Adult

Eager for her wealthy suitor, Jürgen Schoormann, to propose, Eva Bruhns dreams of starting a new life away from her parents and sister. But Eva’s plans are turned upside down when an investigator, David Miller, hires her as a translator for a war crimes trial. As she becomes more deeply involved in the Frankfurt Trials, Eva begins to question her family’s silence on the war and her future. Though it means going against the wishes of her family and her lover, Eva, propelled by her own conscience, joins a team of fiery prosecutors determined to bring the Nazis to justice --- a decision that will help change the present and the past of her nation.

In the days of yore, he flew the skies and scorched angry mobs. Now he hides from swamp tour boats and rises only with the greatest reluctance from his Laz-Z-Boy recliner. For centuries, he struck fear in hearts far and wide as Wyvern, Lord Highfire of the Highfire Eyrie. Now he goes by Vern. He is the last of his kind, the last dragon. A canny Cajun swamp rat, young Everett “Squib” Moreau does what he can to survive and has finally decided to work for a shady smuggler. But on his first night, he witnesses his boss murdered by a crooked constable. Regence Hooke is not just a dirty cop who happens to want Squib’s momma in the worst way. When Hooke goes after his hidden witness with a grenade launcher, Squib finds himself airlifted from certain death by…a dragon?

In Eastvale, a young Middle Eastern boy is found dead. Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team know they must tread carefully to solve this sensitive case. But tensions rise when they learn that the victim was stabbed somewhere else and dumped. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Then, in a decayed area of Eastvale scheduled for redevelopment, a heroin addict is found dead. Was this just another tragic overdose or something darker? Just when he needs to be his sharpest, the seasoned detective finds himself distracted by a close friend’s increasingly precarious situation. He needs a break --- and gets one when he finds a connection to a real estate developer that could be key to finding the truth.

Six years after a virus wiped out most of the planet’s population, former pop star Moira is living under a new identity to escape her past --- until her father launches a sweeping public search for her. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded event planner Krista navigates the world for those still too traumatized to go outside. Rob has tried to protect his daughter, Sunny, by keeping a heartbreaking secret, but when strict government rules threaten to separate parent and child, Rob needs to prove himself worthy in the city’s eyes by connecting with people again. The lives of Krista, Moira, Rob and Sunny begin to twine together. When reports of another outbreak throw the fragile society into panic, the friends are forced to finally face everything that came before --- and everything they still stand to lose.

It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gangmaster and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest controller suspected of pedophilia, and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love. They’re ordinary people, preoccupied by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #MeToo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folklore.

On the night of June 4th, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly 17 years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known.

In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston --- the sole black student at the college --- was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives.

Katie resigns herself to the fact that there’s no sex in London for her and decides to head to the Scottish Highlands. But while she relishes the chance to do battle with armies of admirers, she’s not excited about going head to head with her shady new boss, Harry. At least there’s the local eye-candy to distract her, including gorgeous newshound Iain. But he is at loggerheads with Harry, and she can’t afford to get on Harry’s bad side any more than she already has. Life in the country might not be one big roll in the hay, but now that Katie has taken the plunge, can she ever turn her back on the delights of Fairlish and return to city life?

In the summer of 1969, 14-year-old Lucas Painter carries a huge weight on his shoulders. His brother is fighting in Vietnam. His embattled parents are locked in a never-ending war. And his best friend, Connor, is struggling with his own family issues. To find relief from the chaos, Lucas takes long, meandering walks, and one day he veers into the woods. There he discovers an isolated cabin and two huge dogs. Frightened, he runs. And the dogs run with him. Lucas finds unusual peace in running with the dogs, and eventually he meets their owner, Zoe Dinsmore. Closed off and haunted by a tragic past, Zoe has given up and wants out. But Lucas doesn’t want her to go, and he sees an opportunity to bring more than one friend back into the light.

This inspirational book juxtaposes quotations, one to a page, drawn from Toni Morrison's entire body of work --- both fiction and nonfiction --- to tell a story of self-actualization. Aiming to evoke the totality of Morrison's literary vision, its compelling sequence of flashes of revelation addresses issues of abiding interest in her work: the reach of language for the ineffable; transcendence through imagination; the self and its discontents; the vicissitudes of love; the whirligig of memory; the singular power of women; the original American sin of slavery; the bankruptcy of racial oppression; the complex humanity and art of black people.