Even with the cutthroat days of being Class Mom behind her, as a freshly minted mat mom of the Pioneer Middle School (PMS) wrestling team, Jen Dixon cannot catch a break. This year, as her son joins the ranks of the PMS wrestlers, Jen faces mystifying new social dynamics with her trademark combination of reluctance and resigned acceptance. The sights and smells of her son’s wrestling matches are more than enough for her to deal with, but Jen also finds herself fully immersed in sports-mom competitiveness. These parents all seem perfectly unassuming until their kids start to wrestle, and then some become raging momsters. Jen steels herself for the indignities of middle school life, but she cannot quite fathom the extents to which some kids (and moms) will go for the sweet taste of victory.
Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon --- like all other book eater women --- is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger --- not for books, but for human minds.
On a chilly early morning walk on the wooded outskirts of Berlin, Emil Grimm finds the body of his neighbor, a fellow Stasi officer named Lothar, with a gunshot wound to the temple and a pistol in his right hand. Despite appearances, Emil suspects murder. A few months earlier he would have known just what to do, but now, as East Germany disintegrates, being a Stasi colonel is more of a liability than an asset. More troubling still is that Emil and Lothar were involved in a final clandestine mission, one that has clearly turned deadly. Now Emil must finish the job alone, on uncertain ground where old alliances seem to be shifting by the day.
On a bitter cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money and beg favors --- and before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even 25 years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director, and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball --- especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan Sarandon was already a has-been. But something miraculous happened, and THE CHURCH OF BASEBALL attempts to capture why. From organizing a baseball camp for the actors and rewriting key scenes while on set, to dealing with a short production schedule and overcoming the challenge of filming the sport, Shelton brings to life the making of this beloved American movie.
For Tess Lane, owning Lakeside Books is a dream come true, but it’s the weekly book club she hosts for the women in town that Tess enjoys the most. The gatherings have been her lifeline over the past three years since her husband’s mysterious death. Tess has tried to move on, but when River Harrison shows up on her doorstep, all her lingering questions come rushing back. River, a former marine turned private investigator, was her husband’s best friend. At first, she tries to ignore him, but Tess comes to realize that this is her chance, once and for all, to find the answers that have troubled her for years. However, when secrets surrounding her husband’s death are finally revealed, can Tess find it in her heart to forgive the mistakes of the past...and maybe even open herself up to love again?
They call him el Carnicero --- the Butcher. He is the most powerful drug lord on the planet, and when the city of New York incurs his wrath, he utters a single word: “¡Venganza!” With military precision, he strafes Central Park with 4,000 pounds of cocaine, killing hundreds of innocent people enjoying a summer afternoon. The only NYPD unit trained to go up against this level of terrorism has been disbanded, but four anonymous billionaires retaliate by recruiting a task force of highly decorated retired cops. Armed with cutting-edge technology, former NYPD captain Danny Corcoran leads his team in a pulse-pounding thriller in their battle to stop the enraged head of a Mexican cartel from raining more death on the city.
Since baseball emerged in the mid-1800s to become America’s pastime, the nation’s battles over race, gender and sexuality have been reflected on the playing field, in the executive suites, in the press box and in the community. Some of baseball’s rebels are widely recognized, but most of them are either little known or known primarily for their baseball achievements --- not their political views and activism. BASEBALL REBELS tells stories of baseball’s reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America’s broader political and social protest movements, making the game --- and society --- better along the way.
Ten years ago, Abigail Lovett fell into a job she loves, managing The Passage Inn, a cozy, upscale resort nestled in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter’s Pass. Cutter’s Pass is best known for its outdoor offerings and mysterious history. As the book begins, the string of unsolved disappearances that has haunted the town is once again thrust into the spotlight when journalist Landon West, who was staying at the inn to investigate the story of the vanishing trail, disappears himself. When she finds incriminating evidence that may bring the community closer to the truth, Abby soon discovers how little she knows about her coworkers, neighbors and even those closest to her.
In 1473, 14-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly 400 years later, when George Sand, her two children and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there. A spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants. Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing --- the impossible love of a teenage ghost for a woman who can’t see her and doesn’t know she exists.
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Coming Soon
Curious about what books will be released in the months ahead so you can pre-order or reserve them? Then click on the months below.
October's Books on Screen roundup includes the films The Woman in Cabin 10 on Netflix and Regretting You in theaters; the series premieres of HBO's "IT: Welcome to Derry" and Apple TV+'s "Down Cemetery Road"; the season premieres of "Tracker" and "Watson" on CBS; the season finales of USA Network's "The Rainmaker," STARZ's "Outlander: Blood of My Blood," AMC's "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon" and Apple TV+'s "Slow Horses"; the continuation of "The Morning Show" on Apple TV+; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of She Rides Shotgun, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.