Adult

Following the departure of the formidable Henrietta Bird from Woman’s Friend magazine, things are looking up for Emmeline Lake as she takes on the challenge of becoming a young wartime advice columnist. Her relationship with boyfriend Charles (now stationed back in the UK) is blossoming, while Emmy’s best friend Bunty, still reeling from the very worst of the Blitz, is bravely looking to the future. The Ministry of Information calls on Britain’s women’s magazines to help recruit desperately needed female workers to the war effort. But when Emmy and Bunty meet a young woman who shows them the very real challenges that women war workers face, Emmy must tackle a life-changing dilemma between doing her duty and standing by her friends.

Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental memory treatment for Alzheimer’s using a new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he’s also running from the sudden death of his mother. Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet. She still waitresses during her off-hours at the Chateau Marmont, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin --- or Mem --- among the Hollywood elite. When Lucien and Sophie meet at the Center, they have no memory of how they got there --- or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to one another. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from “before”?

April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Failing out of school and picking up shifts at Margo’s diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers. Driving without a chosen destination, she stops to rest in Ithaca. As she looks for work, she finds a kindred sense of belonging at Cafe Decadence, the local coffee shop. Still, somehow, it doesn’t make sense to her that life could be this easy.

When Ruth, a wealthy divorcée, offers to host a kindergarten meet-and-greet, she hopes this will be a fresh start for her and her introverted daughter, Marley. Instead, the parents are turned off by Ruth’s ostentatious wealth, and Ruth and Marley become outcasts. The last guest to arrive at the meet-and-greet is Gemma, a widow and a single mother to her daughter, Bee. Ruth sets her sights on them, and soon the two families are inseparable. But when Ruth’s affair with a married Hillside dad is exposed, Gemma severs ties with Ruth. Six years later, Gemma finds herself embroiled in a scandal of her own, and Ruth comes to her defense. Soon, though, Gemma starts to feel trapped as Ruth grows more and more obsessed with their relationship.

The accident that ended Miranda Fitch’s burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well,” she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging “Macbeth” instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers. That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of her past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall. Colleen and Rich want a better life for Chub, and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, she and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict.

When 17-year-old Abigail Blake disappears after a party, her best friend Emma is left with questions no one else can answer. The police initially believe Abi ran away, but Emma doesn’t believe that her friend would leave without her. When disturbing evidence is discovered nearby, the festering secrets and longstanding resentment of both Abigail’s family and the people of Whistling Ridge begin to surface with devastating consequences. But Abi has secrets of her own, and the closer Emma grows to unraveling them, the further she feels from her friend. And in a tinderbox of small-town rage, all it will take is just one spark --- the truth of what really happened that night --- to change their community forever.

Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong? How about everything.

In March of 1984, the commercial fishing boat Wind Blown left Montauk Harbor on what should have been a routine offshore voyage. Its captain, a married father of three young boys, was the boat’s owner and leader of the four-man crew, which included two locals and the blue-blooded son of a well-to-do summer family. After a week at sea, the weather suddenly turned, and the foursome collided with a nor’easter. They soon found themselves in the fight of their lives. Tragically, it was a fight they lost. Neither the boat nor the bodies of the men were ever recovered. Amanda M. Fairbanks examines the profound shift of Montauk from a working-class village to a playground for the ultra-wealthy, seeking out the reasons that an event more than three decades old remains so startlingly vivid in people’s minds.

Fresh out of university and right on the precipice of adulthood, El is trying her best to figure out what she really wants from life. This is complicated by the fact that she is also dealing with the loss of her father, Martin. After his sudden death, El inherits and moves into his home just outside Tavistock, in the Devon countryside. Her stepbrother, Will, comes to help her through her grief and to go through her father’s belongings. As El spends time in her father’s home, she uncovers more about his life, and the secrets he had been keeping from her and her family. This includes mysterious messages on his phone from someone El suspects may have been more than just a friendly acquaintance.