Adult

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote DON QUIXOTE to satirize the culture of his time, Salman Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse.

Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO JAPAN, Iyer draws on his years of experience --- his travels, conversations, readings and reflections --- to craft a book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don’t know Japan --- and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief and inescapable sorrow. For Smith --- inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing --- this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet, Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz and Malena --- five cantoras, women who "sing" --- somehow, miraculously, find one another and then discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next 35 years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested --- by their families, lovers, society and one another --- as they fight to live authentic lives.

When Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz was sent to investigate a suspected biochemical attack, he found something far worse: a highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction. He contained it and buried it in cold storage deep beneath a little-used military repository. Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy. Only Diaz knows how to stop it. He races across the country to help two unwitting security guards --- one an ex-con, the other a single mother. Over one harrowing night, the unlikely trio must figure out how to quarantine this horror again. All they have is luck, fearlessness and a mordant sense of humor. Will that be enough to save all of humanity?

When a massive hurricane severs all power and cell service to Little Bridge Island --- as well as its connection to the mainland --- 25-year-old Bree Beckham isn’t worried…at first. But animal-loving Bree does become alarmed when she realizes how many islanders have been cut off from their beloved pets. Now it’s up to her to save as many of Little Bridge’s cats and dogs as she can. To do so, she’s going to need help from her boss’s sexy nephew, Drew Hartwell. But when Bree starts falling for Drew, just as Little Bridge’s power is restored and her emotionally abusive (but now-penitent) ex shows up, she has to ask herself if her island fling was only a result of the stormy weather, or if it could last during clear skies too.

Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont is learning to enjoy the new realities of retirement: doing morning crossword puzzles by a roaring fireplace, playing frisbee with his new dog, having quiet lunches with his still-working wife. But then his past comes calling. When a long-ago acquaintance, Alan Dale, shows up on Beau’s doorstep with a newborn infant in hand and asking for help locating his missing daughter, Beau finds himself faced with an investigation that will turn his own life upside down by dragging his none-too-stellar past onto a roller-coaster ride that may well derail his serene present. It turns out that, even in retirement, murder is still the name of J. P. Beaumont’s game.

Twelve-year-old Rain Winter narrowly escaped an abduction while walking to a friend’s house. Her two best friends, Tess and Hank, were not as lucky. Tess never came home, and Hank was held in captivity before managing to escape. Their abductor was sent to prison but years later was released. Then someone delivered real justice --- and killed him in cold blood. Now Rain is living the perfect suburban life, her dark childhood buried deep. But when another brutal murderer who escaped justice is found dead, Rain is unexpectedly drawn into the case. Eerie similarities to the murder of her friends’ abductor force Rain to revisit memories she’s worked hard to leave behind.

Terri Rayburn is a girl with a reputation. She doesn’t deserve it, but having grown up on the outskirts of Summer Hill, Virginia, she knows how small towns work. The only way to deal with vicious gossip is to ignore it. When Terri returns home from a short trip to find a handsome stranger living in her house, she smells a rat. Someone is trying to fix her up, and she has to admit that Nate Taggert is just her type. However, Nate is engaged to the daughter of the mayor and strictly off-limits. As he starts to hear rumors about Terri, he’s determined to discover the source of the gossip. Terri doesn’t want to revisit the past, but Nate won’t stop until he discovers the truth --- even if the truth might be more than either of them can handle.

Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Susan Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money --- and when many gave in. SONTAG tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based.