Adult

Charlie Savoy was once Hollywood’s hottest A-lister. Now, 10 years later, she’s pushing 40, exiled from the film world, and back at the summer Shakespeare theater in the Berkshires that launched her career --- and where her old flame, Nick, is the artistic director. It’s not exactly her first choice. But as parts are cast and rehearsals begin, Charlie is surprised to find herself getting her groove back, bonding with celebrity actors, forging unexpected new friendships, and even reigniting her spark with Nick, who still seems to bring out the best in her despite their complicated history. Until Charlie’s old rival, Hollywood’s current It Girl, is brought on set, threatening to undo everything she’s built.

Eight years ago, Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow, forming an unconventional intercultural family. But now that family is in jeopardy. The birth of Poke and Rose’s newborn son has littered their small apartment with emotional land mines, forcing Poke to question his identity as a dad and Miaow to question her identity as a daughter. At the same time, the most cantankerous member of the small gang of Old Bangkok Hands who hang out at the Expat Bar suddenly goes missing under suspicious circumstances. Engaged in the search for the missing American, Poke is caught completely off-guard when someone he thought was gone forever resurfaces --- and she has the power to tear the Raffertys apart.

In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. THE SHAPELESS UNEASE is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive.

Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Alexandra, a high-powered job in image management for whole countries cannot prepare her for her missing brother’s sudden reappearance. In a culture of limitless surveillance, Jeremy and Alexandra will go to great lengths to protect what is closest to them. Spanning decades and continents, their saga brings them into contact with a down-and-out online journalist, shadowy security professionals, and jockeying technology experts, each of whom has a different understanding of whether information really protects us.

When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City's South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth and comfort. He buys a rundown house in a community that is quickly changing from an Italian enclave of mobsters to a haven for Haitian immigrants, and begins life anew. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn't, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses. What he can't even begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien's ultimate evil.

In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII is desperate to be rid of his unappealing German queen, Anna of Kleve, and casts an amorous eye on a pretty 19-year-old brunette, Katheryn Howard. Like her cousin Anne Boleyn, Katheryn is a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, England’s premier Catholic peer, who is scheming to replace Anna of Kleve with a good Catholic queen. A fun-loving, eager participant in the life of the royal court, Katheryn readily succumbs to the king’s attentions when she is intentionally pushed into his path by her ambitious family. But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back increasingly to haunt her. What happens next to this naïve and much-wronged girl is one of the saddest chapters in English history.

Alice always thought she'd see her brother again. Rob ran away when he was 15, with so many years left to find his way home. But his funeral happened first. Now that she has to clear out her childhood home in Georgia, the memories come flooding in, bringing with them an autopsy report showing her family's lies --- and sealed, addressed letters from Rob. In a search for answers to questions she's always been afraid to ask, Alice delivers the letters. Each dares her to open her eyes to her family's dark past --- and her own role in it. But it's the last letter, addressed to her brother's final home in New Orleans, that will force her to choose if she'll let the secrets break her or finally bring her home.

FUNNY WEATHER brings together a career’s worth of Olivia Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers fertile new ways of living.

A CHILDREN’S BIBLE follows a group of 12 eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders --- including Eve, who narrates the story --- decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.

In 1796 Trinidad, young Rosa Rendón quietly but purposefully rebels against the life others expect her to lead. She sees no reason why she should learn to cook and keep house, for it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm that she, alone, views as her birthright. But when her homeland changes from Spanish to British rule, it becomes increasingly unclear whether its free Black property owners --- Rosa’s family among them --- will be allowed to keep their assets, their land and, ultimately, their freedom. By 1830, Rosa is living among the Crow Nation in Bighorn, Montana, with her children and her husband, Edward Rose, a Crow chief. Her son, Victor, is of the age where he must seek his vision and become a man. But his path forward is blocked by secrets Rosa has kept from him.