Adult

Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Carmen Maria Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives IN THE DREAM HOUSE its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope --- the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman --- through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

A series of nuclear strikes has left huge swathes of the country uninhabitable. It’s a level playing field now: both Hater and Unchanged alike have to fight to stay alive. Both have retreated to their camps to regroup, less than 20 miles away from each other. It’s here that the last major battle of the final war will inevitably be fought, but neither side has any idea what’s waiting for them just around the corner. Both armies are ready to fight to the death, each of their leaders hell-bent on victory. Their tactics are uniformly simple: strike first, get the enemy in a chokehold, then strangle the life out of them.

A note from bartender Brian McNulty, Raymond Ambler’s friend, confidant and sometimes adviser, sets the librarian sleuth off on a murder investigation, one that he pursues reluctantly until a second murder upends the world as he knows it. The second victim is a lady friend of McNulty’s --- and the prime suspect is McNulty himself. As Ambler pursues his investigation, he discovers that the murdered woman had a double life. While Ambler looks into the past of Dr. Sandra Dean to understand the murder of Shannon Darling in the present, NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove investigates the men in Darling’s life. Yet, no matter which way he turns, McNulty emerges as a suspect.

After spending years in prison for a crime she didn’t intend to commit, Rose Collins is suddenly free. Someone who knows about the good work she has done --- training therapy dogs while serving time --- has arranged for her early release. This mysterious benefactor has even set her up with a job in the coastal Massachusetts community of Gloucester. There she works to rebuild her life with the help of Shadow, a stray dog who appears one rainy night. Meghan Custer is a wheelchair-bound war veteran who used to be hopeless, too. But ever since she was matched with a service dog named Shark, who was trained in a puppy-to-prisoner rehabilitation program, Meghan has a brand-new outlook. Finally, she can live on her own, go to work and maybe even find love again.

Since his election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown has sat on the Senate floor at a mahogany desk with a proud history. In DESK 88, he tells the story of eight of the Senators who were there before him. They range from Hugo Black, who helped to lift millions of American workers out of poverty, to Robert F. Kennedy, whose eyes were opened by an undernourished Mississippi child and who then spent the rest of his life afflicting the comfortable. Brown revives forgotten figures such as Idaho’s Glen Taylor, a singing cowboy who taught himself economics and stood up to segregationists, and offers new insights into George McGovern, who fought to feed the poor around the world even amid personal and political calamities. He also writes about Herbert Lehman of New York, Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee, Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, and William Proxmire of Wisconsin.

Sheila Weller traces Carrie Fisher’s life from her Hollywood royalty roots to her untimely and shattering death after Christmas 2016. Her mother was the spunky and adorable Debbie Reynolds; her father, the heartthrob crooner Eddie Fisher. When Eddie ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, the scandal thrust little Carrie Frances into a bizarre spotlight, gifting her with an irony and an aplomb that would resonate throughout her life. Weller sympathetically reveals the conditions that Fisher lived with: serious bipolar disorder and an inherited drug addiction. Still, despite crises and overdoses, her life’s work --- as an actor, a novelist and memoirist, a script doctor, a hostess and a friend --- was prodigious and unique.

After losing a hotly contested sheriff's race to the lackey of corrupt politician Jeb Walsh, Earl Marcus has had the worst summer of his life. But worst turns deadly when a body turns up on Earl's front lawn, accompanied by a cryptic letter. Earl finds a cell phone in the victim's car and tracks it to The Harden School, an old, isolated campus surrounded by barbed wire and locked gates, and catches a sneak peek at a file labeled complaints, where he finds a familiar name: Jeb Walsh. Jeb's ex-wife, Eleanor, had lodged multiple complaints against the school on behalf of her son, and when he contacts Eleanor, the horrifying truth begins to emerge. Desperate to make a connection between the school and the dead man, Earl journeys into a world where nothing is sacred.

An explosion outside a community dance sends Mattie Cobb and Cole Walker reeling into the night, where they discover a burning van and beside it the body of outfitter Nate Fletcher. But the explosion didn't kill Nate --- it was two gunshots to the heart. The investigation leads them to the home of rancher Doyle Redman, whose daughter is Nate's widow, and the object of one of their suspect's affection. But before they can make an arrest, they receive an emergency call from a man who's been shot in the mountains. Mattie and her K-9 partner, Robo, rush to the scene, only to be confronted by the ominous growl of a wild predator. They journey into the cold, misty mountains to track the animal --- but discover something even more deadly.

At the start of World War II, the US Army had two cavalry divisions --- and no mountain troops. The German Wehrmacht, in contrast, had many well-trained and battle-hardened mountain divisions. Starting from scratch, the US Army developed a unique military fighting force, the 10th Mountain Division, drawn from the ranks of civilian skiers, mountaineers and others with outdoor experience. The resulting mix of Ivy League students, park rangers, Olympic skiers and European refugees formed the first specialized alpine fighting force in US history. By the time it deployed to Italy at the beginning of 1945, this ragtag group had coalesced into a tight-knit unit. In the months that followed, at a terrible cost, they spearheaded the Allied drive in Italy to final victory.

In April 1912, six notable people were among those privileged to experience the height of luxury --- first-class passage on “the ship of dreams,” the RMS Titanic. Using previously unpublished sources, deck plans, journal entries and surviving artifacts, Gareth Russell peers through the portholes of these first-class travelers to immerse us in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history. Through their intertwining lives, he examines social, technological, political and economic forces, such as the nuances of the British class system, the explosion of competition in the shipping trade, the birth of the movie industry, the Irish Home Rule Crisis, and the Jewish-American immigrant experience, while also recounting their intimate stories of bravery, tragedy and selflessness.