Adult

Four years ago, Dylan and Addie fell in love under the Provence sun. Two years ago, their relationship officially ended. They haven’t spoken since. Today, Dylan’s and Addie’s lives collide again. It’s the day before Dylan’s friend Cherry’s wedding, and Addie and Dylan crash cars at the start of the journey there. The car Dylan was driving is wrecked. So, along with Dylan’s best friend, Addie’s sister, and a random guy on Facebook who needed a ride, they squeeze into a space-challenged Mini and set off across Britain. Cramped into the same space, Dylan and Addie are forced to confront the choices they made that tore them apart --- and ask themselves if that final decision was the right one after all.

For cynical 23-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. There’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures. But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train. Jane. Her subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her.

Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Though the teenager has been told she’s dying, she still has plenty of living to do. Joining the hospital’s arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old rebel who transforms Lenni in ways she never imagined. Though their days are dwindling, both are determined to leave their mark on the world. With the help of Lenni’s doting palliative care nurse and Father Arthur, the hospital’s patient chaplain, Lenni and Margot devise a plan to create 100 paintings showcasing the stories of the century they have lived --- stories of love and loss, of courage and kindness, of unexpected tenderness and pure joy.

In BRAIN STORM, Dr. Shelley Kolton tells the story of a childhood marked by unimaginable abuse and the distinct parts her brain created to hold those memories and protect her. She balanced the demands of medicine, marriage and family as new parts --- each one requiring her attention and care --- emerged while grueling therapy sessions consumed her days and nights. After 12 torturous years, she finally accepted that the alters colliding inside her brain had, in truth, saved her. Kolton, often using emails and text messages written by her alters, mixed with her own journal entries, paints an honest, intimate and at times humorous portrait of a woman living with dissociative identity disorder (DID), managing the inhabitants of her own creation.

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, BARCELONA DREAMING is narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love, all of whose lives will be changed forever. Underpinning the novel, and casting a long shadow, is a crime committed against a young Moroccan immigrant.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society, introducing mass commuting by car, use a new kind of currency called “energy dollars,” and have the added benefit (from Ford and Edison's view) of crippling the growth of socialism. The whole audacious scheme almost came off. But while some saw it as a way to conjure the future and reinvent the South, others saw it as one of the biggest land swindles of all time. They were all true.

When NBA player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, the league shut down immediately. As the pandemic raged, it looked as if it might be the first year in league history with no champion. But four months later, after meticulous planning, 22 teams resumed play in a "bub­ble" at Disney World --- a restricted, single-site locale cut off from the outside world. Due to health concerns, the league invited only a handful of reporters, who were required to sacrifice medical privacy, live in a hotel room for more than three months, and submit to daily coronavirus test­ing in hopes of keeping the bubble from bursting. Ben Golliver, the national NBA writer for the The Washington Post, was one of those allowed access. BUBBLEBALL is his account of the season and life inside.

In a world in which the word masculinity now often goes hand in hand with toxic, comedian, actor and father Michael Ian Black offers up a way forward for boys, men and anyone who loves them. Part memoir, part advice book, and written as a heartfelt letter to his college-bound son, A BETTER MAN reveals Black’s own complicated relationship with his father, explores the damage and rising violence caused by the expectations placed on boys to “man up,” and searches for the best way to help young men be part of the solution, not the problem. “If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability,” he writes, “how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness?”

THE HERO CODE is Admiral William H. McRaven's ringing tribute to the real, everyday heroes he's met over the years, from battlefields to hospitals to college campuses, who are doing their part to save the world. When Bill McRaven was a young boy growing up in Texas, he dreamed of being a superhero. He longed to put on a cape and use his superpowers to save the earth from destruction. But as he grew older and traveled the world, he found real heroes everywhere he went --- and none of them had superpowers. None of them wore capes or cowls. But they all possessed qualities that gave them the power to help others, to make a difference, to save the world: courage, both physical and moral; humility; a willingness to sacrifice; and a deep sense of integrity.

When Sean Flynn’s neighbor in North Carolina texted “Any chance you guys want a peacock? No kidding!” he stared bewilderedly at his phone. He had never considered if he wanted a peacock. But as an award-winning magazine writer, this kind of mystery intrigued him. So he, his wife and their two young sons became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel and Mr. Pickle. In WHY PEACOCKS?, Flynn chronicles his hilarious and heartwarming first year as a peacock owner, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg.