Adult

Yayoi, a 19-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, lately has been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day. As if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home. When she is not working, she spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at 2am to be her drinking companion and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A child study desk, old stuffed animals --- things Yukino wants to forget --- are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories.

Rupert's 30th birthday party is a black-tie dinner at the Kentish Town McDonald's --- catered with cocaine and expensive champagne. The morning after, his girlfriend Clemmie is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, a single stiletto heel jutting from under a bush. All the party-goers have alibis. Naturally. This investigation is going to be about aristocrats and Classics degrees, Instagram influencers and whose father knows who. Or is it "whom"? Detective Caius Beauchamp isn't sure. Sharply dressed, smart and thoroughly modern, he discovers Clemmie's body on his early morning jog. As he searches for the dark truth beneath the luxurious life of these London socialites, a wall of staggering wealth and privilege threatens to shut down his investigation before it's even begun.

Since the publication of the groundbreaking BAD FEMINIST and HUNGER, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society --- state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy --- alongside more individually personalized matters: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8am meeting? In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, she reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. OPINIONS is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past 10 years.

As the arguably lesser of the three former members of the boy band INK, Kallum Lieberman enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame and then moved home where he opened a regional pizza chain called Slice, Slice, Baby! But after an old one-off sex tape is leaked and quickly goes viral, Kallum decides he’s ready to step into the spotlight again, starring in a sexy Santa biopic for the Hope Channel. Winnie Baker married her childhood sweetheart, avoided the downfalls of adolescent stardom, and transitioned into a stable adult acting career. But after her perfect life falls apart, Winnie is ready to redefine herself…and what better way than a steamier-than-a-steaming-hot-mug-of-cider Christmas movie? Suddenly, Kallum’s teenage crush on Winnie is bubbling to the surface, and Winnie might be catching feelings herself.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book --- Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns --- and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early 20th century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.

Astrid Johansen swore she would never return to Heron Bay, Washington. In that idyllic coastal town, her little sister, Nina, drowned in a reflecting pool under Astrid’s watch 17 years ago. Though guilt has kept her away, Astrid can’t ignore her aunt Maude’s urgent plea to come back. Maude claims to have found a letter that will change everything about the past. When Astrid arrives in Heron Bay, she finds Maude unconscious, perhaps the victim of an attack. As Maude lingers in a coma, Astrid uncovers alarming evidence that Nina’s drowning that tragic night was no accident. The ensuing investigation leads her down a trail of dark memories, lies and betrayals that will shatter her perception of everyone she thought she knew --- even herself.

In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, 14-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects he is responsible. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider. Richard traces the number that Tom prank-called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear: She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.

Andrew Johnson was called The Great Commoner, appealing to the masses, loathing the establishment and anyone he deemed elitist. Once Johnson made an enemy, you became his enemy for life. He saw insults where none were intended, and personal loyalty meant everything. He also was the first U.S. president to be impeached. Time, however, waits for no man, and even the Famous (or Infamous) must leave this world eventually. But when a man has as many enemies as the Devil, what death could really be a natural one? From political opponents to most of his own family, the suspects are endless, and the truth not really wanted. John Hay --- lawyer, sometimes governmental bureaucrat, and now journeyman investigative reporter --- is set on finding that truth. And it may wind up killing him.

CIA officers Sia and Max enter Russia under commercial cover to recruit Vladimir Putin’s moneyman. Sia works for a London law firm that conceals the wealth of the superrich. Max’s family business in Mexico, a CIA front since the 1960s, is a farm that breeds high-end racehorses. They pose as a couple to target Vadim, Putin’s private banker, and his wife, Anna, who --- unbeknownst to the CIA --- is a Russian intelligence officer under deep cover at the bank. As they descend further into a Russian world dripping with luxury and rife with gangland violence, Sia and Max’s only hope may be Anna, who is playing a game of her own.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues and rivals, Benjamín Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. THE MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces. It ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo.