Adult

Nearly a century after Harry Houdini died, he feels as modern and alive as ever. The name Houdini still leaps to mind whenever we witness a daring escape. Every generation produces new disciples of the magician, from household names in magic like David Copperfield and David Blaine to countless other followers whose lives have been transformed by the power of Houdini. But the unique phenomenon of Houdini was always more than his death-defying stunts or his ability to escape handcuffs and straitjackets. It is also about the power of imagination and self-invention. Fueled by Joe Posnanski’s personal obsession with the magician --- and magic itself --- THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF HARRY HOUDINI is a poignant odyssey of discovery that traces Houdini’s metamorphosis into an iconic figure who has inspired millions.

Janis Joplin has become a legend known as a brash, impassioned soul doomed by the pain that produced one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. But in these pages, Holly George-Warren provides a revelatory portrait of a woman who wasn’t all about suffering. Janis was a perfectionist: a passionate, erudite musician who was born with talent but also worked exceptionally hard to develop it. She was a woman who pushed the boundaries of gender and sexuality long before it was socially acceptable. She was a sensitive seeker who wanted to marry and settle down --- but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was a Texan who yearned to flee Texas but could never quite get away --- even after becoming a countercultural icon in San Francisco.

Rona Leonard was only 20 years old when she walked out of her sister Fiona’s flat and disappeared. Six years later --- worn down by a tedious job, childcare and an aching absence in her life --- Fiona’s mundane existence is blown apart by the revelation that Rona had been working as a prostitute before she vanished. Driven to discover the truth, Fiona embarks on an obsessive quest to investigate the sex industry that claimed her sister. However, as she is drawn into this complex world, Fiona finds herself seduced by the power it offers women in a society determined to see them only as victims.

Moved by his mother's death and his Irish Catholic family's complicated history with the church, Timothy Egan decided to follow in the footsteps of centuries of seekers to force a reckoning with his own beliefs. He embarked on a thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity to explore the religion in the world that it created. Egan sets out along the Via Francigena, once the major medieval trail leading the devout to Rome, and travels overland via the alpine peaks and small mountain towns of France, Switzerland and Italy, accompanied by a quirky cast of fellow pilgrims and by some of the towering figures of the faith. The goal: walking to St. Peter's Square, in hopes of meeting the galvanizing pope who is struggling to hold together the church through the worst crisis in half a millennium.

Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically. The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Horseback Librarians of Kentucky. What happens to them --- and to the men they love --- becomes a classic drama of loyalty, justice, humanity and passion.

On a lonely moor in northern England, the body of a young woman is discovered. In the south, a girl lies buried beneath a Saxon mound. To the southeast, the ruins of a priory hide a human skull. Each is a sacrifice, a summons. And something in the darkness has heard the call. Charlie Parker has also heard it, and from the forests of Maine to the deserts of the Mexican border, from the canals of Amsterdam to the streets of London, he will track those who would cast the world into darkness. Parker fears no evil --- but evil fears him.

Philadelphia, 1825: Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, five young, free Black boys are instead met with blindfolds, ropes and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.

In her first short story collection, Zadie Smith combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interweaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, GRAND UNION is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves, and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.

Stone Barrington is trying to enjoy some downtime at his English retreat when he's unceremoniously sent off to the remote reaches of the UK and into a deadly snare. As it turns out, this is only the first volley by a rival power, one that has its eyes set on disrupting the peace of the nation. With the help of two brilliant and stunning women, Stone must leverage a new position of power to capture a villain with a lethal agenda. But the closer he comes to nabbing the culprit, the more he realizes there's a bigger plan at work, and a true mastermind who's a force to be reckoned with.

“Marley was dead, to begin with,” Charles Dickens tells us at the beginning of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. But in Jon Clinch’s novel, Jacob Marley, business partner to Ebenezer Scrooge, is very much alive: a rapacious and cunning boy who grows up to be a forger, a scoundrel, and the man who will be both the making and the undoing of Scrooge. With their business interests inextricably bound together, and instincts for secrecy and greed bred in their very bones, the two men engage in a shadowy war of deception, false identities, forged documents, theft and cold-blooded murder. Marley and Scrooge are destined to clash in an unforgettable reckoning that will echo into the future and set the stage for Marley’s ghostly return.