Adult

Constance, the woman who taught journalist Kitty Logan everything she knew, is dying. At her mentor's bedside, Kitty asks her, "What is the one story you always wanted to write?" The answer lies in a single sheet of paper buried in Constance's office --- a list of 100 names --- with no notes or explanation. But before she can ask her friend, it is too late. Determined to unlock the mystery, Kitty begins piecing together an unexpected portrait of Constance's life...and starts to understand her own.

A graduate of one of the first classes of women at Princeton University, Susan Patton has heard smart young women admit they aspire to marriage and motherhood but have no model for pursuing those goals. Reflecting on the choices she made in her early 20s, she’s boldly turned the tables on our “career first” conditioning and suggests that you seek out the golden opportunities right in front of you, right now.

A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labor camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China. Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction. But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known...and not only to the British.

Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate, leading quickly to a marriage that is dear, erotically charged and brief. In Howard Norman’s new novel, the gleam of the marriage and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s murder are revealed in heart-stopping increments.

In 1907 Wisconsin, 17 year old Marie Reehs is determined: she will not marry a violent man, as did her mother and grandmother before her. Day after day, Marie toils at the local laundry, watched by an older man who wants to claim her for his own. At first, it seems that Marie's passionate love affair with a charismatic young man will lead her to freedom, but she soon realizes that she too may have inherited the Reehs women's dark family curse.

New Bern, Connecticut is the ideal place to buy a second home and reignite the spark in Gayla and Brian's 26-year marriage. But when she finds a discarded memo in which Brian admits to a past affair and suggests an amicable divorce, a devastated Gayla flees to New Bern. This solo sabbatical is a chance to explore the creative impulses she sidelined long ago --- quilting, gardening, and striking up new friendships with the women of the Cobbled Court circle.

At the end of a particularly grueling summer day, Ash Rashid is heading home to his wife and kids when he discovers a pair of bodies, shot execution style, in the front seat of a crashed vehicle. As the first officer on the scene, Ash finds himself and his department 20 minutes behind a killer in a race where every second counts. With two victims down and a third unaccounted for, Ash must find the killer before he strikes again.

When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she’d left, that’s exactly what happens --- Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children.

AMERICAN SPRING follows a fledgling nation from Paul Revere's little-known ride of December 1774 and the first shots fired on Lexington Green through the catastrophic Battle of Bunker Hill, culminating with George Washington taking command of colonial forces on July 3, 1775. Focusing on well-known heroes and the ordinary Americans caught up in the revolution, Walter Borneman tells the story of how a decade of discontent erupted into an armed rebellion that forged our nation.

In TIBETAN PEACH PIE, Tom Robbins stitches together stories of his unconventional life, from his Appalachian childhood to his globetrotting adventures. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become over the course of half a century a poet-interruptus, an air force weatherman, a radio DJ, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist and a counter-culture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.