Adult

Preston and Constance Whittier have built a happy life together, with a brood of six children raised in a beautiful historic Manhattan mansion. Now, with a nearly empty nest, it’s easier than ever for the Whittiers to maintain their tradition of a solo romantic “Wintermoon” ski trip. But with this year’s trip comes tragedy, and suddenly the Whittiers' adult children find themselves reuniting in the family home without their parents for the first time ever. The eldest four are forced to put aside their personal issues and their grief to keep the family together and support each other and their two youngest siblings. Selling the house, along with all the memories that live in its walls, feels like yet another devastating loss. Could there be another way, as unconventional as it seems?

In 2018, without any plan or agenda for what might happen next, Patti Smith posted her first Instagram photo: her hand with the simple message “Hello Everybody!” Known for shooting with her beloved Land Camera 250, Smith started posting images from her phone, including portraits of her kids, her radiator, her boots and her Abyssinian cat, Cairo. Followers felt an immediate affinity with these miniature windows into Smith’s world. Over time, a coherent story of a life devoted to art took shape, and more than a million followers responded to Smith’s unique aesthetic in images that chart her passions, devotions, obsessions and whims. In wide-ranging yet intimate daily notations, Smith shares dispatches from her travels around the world.

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In THE LIGHT WE CARRY, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much? Obama believes that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress.

Once a penniless orphan, Scuff is studying medicine at a free clinic run by Dr. Crowe. But lately Crowe has been distracted, having witnessed an altercation between a wealthy former patient of his named Ellie and her controlling fiancé. It seems that someone is forcing Ellie to marry the man. So Crowe sets out to uncover the troubling connection between Ellie, her father and her betrothed. With Crowe engrossed in his investigation just weeks before the holidays, Scuff is left to run the clinic on his own, treating London’s poor and vulnerable. In the holiday spirit, he offers Mattie, a young girl in need, a warm place to stay as the winter chill sweeps through the city. Together, Scuff and Mattie also must fend off the police, who are growing suspicious of Crowe’s amateur sleuthing.

Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor’s novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A SLIVER OF DARKNESS, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination. In “The Lion at the Gate,” a strange piece of graffiti leads to a terrifying encounter for four school friends. In “Final Course,” the world has descended into darkness, but a group of old friends make time for one last dinner party. In “Runaway Blues,” thwarted love, revenge and something very nasty stowed in a hat box converge. In “Gloria,” a strange girl at a service station endears herself to a coldhearted killer, but can a leopard really change its spots? And in “I’m Not Ted,” a case of mistaken identity has unforeseen fatal consequences.

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late ’90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost 20 years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job --- as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory. One day, her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. But then, shockingly, one of her old friends, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. Garfield was an eminent --- and controversial --- MP, and the investigation is high profile. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again. Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies?

It’s December 22nd, and siblings Henry, Kate and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

In ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece --- the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen --- the gift of life. After marrying her, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own and yearns for independence. In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, Galatea is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost.

Jane and William are enjoying their honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort until Jane receives a chilling note warning her to “Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours.” At dinner that night, five other couples are present, and none of their tables is any nearer or farther away than any of the others. It’s almost as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless. But why would anyone do that? Jane has no idea. But someone in this dining room will be dead before breakfast, and all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could have possibly committed the crime.

Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Caroline Moorehead’s fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.