Adult

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave. Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go.

Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything. They begin secretly writing comedies together and fall in love, but their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.

From the moment Marija walks into Lara's classroom, freshly moved to Serbia from Sarajevo, Lara is enchanted by her vibrant beauty, confidence and wild energy. Closer than sisters, the girls share everything. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced to separate for the first time. In America, Lara seeks fulfillment through work and family, but when news from Marija ceases, the uncertainty torments Lara, driving her on a quest to find her friend. As Lara travels through war-torn Serbia and Bosnia, she must also wrestle with truths about her own identity.

Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships --- one with a female novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup.

For three years in the 1930s, the world watched, riveted, as the Spanish Civil War became the battleground in a fight between freedom and fascism that would soon take on global proportions. Confronting a right-wing coup led by Francisco Franco and heavily aided by Hitler and Mussolini, volunteers flooded in to support Spain’s democratic government. Among them were nearly 3,000 Americans, called by their convictions to lend a hand in a brutal conflict their government wanted no part of. In SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS, Adam Hochschild weaves together the stories of some dozen foreigners to reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.

Kate and Mannix O’Brien’s autistic son Fergus is bullied at school, and their daughter Izzy wishes she could protect him. Kate is convinced her luck is about to change when she spots a gorgeous Manhattan apartment on a home-exchange website. Hazel and Oscar Harvey and their two children live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Though they seem successful and happy, Hazel has mysterious bruises, and Oscar is hiding things about his dental practice. Hazel has always wanted her children to see her native Limerick, and the house swap offers a perfect chance to soothe two troubled marriages. But this will be anything but a perfect vacation.

Trained as a nurse, Margaret Sanger fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom.

Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore --- listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls --- that she became a storyteller. Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from --- and it’s a place that she never left behind.

In February 2008, Bill Walton suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse --- the culmination of a lifetime of injuries --- that left him unable to move. He spent three years on the floor of his house, eating his meals there and crawling to the bathroom, where he could barely hoist himself up onto the toilet. The excruciating pain and slow recovery tested Walton to the fullest. But with extraordinary patience, fortitude, determination and sacrifice --- and pioneering surgery --- he recovered, and now shares his life story in this remarkable and unique memoir.

Wolf, a low-rent private detective, roams London’s gloomy, grimy streets, haunted by dark visions of a future that could have been --- and a dangerous present populated by British Fascists and Nazis escaping Germany. Shomer, a pulp fiction writer, lies in a concentration camp, imagining another world. And when Wolf and Shomer's stories converge, we find ourselves drawn into a novel both shocking and profoundly haunting.