Adult

In her mid-30s and newly free from a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley quit her job at a London magazine, packed her bags, and poured her savings into a six-month lease on an apartment in Aberdeen, Scotland. She decided to make good on a long-deferred idea for a book about oil rigs and the men who work on them. Why oil rigs? She wanted to see what men were like with no women around. In Aberdeen, Tabitha became deeply entrenched in the world of roughnecks, a teeming subculture rich with brawls, hard labor and competition. The longer she stayed, the more she found that her presence had a destabilizing effect on the men --- and her.

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status. When she befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer with a new romantic prospect of noble birth. Soon Jade must decide whether she will risk everything for the one who would do the same for her.

Ava Kirilova has reached the very top of her profession. After years and years of hard graft, pain and sacrifice as part of the London Russian Ballet Company, allowing nothing else to distract her, she is finally the poster girl for "Swan Lake." Even Mr K --- her father and the intense, terrifying director of the company --- can find no fault. Ava has pushed herself ahead of countless other talented, hardworking girls, and they are all watching her now. But there is someone who really wants to see Ava fall.

Luke is a true crime writer in search of a story. When he flees to Brighton after an explosive break-up, the perfect subject lands in his lap: reformed gangster Joss Grand. Now in his 80s, Grand once ruled the Brighton underworld with his sadistic sidekick Jacky Nye --- until Jacky washed up by the West Pier in 1968, strangled and thrown into the sea. Though Grand’s alibi seems cast-iron, Luke is sure there’s more to the story than meets the eye, and he convinces the criminal-turned-philanthropist to be interviewed for a book about his life. Luke is drawn deeper into the mystery of Jacky Nye’s murder, soon realizing that in stirring up secrets from the past, he may have placed himself in terrible danger.

Jane Whitefield helps people disappear. Fearing for their lives, fleeing dangerous situations, her clients come to her when they need to vanish completely. And when people are desperate enough to need her services, they come to the old house in rural western New York where Jane was raised to begin their escape. It’s there that, one spring night, Jane finds a young woman fresh from LA. After she cheated on her boyfriend, he dragged her to the home of the offending man and made her watch as he killed him. She testified against the boyfriend, but a bribed jury acquitted him, and now he’s free and trying to find and kill her. Jane agrees to help, but the boyfriend has some new friends: members of a Russian organized crime brotherhood.

From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like "The Walking Dead" have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls and bestseller lists, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial and deeply profound. In AMERICAN COMICS, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history. His story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell.

From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly, not the least of which is a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples and, worst of all, its food. Reckoning with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which his people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife.

Alyson Tinsdale is giving her son the childhood she never had: a stable family, a loving home and a great school in a safe neighborhood. Bonnie Sloan is the neighborhood matriarch. With her oldest son headed to Yale, and her youngest starting kindergarten, Bonnie is now pursuing her own long-held political aspirations despite private family struggles. When the open space behind some of the most expensive homes gets slated for development into an amusement facility, the neighborhood becomes deeply divided. The personal pressures and community conflicts ratchet with every passing day, but it's when a 13-year-old is found dead beside the neighborhood lake that simmering tensions boil over into panic.

Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, FIVE TUESDAYS IN WINTER --- Lily King's first book of short fiction --- intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive bookseller begins to feel the discomfort of love again. Two college roommates have a devastating middle-aged reunion. A proud old man rages powerlessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. A writer receives a visit from all the men who have tried to suppress her voice.

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.