Adult

Selena Murphy is commuting home on the train when she strikes up a conversation with a beautiful stranger in the next seat. The woman introduces herself as Martha and soon confesses that she has been stuck in an affair with her boss. Selena, in turn, confesses that she suspects her husband is sleeping with the nanny. When the train arrives at Selena’s station, the two women part ways, presumably never to meet again. Then the nanny disappears. As Selena is pulled into the mystery of what happened, and as the fractures in her marriage grow deeper, she begins to wonder who Martha really was. But she is hardly prepared for what she will discover.

In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place on the campus of the elite New Hampshire men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken, never-married women on the faculty, she now finds herself depending on them, even joining their work to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon College. Soon, though, reports of violent protests across the country reach this sleepy New England town, stirring tensions between the fraternal establishment of Clarendon and those calling for change. Virginia must decide if she’s willing to put herself and her family at risk for a cause that had never felt like her own.

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless 19-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands.

Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family. The year is 1957, and the Catholic Church rules Ireland with an iron fist. Strafford faces obstruction at every turn, from the heavily accumulating snow to the culture of silence in the tight-knit community he begins to investigate. As he delves further, he learns that the Osbornes are not at all what they seem. And when his own deputy goes missing, Strafford must work to unravel the ever-expanding mystery before the community’s secrets threaten to obliterate everything.

The offer is too tempting: be part of a scientific breakthrough, step out of his life for a year, and be paid hugely for it. When ViMed Pharmaceutical asks Jeremiah to be part of an illegal cloning experiment, he sees it as a break from an existence he feels disconnected from. No one will know he’s been replaced --- not the son who ignores him, not his increasingly distant wife --- since a revolutionary drug called Meld can transfer his consciousness and memories to his copy. From a luxurious apartment, he watches the clone navigate his day-to-day life. But soon Jeremiah discovers that examining himself from an outsider’s perspective isn’t what he thought it would be, and he watches in horror as “his” life spirals out of control.

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.