Adult

RubyLyn Bishop is luckier than some. Her God-fearing uncle, Gunnar, has a short fuse and high expectations, but he’s given her a good home ever since she was orphaned at the age of five. Yet now, a month shy of her sixteenth birthday, RubyLyn itches for more. Atmospheric, poignant and searingly honest, GODPRETTY IN THE TOBACCO FIELD follows RubyLyn through the course of one blazing summer, as heartbreaking revelations and life-changing decisions propel her toward a future her fortunetellers never predicted.

Caleb York has made up his mind and packed his bags. He'll be on the next stage, bound for San Diego and a new life as a Pinkerton man. But before Caleb can say a proper goodbye to his sweetheart, Willa, a peaceful morning erupts into blazing gunfire. Someone has to bring law and order to the wild little town of Trinidad, even as a band of outlaw brothers rides the vengeance trail and a new cattle baron sets his sights on more land…and on Willa, too. With his Colt loaded for justice and a sheriff's badge on his chest, Caleb York emerges as a classic Western hero who knows just how to stand up to the deadliest of enemies --- and win.

On his 18th birthday in 1850, Jonah Williams flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born a slave. Taking with him only a few stolen coins, a knife and the clothes on his back, he heads north, following a star that he prays will be his guide. Hiding during the day and running through the night, Jonah must elude the men sent to capture him and the bounty hunters out to claim the reward on his head. There is one person, though, who never lets him fully out of sight: Angel, herself a slave, yet with a remarkably free spirit. In Jonah, she sees her own way to freedom, so she sets out to follow him.

John Hay, famous as Lincoln’s private secretary and later as secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous for being “Mark Twain,” grew up 50 miles apart in the same rural antebellum stew of race and class and want. This shared history helped draw them together when they first met as up-and-coming young men in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences in personality, worldview and public conduct. In THE STATESMAN AND THE STORYTELLER, the last decade of their lives plays out against the tumultuous events of the day.

Leo Maxwell has left private practice and is working as a public defender in San Francisco. He and his co-counsel, Jordan Walker, are brilliantly defending Randall Rodriguez, a mentally ill homeless man whom they contend falsely confessed to the rape of a young San Francisco socialite. After their client is acquitted, Leo and Jordan fall into an intense relationship --- until Jordan is found brutally raped and murdered in her apartment. The story takes a shocking turn when Leo and Jordan's freshly acquitted client walks into the police station and offers to confess to Jordan's murder.

When Joanna Connors was thirty years old on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to review a play at a college theater, she was held at knife point and raped by a stranger who had grown up five miles away from her. Setting out to uncover the story of her attacker, Connors embarked on a journey to find out who he was, where he came from, who his friends were and what his life was like. What she discovers stretches beyond one violent man’s story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America.

When Kim Barker first arrived in Kabul as a journalist in 2002, she barely owned a passport, spoke only English and had little idea how to do the “Taliban Shuffle” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. No matter --- her stories about Islamic militants and shaky reconstruction were soon overshadowed by the bigger news in Iraq. In this darkly comic and unsparing memoir, Barker uses her wry, incisive voice to expose the absurdities and tragedies of the “forgotten war,” finding humor and humanity amid the rubble and heartbreak.

Journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Benjamin Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over 70% of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology --- from mobile post offices on railroads and air mail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers.

Rob Spillman --- the award-winning, charismatic co-founding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine --- has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. After an unsettled youth moving between divorced parents in disparate cities, Spillman would eventually find his way into the literary world of New York City, only to abandon it to return to Berlin just months after the Wall came down. Twenty-five and newly married, Spillman and his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, moved to the anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman soon discovered he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.