Adult

In the summer of his 17th year, Samuel Sooleymon gets the chance of a lifetime: a trip to the United States with his South Sudanese teammates to play in a showcase basketball tournament. However, a civil war is raging across South Sudan; while he is away, rebel troops ransack his village. His father is dead, his sister is missing, and his mother and two younger brothers are in a refugee camp. Partly out of sympathy, the coach of North Carolina Central offers him a scholarship. He moves to Durham, enrolls in classes, joins the team, and prepares to sit out his freshman season. But Samuel has something no other player has: a fierce determination to succeed so he can bring his family to America.

The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions --- Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague --- until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. EMPIRE OF PAIN is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world. It chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father --- unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father’s death.

When faced with an event that disrupts every aspect of our lives, how do we avoid succumbing to hopelessness, bitterness and other destructive habits of the mind, and instead find ways to allow joy, kindness and generosity to fill our hearts in the midst of suffering? Rebecca Li explains how we can, through the cultivation of clear awareness, transform challenging circumstances into fertile soil for wisdom and compassion to grow by facing each moment with tenderness, clarity and courage.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission --- and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. But he can’t remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery --- and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he has to do it all alone. Or does he?

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets? Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard is facing her own battle. Her husband of 21 years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened --- by Elizabeth's intellect, independence and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. One summer morning, Theophilus has her committed to an insane asylum. The conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are horrific, and there are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they've been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line. No one is willing to fight for their freedom, and they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose.

On paper, Jazmine, Judith, Erin and Sara have little in common --- they’re very different people leading very different lives. And yet at book club meetings in an historic carriage house turned bookstore, they bond over a shared love of reading (and more than a little wine), as well as the growing realization that their lives are not turning out like they expected. Former tennis star Jazmine is a top sports agent balancing a career and single motherhood. Judith is an empty nester questioning her marriage and the supporting role she chose. Erin’s high school sweetheart and fiancé develops a bad case of cold feet, and Sara’s husband takes a job out of town, saddling Sara with a difficult mother-in-law who believes her son could have done better --- not exactly the roommate most women dream of.

Something mysterious is killing the wildlife in the mountains just south of Tucson. When a college intern turned activist sets out to collect her own evidence, she, too, ends up dead. Local law enforcement is slow to get involved. That’s when the mobile FBI unit goes undercover to infiltrate the town and its copper refinery in search of possible leads. Detective Kara Quinn and FBI agent Matt Costa find themselves scouring the desolate landscape, which keeps revealing clues to something much darker. As the body count adds up, it’s clear they have stumbled onto much more than they bargained for. Now they must figure out who is at the heart of this mayhem and stop them before more innocent lives are lost.