Adult

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, “I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.” This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next. Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne and the Virgin Mary. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy.

Elle's dreams of domestic bliss are devastated by David's deceiving dalliances. Abandoned and alone, she needs a new life plan, and it's thrust upon her by her tiger-loving aunt in India. She must conserve the creatures and hunt the hunters. Converted to the cause, Elle is committed to combating cruel animal exploitation, but she can't do it on her own. She needs money and a terrific team beneath her, and it takes time to find the right people to bring in money and carry out the campaign. What she gets is an assortment of wicked women with their own attributes and agendas. But the battle gets bigger. There's a mysterious mastermind building an execrable empire on the back of coveted creatures' carcases. The Sinister Sisterhood are devious, deadly and dedicated --- but not necessarily to Elle's cause.

Audrey Harper needs more than home and hearth to satisfy her self-worth, despite being raised with the idea that a woman's place is in the home. Working as a music critic for the city newspaper in Baltimore, Maryland, during the Second World War, she has enjoyed both financial freedom and personal satisfaction in a job well done. When Audrey uncovers evidence of German spies working to sabotage a secret bomber plane being manufactured in her beloved city, she must choose between her sense of duty to protect her city and the urgings of her boss, her family and her fiancé to turn over her evidence to the authorities. But when her choices lead her and her sister into danger, she is forced to risk life and limb to save her sister and bring the spies to justice.

After a messy public breakup, soap opera darling Jasmine Lin Rodriguez finds her face splashed across the tabloids. When she returns to her hometown of New York City to film the starring role in a bilingual romantic comedy, Jasmine figures her new “Leading Lady Plan” should be easy enough to follow --- until a casting shake-up pairs her with telenovela hunk Ashton Suárez. But after a disastrous first impression, Jasmine and Ashton agree to rehearse in private. Rehearsal leads to kissing, and kissing leads to a behind-the-scenes romance worthy of a soap opera. While their on-screen performance improves, the media spotlight on Jasmine soon threatens to destroy her new image and expose Ashton’s most closely guarded secret.

It's August 1984, and paperboy Christopher Stewart has gone missing. Hours later, 12-year-old Sammy Cox hurries home from his own paper route, hiding a terrible secret. Crystal, Sammy's 17-year-old sister, is worried by the disappearance but also sees opportunity: the Stewart case has echoes of an earlier unsolved disappearance of another boy, one town over. Crystal senses the makings of an award-winning essay, one that could win her a scholarship --- and a ticket out of their small Iowa town. As the abductions set in motion an unpredictable chain of violent, devastating events touching each life in unexpected ways, officer Dale Goodkind is forced to face his own demons.

To Senior Midwife Lucy Ryuan, pregnancy is not an unusual condition, it's her life's work. But when two kidnappings and a vicious stabbing happen on her watch in a university hospital in Manhattan, her focus abruptly changes. Something has to be done, and Lucy is fearless enough to try. Rumors begin to swirl, blaming everyone from the Russian Mafia to an underground adoption network. The feisty single mom teams up with a skeptical NYPD detective to solve the case, but the truth is far more twisted than Lucy ever could have imagined.

Popular Irish musician Ronan Hession tells the story of two single, thirty-something men who still live with their parents and who are…nice. They take care of their parents and play board games together. They like to read. They take satisfaction from their work. They are resolutely kind. And they realize that none of this is considered…normal. LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL is the story of two friends struggling to protect their understanding of what’s meaningful in life.

Dreams collide with reality, modernity with antiquity, and myth with identity in the 12 arresting stories of A HOUSE IS A BODY. In “Earthly Pleasures,” a young painter living alone in San Francisco begins a secret romance with one of India’s biggest celebrities, and desire and ego are laid bare. In “A Simple Composition,” a husband’s professional crisis leads to his wife’s discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy. And in the title story, an exhausted mother watches, hypnotized by fear, as a California wildfire approaches her home. Set in the United States and India, they reveal small but intense moments of beauty, pain and power that contain the world.

Stella is a nurse who has long suppressed her own needs and desires to nurture the dreams of her partner, Simon, the bass player for a rock band that has started to lose its edge. But when Stella falls into a coma just as Simon is headed to a gig that could revive his career, Simon must learn the meaning of sacrifice, while Stella’s best friend, Libby, a doctor who treats Stella, must also make a difficult choice as the coma wears on. When Stella at last awakes from her two-month sleep, she emerges into a striking new reality where Simon and Libby have formed an intense bond, and where she has acquired a startling artistic talent of her own: the ability to draw portraits of people in which she captures their innermost feelings and desires.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and he tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat --- “special meat” --- is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon he becomes tortured by what has been lost --- and what might still be saved.