Adult

In ANTIQUITIES, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for 34 years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage, he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. Included alongside this wondrous tale are four additional stories weaving myth and mania, history and illusion: "The Coast of New Zealand," "The Bloodline of the Alkanas," "Sin" and "A Hebrew Sibyl."

Ted Molloy was once a high-powered Manhattan lawyer, but after a spectacular fall from grace, he has found himself back on his home turf in Queens, scraping by as a foreclosure profiteer. It’s a grubby business, but a safe one --- until Ted’s case sourcer, a mostly reformed small-time conman named Richie Rubiano, turns up murdered shortly after tipping Ted off to an improbably lucrative lead. With Richie’s widow on his back and shadows of the past popping up at every turn, Ted realizes he has gotten himself embroiled in a murder investigation. His quest for the truth will take him all over Queens, plunging him into the machinations of greedy developers, mobsters, enraged activists, old litigator foes and old-school New York City operators.

Nobody robs banks in Belfast without the IRA getting a cut --- not even former Provo James “Ructions” O'Hare. But when word gets around that O'Hare may be up to something, the pressure from the IRA begins. Ructions trusts his crack squad of former paramilitary compadres, and has full confidence in his audacious plan: To literally empty the biggest bank in Belfast by kidnapping the families of two employees --- known as a "tiger" kidnapping --- in order to force them to help Ructions and his crew get into the bank's vault. But keeping the plan --- and the money --- from the IRA is another plan entirely, one requiring all of Ructions' cunning and skill.

The eight stories in FIRST PERSON SINGULAR are all told in the first person by a classic Haruki Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.

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.