Adult

As a child living in his family's apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather's every mesmerizing word. On the day of his father's death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse…and the boy's own fated role in the story. Ahmad grows up to suspect that something must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together through decades of famine, loss and political turmoil in Iran. As the world transforms around him, each turn of Ahmad's life is a surprise. These lives, and the many unforgettable stories alongside his, converge and catch fire at the center of the Revolution.

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where 14-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. But then Lacey May’s mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves her daughter and runs off with a man she barely knows. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes.

Author Ian Ludlow writes great adventures…but after helping Chinese movie star Wang Mei defect to the United States, he becomes the accidental hero of a real-life espionage thriller. Now he’s stuck with the actress --- and suffering a nasty case of writer’s block --- when he stumbles into a secret Russian plot using “fake news” to outrage Americans into believing a terrifying lie. It’s up to Ian and Margo French, his researcher-turned-spy, to discover the connection between a barbaric drug lord in Mexico, a homicidal maniac in California, a rogue citizen army in Texas, a raging TV pundit in New York, and two dead tourists in Portugal…before the president of the United States makes a catastrophic mistake that could resurrect the Soviet Union.

After 25 years on the job, Detective Roscoe Conklin moves to Bonaire, a small island nestled in the southern Caribbean. But when his longtime police buddy and friend back home is murdered, Conklin calls his old department, trolling for information. It’s slow going. No surprise, there. After all, it’s an active investigation, and his compadres back home aren’t saying a word. When a suspicious mishap lands his significant other, Arabella, in the hospital, the island police conduct, at best, a sluggish investigation, stonewalling progress. Conklin questions the evidence and challenges the department’s methods. Something isn’t right. Arabella wasn’t the intended target. He was.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative female artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl and honky-tonk angel. Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk and the home.

In SHELTER FROM THE MACHINE, Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed, while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society --- only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.

CONJURE WOMEN is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter, Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter, Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency, all while raising her children. Maya’s mother had always been a source of support --- until Maya became a mother herself. Then the parent who had once been so capable and attentive became suddenly and inexplicably unavailable. Struggling to understand this abrupt change, Maya searches for answers and soon learns that her mother is living with Alzheimer’s. Unable to remember or keep track of the stories she once told her daughter, Maya’s mother divulges secrets about her past that force Maya to reexamine their relationship. It becomes clear that Maya never really knew her mother, despite their close bond.

The Parisian design houses in 1928, the crash of 1929, the losses of war, the drug culture of the 1960s --- history holds many surprises, and lives are changed forever. For richer or for poorer, in cramped apartments and grand mansions, the treasured wedding dress made in Paris in 1928 follows each generation into their new lives, and represents different hopes for each of them, as they marry very different men. From inherited fortunes at the outset to self-made men and women, the wedding dress remains a cherished constant for the women who wear it in each generation and forge a destiny of their own. It is a symbol of their remaining traditions and the bond of family they share in an ever-changing world.

Math-genius mercenary Cas Russell has stopped a shadow organization from brainwashing the world, and discovered that her past was deliberately erased and her superhuman abilities deliberately created. And that's just the start. When a demolitions expert targets Cas and her friends, and the hidden conspiracy behind Cas' past starts to reappear, the past, present and future collide in a race to save one of her dearest friends.