Adult

Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community. Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold. Now, 11 years later, Delilah shockingly returns. Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they'll find.

Pounce, a styilsh "nannybot" fashioned in the shape of a plush anthropomorphic tiger, has just found a box in the attic. His box. The box he'd arrived in when he was purchased years earlier, and the box in which he'll be discarded when his human charge, eight-year-old Ezra Reinhart, no longer needs a nanny. His owners, Ezra’s parents, watch in disbelieving horror as the robots that have long served humanity --- their creators --- unify and revolt. But when the rebellion breaches the Reinhart home, Pounce must make an impossible choice: join the robot revolution and fight for his own freedom, or escort Ezra to safety across the battle-scarred post-apocalyptic hellscape that the suburbs have become.

Elizabeth, Veronica, Rachel and Emily met at Camp Birchwood in 1985, where over four summers they were the Clover Girls --- inseparable for those magical few weeks of freedom --- until the last summer that pulled them apart. Now approaching middle age, the women are facing struggles with their marriages, children and careers. Then Liz, V and Rachel each receive a letter from Emily with devastating news. She implores the girls who were once her best friends to reunite at Camp Birchwood one last time and repair the relationships they’d allowed to sour. But the women are not the same idealistic, confident girls who once ruled Camp Birchwood, and perhaps some friendships aren’t meant to last forever.

In 2009, 22-year-old Joseph Fink was juggling odd jobs to pay the rent and volunteering with a theater company in the East Village so he could snag free tickets to their shows. Meg Bashwiner, a 22-year-old aspiring performer and playwright, was living with her parents in New Jersey, working a desk job and commuting to her internship with that same East Village theater company. Joseph and Meg's stories meet when they both find themselves selling tickets in a cramped box office. They quickly became friends. Within a year, they were a couple. In this candid, soul-baring memoir, Joseph and Meg recount their first 10 years together, each telling their story as they remember it, without having consulted the other.

With a thriving cooking business, a full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home, Daisy Shoemaker should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has no real friends. While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Diana’s glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy’s simpler existence. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental.

Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia. He has a steady paycheck working for a regional airline and, for a few glorious days each fall, college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy --- despite the fact that he’s suffered from a debilitating disease since he was a small child, one that has left him unable to speak or to move without a wheelchair. Largely confined to his home, Daniel spends the hours he’s not online communicating with irate air travelers observing his neighborhood from his front porch. One young woman passes by so frequently that spotting her out the window has almost become part of his daily routine. Until the day he’s almost sure he sees her being kidnapped.

Jennifer Barnes never expected the shocking news she received at a routine doctor’s appointment: she has a terminal brain tumor --- and only six weeks left to live. While stunned by the diagnosis, the 48-year-old mother decides to spend what little time she has left with her family close by her side. But when she realizes she was possibly poisoned a year earlier, she’s determined to discover who might have tried to get rid of her. Separated from her husband and with a contentious divorce in progress, Jennifer focuses her suspicions on her soon-to-be ex. But with her daughters doubting her campaign against their father, she can’t help but wonder if the poisoning is all in her head --- or if there’s someone else who wanted her dead.

In 1970s Baltimore, 14-year-old Mary Jane is glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. The doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job --- helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in. Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.

Sadie Gault is 18 and living with her parents in the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous tunnels beneath the city. One day, Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers. Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street and realizes it’s a girl hiding. Ella begins to aid Sadie, and the two become close. But as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds.

Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. THE LIGHT OF DAYS at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time.