Adult

Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history --- one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In THE WORLD, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama.

It is 1940, and 20-year-old Charlotte Richmond watches from her attic window as enemy planes fly over London. Still grieving her beloved brother, who never returned from France, she is trying to keep herself out of trouble: holding down a typist job at the Ministry of Information, sharing gin and confidences with her best friend, Elena, and dodging her overbearing father. On her way to work, she often sees the boy who feeds the birds --- a source of unexpected joy amid the rubble of the Blitz. But every day brings new scenes of devastation, and after yet another heartbreaking loss, Charlotte has an uncanny sense of foreboding. Someone is stalking the darkness, targeting her friends. And now he’s following her. As grief and suspicion consume her, Charlotte’s nerves become increasingly frayed.

Young Henry began his rule as a magnificent and chivalrous Renaissance prince who embodied every virtue. He had all the qualities to make a triumph of his kingship, yet we remember only the violence. Henry famously broke with the pope, founding the Church of England and launching a religious revolution that divided his kingdom. He beheaded two of his wives and cast aside two others. He died a suspicious, obese, disease-riddled tyrant. His reign is remembered as one of dangerous intrigue and bloodshed --- and yet the truth is far more complex. THE KING’S PLEASURE brings to life the idealistic monarch who expanded Parliament, founded the Royal Navy, modernized medical training, composed music and poetry, and patronized the arts.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

On UrbanMyth, an anonymous discussion board grouped by zip code, the residents of Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side disclosed it all --- things they would never share with their friends or their spouses. So when a “hacktivist” group breaks into the forum and exposes the real identity of each poster, the repercussions echo down Park Avenue with a force that none could have anticipated. And someone ends up dead. Is the murderer Heather, the outsider who would do anything to get her daughter into the elite’s good graces and into their even better schools? Norah, the high-powered executive failing to balance work with the emotional responsibilities of motherhood? Or Poppy, whose perfect-on-the-outside façade conceals more than her share of secrets?

Two crimes have rocked the sun-drenched island of Ischia. And once again, the island’s denizens have called upon Nonna Maria, the espresso-brewing, sage-counsel-giving sleuth. A wealthy woman alleges that a valuable necklace has been stolen from her hotel room, and she blames Nonna Maria’s goddaughter as the most likely suspect. Nearby, the body of a woman is found on a curved road near the borough of Barano. The woman is not known to anyone on the island. The one potential suspect is a young friend of Nonna Maria’s who drove by the area that very night and thinks he might have hit something --- perhaps the woman in question. It’s up to Nonna Maria to string together the clues and solve these two mysteries before death comes to Ischia again.

When her marriage fizzles out, Heather Willette decides to leave her husband and rent a cottage on Nantucket. Her plan is going perfectly --- until her son, Ross, announces he’s moving to Nantucket to work at his girlfriend’s family’s construction business instead of going back home to work with his own father. Worst of all for Heather, this means having to get along with her. Kailee Essex is thrilled that Ross is willing to move to her hometown. She has big hopes for their happily ever after, especially now that her parents are finally showing interest in her career. She’s less thrilled, however, about his mother living nearby. Kailee has clashed with Heather since the day they met. But anything is possible in the summer sun and sea breezes of Nantucket --- even reconciliation.

Faith Ferguson is New York’s most in-demand wedding planner. But as much as she enjoys her work, her two failed engagements leave her with no desire to get married herself. She finds fulfillment in her close relationship with her twin sister, Hope; her role as a mentor for her assistant, Violet; and her career. This year, new clients have flocked to her, and she signs up an extravagant reception, a mid-sized gathering and an intimate soirée, in addition to her mother’s next marriage and Violet’s modest ceremony. Faith finds herself forming bonds with her new clients and their loved ones --- most notably the handsome brother of one of her grooms. But in no time, Faith is grappling with private quarrels, unplanned pregnancies, family scandals, dark secrets and the possibility of canceled ceremonies.

The islands of Prospera lie in a vast ocean, in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity --- or whatever remains of it. Citizens of the main island enjoy privileged lives. They are attended to by support staff who live on a cramped neighboring island, where whispers of revolt are brewing. But for the Prosperans, life is perfection. And when the end of life approaches, they’re sent to a mysterious third island, where their bodies are refreshed, their memories are wiped away, and they return to start life anew. Proctor Bennett is a ferryman, whose job it is to enforce the retirement process when necessary. He never questions his work, until the day he receives a cryptic message: “The world is not the world.” These simple words unlock something he has secretly suspected. They give him the unshakable feeling that someone is trying to tell him something important.

Virginia, 2004. Gore is entering his second term as president. Our narrator, Martin Neumann, recently divorced, is living at Halcyon, the estate of renowned lawyer and World War II hero Robert Ableson. When news breaks that scientists funded by the Gore administration have discovered a cure for death, it calls into question everything Martin thought he understood about life, not least his work as a historian. Who is Ableson, really, and why did he draw Martin into his orbit? Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil?