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It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. A magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises, Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating.

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage. For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar living in Florence at the end of the 15th century. An anti-corruption campaigner, his hellfire preaching increasingly spilled over into tirades against all luxuries that tempted his followers toward sin. These sermons led to the infamous "Bonfire of the Vanities” --- a series of fires lit throughout Florence for the incineration of everything from books, extravagant clothing, musical instruments, make-up and mirrors to paintings, tapestries and sculptures. Railing against the vice and avarice of the ruling Medici family, he was instrumental in their removal from power. Denise Mina brings a modern take to this fascinating historical story, drawing parallels between the febrile atmosphere of medieval Florence and the culture wars of the present day.

When her husband’s car is found abandoned and on fire --- in the middle of a rainstorm --- Eve Roth becomes the police's number one suspect. After all, her husband was suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct with a student. And who else but an atmospheric physicist could incinerate a car in a downpour? Jonah Kendrick appears on their doorstep with a theory. He’s seen Eve’s husband, bound and bleeding in a barn. Claiming to be a psychic detective who dreams of the lost, Jonah has helped find missing people his entire life. He dreamed about a young woman trapped in the same barn months ago, and she’s still missing. As a firm believer in the laws of nature, Eve rejects anything to do with psychics, but their investigations soon collide.

Salvador, the patriarch of a wealthy family, runs one of Wall Street’s biggest banks the summer before everything collapses; Roberto and Rachel, his two children, have never worked a day in their lives; and Lena, his ex-wife, is a scheming hypochondriac. WESTERN ALLIANCES follows Roberto and Rachel across Europe as the two dilettantes come to terms with their father’s choices and the repercussions of his actions. Wilton Barnhardt invites readers on a literary romp from an elegant Paris apartment to a hilariously inept London hotel, ancient churches and crypts to gleaming Mediterranean coasts, hot dog stands in Providence, RI to the best places in Manhattan, and terrifying encounters in the Serbian countryside to dangerous liaisons in Moscow, as two grown-up rich kids are forced to come of age at last.

Twenty-four-year-old Bridge is paralyzed by choices: all the other lives she could have lived, the decisions she could have made. And now, who she should be in the wake of her mother’s unexpected death. Jo was a maverick neuroscientist fixated on an artifact she called the “dreamworm” that she believed could open the doors to other worlds. But in packing up Jo’s house, Bridge discovers Jo’s obsession hidden amongst her things. And the dreamworm works, exactly the way it’s supposed to, the way Bridge remembers from when she was a little girl. Suddenly Bridge can step into other realities, otherselves. In one of them, could she find out what really happened to her mother? What Bridge doesn’t know is that there are others hunting for the dreamworm --- who will kill to get their hands on it.

For Chicago police detective Annalisa Vega, Sam Tran’s death presents an ominous puzzle. The ex-cop turned PI is found hanging from a cemetery tree with a message across his chest that suggests someone holds a murderous grudge against the police. Annalisa suspects the real answer lies in one of Tran’s open cases. She believes he stumbled on a dark secret during his investigations and someone killed him to keep him quiet. Her own family harbors plenty of secrets, something Annalisa is reminded of when her brother turns out to be one of Sam’s last clients. Vinny Vega hired Tran to find a dangerous stalker on his daughter’s college campus. Now Sam is dead and the stalker remains at large, with Annalisa’s niece, Quinn, firmly in his sights.

Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-30s, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has made the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own. Alina's pregnancy shakes the women's lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina's daughter survives childbirth --- after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite --- and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor's son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man and innumerable others. The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community --- where nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.

