Adult

For Brenda Spahn, entrepreneur and businesswoman, wealth was a lifestyle --- until a brush with the law threatened to send her to prison. In those dark moments, Brenda made a promise to God. Spared incarceration, a renewed Brenda glimpsed into the lives of women serving time in one of the worst places in America --- the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama. What she saw prompted a God-inspired vision.

David has traveled to New York with his wife to visit his new publisher. On his way back to Penn Station, he bumps into a stranger who covertly follows him, and then, just before they board the train home, passes him by close enough to whisper: "Remember me." The stranger follows David and his wife back to where they live, and it isn't long before he realizes that this man wants something from him...something very personal, that he may have no choice but to surrender.

Maria Mutch explores the miraculous power that care and communication have in the face of the deep, personal isolation that often comes with disability. A chronicle of the witching hours between midnight and 6am, this meditative book takes place during the two-year period in which Mutch’s son Gabriel, who is autistic and also has Down syndrome, rarely slept through the night. We see both Gabriel’s difficult childhood and Maria’s introduction to the world of multiple disability parenting.

Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection of short stories since 2005 consists of 10 pieces that take place in the American South, mainly in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Her characters are good-hearted Southerners, many of them wealthy, who are forced to confront life’s toughest challenges --- from natural disasters to terrorist threats to multiple sclerosis and untimely death --- and who emerge from each experience with a renewed belief in the goodness of human nature.

A.J. Fikry's life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died; his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history; and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island . Then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore --- an unexpected arrival that gives A.J. the opportunity to make his life over and the ability to see everything anew.

Young Marcia Garcia, a gifted and smart-mouthed 16-year-old seamstress, lives alone, raising two small boys and guarding a family secret. When she meets Farouk Karam, an ambitious young policeman, the risks and rewards in Marcia’s life amplify forever. The novel follows Marcia and Farouk from their amusing and passionate courtship through personal and historical events that threaten Marcia’s secret, entangle the couple and their children in a scandal, and endanger the future for all of them.

In Kabul, 2007, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. A century earlier, her great-aunt, Shekiba, saved herself and built a new life the same way. Crisscrossing in time, THE PEARL THAT BROKE ITS SHELL interweaves the tales of these two women separated by a century who share similar destinies.

Basing his tale on remarkable original research, historian Alexander Rose reveals the unforgettable story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed individuals who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors --- including the spymaster at the heart of it all, George Washington.

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way --- to wince-worthy, hilarious and illuminating results.

O'Clair is a former Detroit homicide investigator who now owns a motel in Pompano Beach, Florida in his retirement. One morning, he discovers a lovely young woman dead on a lounge chair. When a second girl is murdered, O'Clair knows someone is trying to send him a message. So he returns to Detroit Police Homicide to review the murder file and try to figure out what he might have missed. And when his young girlfriend, Virginia, is kidnapped by the killer, the stakes grow exponentially higher.