Adult

In rural West Virginia, Joanie and her foster siblings live on a farm tending a mysterious plant called the vine. The older girls are responsible for cultivating the vine, performing sacred rituals to make it grow. After Joanie’s arranged marriage goes horribly wrong, leaving her widowed and with a baby, she plots her escape with the help of her foster brother, Cello. But before they can get away, her baby goes missing, and Joanie --- desperate to find him --- turns to the vine, understanding it to be far more powerful than her siblings realize. She begins performing generations-old rituals to summon the vine’s power and goes on a perilous journey into the wild, pushing the boundaries of her strength and sanity to bring her son home.

A former prosecutor notorious for her aggressive tactics, Diane Harbaugh is now a DEA agent. But when she hears from Gustavo, a high-ranking cartel member with an invaluable secret about the international black market, her entire understanding of justice and duty is thrown into question. Gustavo sends her down a rabbit hole that leads to a criminal conspiracy more pervasive than anything she and the DEA ever suspected. She teams up with Ian Carver, a disillusioned CIA agent, and begins to unravel layers of deceptions, grifts and schemes that date back to the beginnings of the Afghanistan War. As they learn more, they become the target of cartel assassins, embittered spies and even their own government.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics and disordered knowledge --- decades before Facebook, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk --- or so argues Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, in her account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

In her 13th year, Kirabo confronts a piercing question: Who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small Ugandan village of Nattetta --- her grandmother, her best friend and her many aunts --- but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Seeking answers from Nsuuta, the local witch, Kirabo learns about the woman who birthed her, who she discovers is alive but not ready to meet. Nsuuta also helps Kirabo understand the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing force inside her --- this, says Nsuuta, is a streak of the “first woman”: an independent, original state that has been all but lost to women.

In 1844 Ireland, Liam O’Connor, a rogue and a thief, fell madly in love with a squire’s daughter and unwittingly altered the future. Shy and naive Cora McLeod thought Liam was the answer to her prayers. But the angels disagreed, and they’ve been waiting for the right moment in time to step in. Now Liam finds himself reunited with his beloved Cora in Providence Falls, North Carolina. The angels have given Liam a task. He must make sure Cora falls in love with another man --- the one she was supposed to marry before Liam interfered. But this Cora is very different from the innocent girl who fell for Liam in the past. Liam wants Cora for himself, but with his soul hanging in the balance, he must choose between a stolen moment in time or an eternity of damnation.

As a child in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Its presence haunts her throughout her youth. Raised in a trailer by her stubborn, bowhunting father, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence and her father’s vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster, and the creature she saw long ago reappears as a portent of the valley’s final reckoning.

Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa --- the setting of her novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA --- and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions and the wonders of a sacred world. JACK is the fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.

Rosa, also known as Red Riding Hood, is done with wolves and woods. Hou Yi the Archer is tired and knows she is past her prime. Both would rather just be retired, but that’s not what the world has ready for them. When deadly sunbirds begin to ravage the countryside, threatening everything they’ve both grown to love, the two must join forces. Now blessed and burdened with the hindsight of middle age, they begin a quest that’s a reckoning of sacrifices made and mistakes mourned, of choices and family and the quest for immortality.

When Debora Harding was just 14, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom and left to die. Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother. It wasn't until decades later --- when beset by the symptoms of PTSD --- that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and reimagine his complex story.

Isabel Lincoln is gone. But is she missing? It’s up to Grayson Sykes to find her. Although she is reluctant to track down a woman who may not want to be found, Gray’s search for Isabel Lincoln becomes more complicated and dangerous with every new revelation about the woman’s secrets and the truth she’s hidden from her friends and family. Featuring two complicated women in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, Rachel Howzell Hall's AND NOW SHE'S GONE explores the nature of secrets --- and how violence and fear can lead you to abandon everything in order to survive.