Adult

In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money --- and maybe get him killed. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won't find it. But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake.

A brilliant but careless professor, Steven Brookman has determined that for the sake of his marriage --- and his soul --- he must extract himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late and too long yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

How many ways can two people wound each other? In James Whitfield Thomson's debut novel, LIES YOU WANTED TO HEAR, Lucy's husband, Matt, has taken their children and fled. This seems 100% unforgivable, until we read the backstory of terrible wrongs committed by wife against husband, and mother against child. Then we're left wondering.

As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair --- a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.

In the tradition of the great immigrant sagas, THE LION SEEKER brings us Isaac Helger, son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, surviving the streets of Johannesburg in the shadow of World War II.

Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has been following Natasha Doroshenko's case for years now. Nina, who had tried to help Natasha leave her abusive Danish fiancé more than once, can't see the young Ukrainian mother as a vicious killer. But in her effort to protect Natasha's daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn't know about this woman and her past.

Stay-at-home dad Deuce Winters finds a body among the frozen burgers and bratwurst at the Rose Petal fair’s concession stand. And it seems the defrosting deceased was last seen arguing passionately with one of the fair’s board members. But there may be more --- a lot more --- to the mystery, and tracking down the dangerous truth may be too much for even the most determined dad!

When young girls start to go missing, Samantha Khama, a new detective on the Botswana police force, suspects that muti, a traditional African medicine, is the reason. She and Detective David “Kubu” Bengu race to stop a serial killer, all as the father of one of the victims threatens to take matters into his own hands.

Alice is the black sheep of her family, as she has never enjoyed the closeness with her father that her two older sisters have and has eschewed their more conventional career paths. She is late to hear the news that her father is dying, and she returns to the family home only just in time to say good-bye. As Daniel approaches his sixties his health is faltering, and he is kept alive by the knowledge of one thing --- that he has a daughter somewhere in the world whom he has never been able to find. TEN THINGS I’VE LEARNT ABOUT LOVE is a story about finding love in unexpected places, about rootlessness and homecoming, and the power of the ties that bind.

Native Californian Ray Walker was studying to become a securities representative at Merrill Lynch but found the work unfulfilling. He had a wife and, soon, a baby daughter, and felt he needed to be responsible and live the corporate life. But Ray had a dream: to make Burgundy wine in France. THE ROAD TO BURGUNDY is Walker’s charming account of the stumbles and serendipity that led to his transformation from corporate drone to vigneron.