Adult

By 1942, Winston Churchill found himself facing a vastly different war than the one he’d inherited from Neville Chamberlain back in 1940. In the East, the Soviets were now a co-belligerent (if not exactly a firm ally). And the aid he’d so longed for from across the Atlantic had finally arrived, when Pearl Harbor pushed America to end its “dithering and buggering about.” But with Parliament and the public losing faith in him, Churchill had to manage a war that now stretched into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatening Britain’s colonies, all the while negotiating a new relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin --- two jostling, unpredictable comrades-in-arms fully prepared to carve up the world to their own satisfaction. In this sequel to his prizewinning BRITAIN AT BAY, Alan Allport completes his superlative history of Britain’s role in World War II.

A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don’t. In these sinewy, thoughtful stories, celebrated New Yorker contributor Camille Bordas delves into the mysteries of life, death and all that happens in between. At once darkly funny and poignantly self-aware, Bordas’ writing offers a window into our shared, flawed humanity without insisting on a perfect understanding of our experiences.

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day. In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the 17 years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from a van, he saves John Ward, a billionaire, from an assassination attempt. As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. They return to Earth as heroes. When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled. Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. 

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. But the powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it? Crowds of people and animals --- worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead --- arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the love seat, a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes, and two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who, after coming out late in life, has never found love. Teddy is the caustic, unspoken leader of “The Golden Gays” --- the foursome’s monthly drag tribute to "The Golden Girls." Despite their foibles and bickering, they have turned their golden years into a golden era. But the harmony of their desert enclave becomes a carousel of emotional baggage when Teddy’s estranged sister, Trudy, shows up on their doorstep, her dramatic teenage granddaughter in tow.

Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story or a story within the story but not just yet.” Of course, whether DEPARTURE is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder, his long preoccupation with dying, and his sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen and Jean; he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and 40 years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals and disappointments of a different order.

It only took six months for the life of Special Agent Dwight Chambers to crumble around him. Returning to work at the New Orleans Field Office, Chambers is dismayed to find himself saddled with mentoring a brand new FBI agent. Pendergast. As Chambers tries to pull himself together, his  junior partner pulls a stunt that gets both of them suspended. Pendergast welcomes the banishment, because it gives him the opportunity to investigate a peculiar murder in Mississippi. What starts off as a whimsical quest swiftly turns into a terrifying pursuit, as Chambers and Pendergast uncover a string of grisly, ritualistic killings that defy any known serial killer profile. Thanks in large part to Pendergast’s brilliance and unorthodox methods, they solve the case and find the killer…and that is when the true horror begins.

One night after a party, old grievances surface between married couple Aliya and Sam, and the night ends badly with a heated argument. Sam goes for a run early the next morning to clear her head --- and doesn’t come back. Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can't escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her. Scared and furious, and feeling isolated as strangers and acquaintances alike doubt her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. She must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye even as she is torn between her fear that Sam is dead and her desire to find and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for them?

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of Simón López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.