Adult

One of the most powerful early medieval queens in British history, Languoreth ruled at a time of enormous disruption and bloodshed, when the burgeoning forces of Christianity threatened to obliterate the ancient pagan beliefs. Together with her twin brother, Lailoken, Languoreth is catapulted into a world of danger and violence. When a war brings the hero Emrys Pendragon to their door, Languoreth collides with the handsome warrior Maelgwn. Their passionate connection is forged by enchantment, but Languoreth is promised in marriage to Rhydderch, son of the High King. As Rhydderch's wife, Languoreth must assume her duty to fight for the preservation of the Old Way, her kingdom and all she holds dear.

A struggling actor, a Brit in America without a green card, Claire needs work and money to survive. Then she gets both. But nothing like she expected. Claire agrees to become a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers. Hired to entrap straying husbands, she must catch them on tape with their seductive propositions. The rules? Never hit on the mark directly. Make it clear you’re available, but he has to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not coercion. The innocent have nothing to hide. Then the game changes. When the wife of one of Claire’s targets is violently murdered, the cops are sure the husband is to blame. Desperate to catch him before he kills again, they enlist Claire to lure him into a confession.

Fifteen years ago, Lilith Wade was arrested for the brutal murder of six women. After a death row conviction, media frenzy and the release of an unauthorized biography, her 30-year-old daughter Edie Beckett is just trying to survive out of the spotlight. She’s a recovering alcoholic with a dead-end city job and an unhealthy codependent relationship with her brother. Edie also has a disturbing secret: a growing obsession with the families of Lilith’s victims. She’s desperate to see how they’ve managed --- or failed --- to move on. While her escalating fixation is a problem, she’s careful to keep her distance. That is, until she crosses a line and a man is found murdered.

Javier Marías is a tireless examiner of the world around us: essayist, novelist, translator, voracious reader, enthusiastic debunker of pretension and vigorous polymath. He is able to discover what many of us fail to notice or have never put into words, and he keeps looking long after most of us have turned away. This new collection of essays journeys from the crumbling canals of Venice to the wide horizons of the Wild West, and Marías captures each new vista with razor-sharp acuity and wit. He explores subjects ranging from soccer to classic cinema, from comic books and toy soldiers to mortality and memory, from “The Most Conceited of Cities” to “Why Almost No One Can Be Trusted,” making each brilliantly and inimitably his own.

There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago, a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned. They were presumed dead until a decade later when the son appeared. He was violent and uncommunicative and sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with him, but he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last 10 years of his life. As she’s drawn closer to her high-profile patient, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world.

Eric disappeared when he was three years old. Ben looked away for only a second at the grocery store, but that was all it took. His brother was gone. Five years later, Ben still looks for Eric. Now 20 and desperate for work, he takes a night stock job at the only place that will have him: the store that blinked Eric out of existence. He can feel that there's something wrong there. With the people. With his boss. With the graffitied baler that shudders and moans and beckons. There's something wrong with the air itself. He knows he's in the right place now. That the store has much to tell him. So he keeps searching, but misses the most important message of all: That he should have stopped looking.

When Teagan's father abruptly abandons his family and his farm, Teagan finds herself wading through the wreckage of what was once an idyllic life, searching for something --- or someone --- to hold on to. What she finds is Ian, short for Obsidian: the magnificent but dangerously headstrong horse her father left behind. But even as she grows close to Ian, patiently training him and trying to overcome her fear of him, Teagan is learning that life and love are fragile.

“I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve.” So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of PONTI. Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress --- who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost --- and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come.

Gracie Mueller is a proud mother of two and a devoted wife. Her life is complicated by the usual tedium and stressors, and she’s settled down comfortably enough. But when her husband’s failing career as a real estate agent makes finances tight, their home goes into foreclosure, and Gracie feels she has no choice but to return to the creatively illegal and high-stakes lifestyle of her past in order to keep all that she’s worked so hard to have. Gracie has a lot to hide about where she’s from, who she is and who she’s been. And when things inevitably begin to spin out of her control, more questions about the truth of her past are raised, including all the ones she never meant to --- or even knew to --- ask.

EVERY DAY IS EXTRA is John Kerry’s candid personal story. A Yale graduate, Kerry enlisted in the US Navy in 1966 and served in Vietnam. He returned home highly decorated but disillusioned, and he testified powerfully before Congress as a young veteran opposed to the war. Kerry was elected to the Senate in 1984, eventually serving five terms. In 2004 he was the Democratic presidential nominee and came within one state --- Ohio --- of winning. He succeeded Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in 2013. In that position he tried to find peace in the Middle East; dealt with the Syrian civil war while combating ISIS; and negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement.