Adult

Mohsin Hamid’s stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family and identity. In DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political, and are shot through with the same passion, imagination and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge.

Despite surviving a fire that claimed the life of his twin sister, Ashleigh, Danny Orchard has never been able to enjoy his second chance at life. Ash had been a budding psychopath who privately terrorized her family --- and death hasn’t changed her wicked ways. She has haunted her brother for 20 years, and now, just when he’s met the love of his life, she wants more than ever to punish him for being alive. So she sets her sights on Danny’s new wife and stepson.

Honors student Sarie Holland is busted by the local police while doing a favor for her boyfriend. Unwilling to betray him but desperate to avoid destroying her future, she has no choice but to become a "CI" --- a confidential informant. Sarie turns out to be the perfect CI but soon enough is hunted by crooked cops and killers alike with nothing to save her --- except what she's learned during her harrowing weeks as an informant. Which is bad news for the police and the underworld.

Newly divorced Gaby Duran isn't really expecting to find her soul mate on a dating site like InTune. She just needs a distraction from pining over her ex-husband, Ben, and the happy marriage they once had. And she's wise enough to know that online, the truth doesn't always match the profile. But Gaby quickly discovers there is much more at stake than her lonely heart. Local singles are going missing after making online connections. And a predator is searching again for the perfect match.

Nikki Moustaki fell hard for birds, just like her grandfather, who showed her how to hypnotize chickens, sneak up on pigeons and handle baby birds. But by the time Nikki graduated from college, she was succumbing to alcohol and increasingly unable to care for her flock. In a last-ditch effort to honor her grandfather when he passed away, she flew to France hoping to visit the bird market of Paris to release a white dove. Instead, something astonishing happened there that saved Nikki’s life.

Newlywed painter and sometime somnambulist Angus Lordie might be sleepwalking his way into trouble with Animal Welfare when he lets his dog, Cyril, drink a bit too much lager at the local bar. Meanwhile, the long-suffering Bertie --- on the cusp of his seventh birthday party --- has taken to dreaming about his 18th, a time when he will be able to avoid the indignity of unwanted girl attendees and the looming threat of a gender-neutral doll from his domineering mother, Irene.

A year has passed since Ari gave birth to Walker, though it went so badly awry she has trouble calling it “birth” and still can't locate herself in her altered universe. When Mina, a one-time cult musician --- older, self-contained, alone and nine-months pregnant --- moves to town, Ari sees the possibility of a new friend, despite her unfortunate habit of generally mistrusting women. Soon they become comrades-in-arms, and the previously hostile terrain seems almost navigable.

Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, tells their daughter, Amina. Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family took to India 20 years earlier. Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past.

In the chaos following World War II, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation code-named Paperclip to allow them to work in the U.S. without the public's full knowledge. Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century.

The 900-day German siege of Leningrad is the most powerful testimony to the immeasurable cruelty and horror of World War II. As the sole British correspondent to have been in the city during the blockade, Alexander Werth presents a harrowing firsthand account of the savagery and destruction wrought by the Nazis against the civilian population of the city.