Adult

While the town cheers on their high school football team, someone sets the school’s auditorium ablaze. Gray Marsden’s father, a firefighter, dies in the blaze. While many believe that a notoriously troubled local teen set the fire, Gray’s best friend, Ginny Beale, makes a shattering discovery that casts blame on the person she trusts most in the world --- but she tells no one. Over the next two decades, Ginny distances herself from the past and nearly everyone in it. But when her husband, Harris, becomes embroiled in a scandal, Ginny’s carefully controlled life crumbles. Just when she believes she is regaining her bearings, the secret she’s kept for 20 years emerges and threatens to destroy her hopes for the future.

Twenty-five years ago, the body of 16-year-old Eve Knox was found in the caves near her home in small-town Grotto, Iowa --- discovered by her best friend, Maggie, and her sister, Nola. There were a handful of suspects, including her boyfriend, Nick, but without sufficient evidence the case ultimately went cold. For decades Maggie was haunted by Eve’s death and that horrible night. Now a detective in Grotto, and seven months pregnant, she is thrust back into the past when a new piece of evidence surfaces and the case is reopened. As Maggie investigates and reexamines the clues, secrets about what really happened begin to emerge. But someone in town knows more than they’re letting on, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep the truth buried deep.

In SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after 20 years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study has produced some of the world’s best minds. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years completely removed from the outside world. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire. But when tragedy strikes, Ines Murillo --- a member of this year’s incoming class --- begins to suspect that the school might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

In this collection of original and previously published nonfiction essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers readers an introspective look into various facets of her life. Her childhood and school years, her successful career as a newspaper reporter, the challenge of balance, her life as a novelist and a reader --- Lippman’s takes on these universal subjects offer as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction. Of the 16 essays, only three have appeared in book form before.

Graduating from Harvard at the height of World War II, brilliant mathematician Charlie Fish is assigned to the Manhattan Project, where he works on designing and building the detonator of the atomic bomb. But he suffers a crisis of conscience, which his wife, Brenda --- unaware of the true nature of Charlie’s top-secret task --- mistakes as self-doubt. Once the bombs strike Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the feelings of culpability devastate him and Brenda. At the war’s end, Charlie receives a scholarship to pursue a PhD in physics at Stanford, but the past proves inescapable. Haunted by guilt, Charlie and Brenda decide to dedicate the rest of their lives to making amends for the evil he helped to birth into the world.

In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life” --- to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. Her mother died when Quindlen was 19: “It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on for the darkest possible reason.... I learned something enduring, in a very short period of time, about life. And that was that it was glorious, and that you had no business taking it for granted.” But how to live from that perspective, to fully engage in our days? In A SHORT GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE, Quindlen guides us with an understanding that comes from knowing how to see the view, the richness in living.

Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America’s much-beloved games of college basketball and football have not been so threatened since the widespread cheating scandals in the early 1950s. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on imperial coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff, and lavish comforts for fat-cat fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color --- many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds --- cannot be justified. But MARCHING TOWARD MADNESS cites 21 reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, while presenting comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, put academics first, and end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.

Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable. One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy. These people --- a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor and a movie star, among others --- could not be more different, yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.