Adult

The year is 1845, and young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding remains of the by-now-extinct Great Auk, a large flightless bird of mythical status. Eliot joins a hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem. As the ship moves further and further into the wilds of the Arctic Sea, Eliot clings to what he believes in, but is irrevocably drawn back into a past that haunts him --- and a present that confronts him with a myriad of dangers.

When revolution swept Iran in 1978, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious regime brought stifling restrictions on women and art. Shohreh Aghdashloo seized the moment and boldly left her husband for Europe and eventually, America, a vastly different culture.Shohreh Aghdashloo writes poignantly about her struggles as an outsider in a new culture—as a woman, a Muslim, and a Persian—adapting to a new land and a new language, and shares behind-the-scenes stories about what it’s really like to be an actress in Hollywood.

In RUNNING WITH THE PACK, Mark Rowlands reveals the most significant runs of his life --- from the entire day he spent running as a boy in Wales, to the runs along French beaches and up Irish mountains with his beloved wolf, Brenin, and through Florida swamps with his husky-mix, Nina. Intertwined are the fascinating meditations that those runs triggered --- from mortality, midlife and the meaning of life.

Kirsten Hammarstrom hasn’t been home to her tiny corner of rural Wisconsin in years --- not since the mysterious disappearance of a local teenage girl rocked the town and shattered her family. Now, years later, a new tragedy forces Kirsten and her siblings to return home, where they must confront the devastating event that shifted the trajectory of their lives. Tautly written and beautifully evocative, THE MOURNING HOURS is a gripping portrayal of a family straining against extraordinary pressure, and a powerful tale of loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness.

Cold and poverty define Hanna Renström’s childhood in northern Sweden, and in 1904 she boards a ship for Australia. But none of her hopes --- or fears --- prepares her for the life she will lead. As Hanna’s story unfurls over the next several years in this “treacherous paradise,” she wrestles with a devastating loneliness and with the racism she is meant to unthinkingly adopt.

When FBI special agent Maggie O'Dell and her partner, Tully, discover the remains of a young woman in a highway ditch, the one clue left behind is a map that will send Maggie and Tully on a frantic hunt crisscrossing the country to stop a madman before he kills again. As the body count rises, she turns to a former foe for help. As she gets closer to finding the killer, it becomes eerily clear that Maggie is the ultimate target.

Thirteen-year-old AnnMarie Walker dreams of a world beyond Far Rockaway, where the sway of the neighborhood keeps her tied to old ideas about success. While attending a school for pregnant teens, AnnMarie comes across a flyer advertising movie auditions in Manhattan. Four months before she’s due to give birth, she lands a lead role. But when the film fades from view and the realities of her life set in, AnnMarie’s grit and determination are the only tools left to keep her moving forward.

In the unforgiving class system of the 1950s, Lucy de Bourgh, daughter of one of Rhode Island's first families and beneficiary of an ample trust fund, was married to Thomas Snow, son of a Newport garage owner and his bookkeeper wife. Decades later, a chance meeting brings Lucy together with Philip, our narrator. They'd known each other earlier, and he remembers her as a ravishing, funny, ready-for-anything hellion. He also remembers Thomas, killed in a freak accident years after his and Lucy's divorce, and is shocked to hear Lucy refer to Thomas insistently as "that monster." How is he to reconcile that unexpected and overflowing reservoir of bitterness and resentments with his own memories?

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as the late David Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. Rakoff's insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises this novel far above mere satire.