Mary "Mae" Foley was a force to be reckoned with. On one hip, she held her makeup compact; on the other, her NYPD badge. When women were fighting for the vote, Mae was fighting crime in the heart of New York City --- taking down rapists, bootleggers, Nazis and serial killers. One of the first women to be sworn into the police force, Mae not only fought crime in the city that never sleeps, but also did something much bigger --- challenged the patriarchal systems that continually tried to shut her and other women down. The result of her efforts? A long career that helped over 2,000 women join her auxiliary police force, the “Masher Squad.” Mae Foley is proof that women can do anything men can do, all while wearing corsets and the perfect shade of rouge.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

In 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson first walked onto the diamond at Ebbets Field, the all-white, upper-crust US Lawn Tennis Association opened its door just a crack to receive a powerhouse player who would integrate "the game of royalty." The player was a street-savvy young Black woman from Harlem named Althea Gibson, who was about as out-of-place in that rarefied and intolerant world as any aspiring tennis champion could be. But her astonishing performance on the court soon eclipsed the negative feelings being cast her way as she eventually became one of the greatest American tennis champions. In ALTHEA, Sally H. Jacobs tells the heart-rending story of this pioneer --- a trailblazer, a champion, and one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century.

Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most --- from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is --- which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of THE ROMANTIC.

When they first meet, John --- a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD --- is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, is hungry for an independent life as a writer and historian. When they meet again some years later, Michaele is ready. Or so she thinks. The life Michaele and John build together intermingles sweetness with complications, including their ethnic and religious differences (Michaele is Jewish; John is not), the trauma John endured as a child during WWII, Michaele’s thwarted ambitions, and even John’s preoccupation with Latvian rye. When he opens a successful company marketing rye bread, Michaele embarks on a European journey in search of her husband’s origins, excavating poignant stories of war, privation and resilience.

Lilach has it all: a beautiful home, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. There, for the first time, he finds a sense of confidence and belonging. Then tragedy strikes again when an African American boy dies at a house party, apparently from a drug overdose. Though he was a high school classmate, Adam claims not to know him. Yet rumors begin to circulate that the death was not accidental, and that Adam and his new friends had a history with Jamal. As more details surface and racial tensions in the community are ignited, Lilach begins to question everything she thought she knew about her son.

T.J. Allen, a professional athlete, is charged with the murder of Matthew Stanton, the owner of the team. Renowned lawyer Joseph Antonelli agrees to take the case only after the trial court judge tells him that Allen is innocent and that “All of America contributed to the making of Matthew Stanton.” The evidence is firmly stacked against Allen: he was found standing over Stanton’s dead body, the murder weapon still in hand. The only way to prove Allen is innocent is to find the real killer and their motive. Who had a reason to kill Matthew Stanton? What had he done, or what was he planning to do, that made the real killer think he had no choice? As Antonelli prepares for the most difficult case of his career, he will learn that the answer to that question not only will change the outcome of this trial, but could change the world as we know it.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes is downsizing in light of a recent downturn of sensitive crime, and staff members are wondering who among them will be transferred elsewhere. As the bickering between colleagues intensifies, Ulf Varg tries his best to stay above the fray. But when Anna, a longtime friend and coworker, appears to blame him for an old case that went sideways, it seems she may be putting her own job prospects above their friendship. In the midst of all this, Ulf embarks on an important inquiry: a man's cabin has mysteriously disappeared, and Ulf is tasked with finding out what happened. How exactly does one steal a house? And, more to the point, how does one track down a stolen house?

Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that is the key that unlocks every door. She begins dating women --- soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads, jobs go off the rails, and evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that her friend, Tig, begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

When an old college friend leading a religious tour in Assisi asks interpreter Rick Montoya to fill in for their guide who's gone missing, Rick is happy to oblige. He's looking forward to seeing his old friend, and the food and wine of Umbria sound like the perfect reward for a tense translation job he's just completed for the police in Palermo involving witness testimony against the mafia. But when the shady tour guide is found dead the next morning under suspicious circumstances, Rick's relaxing gig turns into an unofficial job assisting the local police inspector with her interviews of the tour group members. Could one of the pious pilgrims be a cold-blooded killer? Or has one of the victims' many shady dealings finally caught up with him?

Greta lives with her friend, Sabine, in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’ voice in town, and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware that Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines --- a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan --- and increases her dosage on a regular basis. Following her doctor’s orders, Melissa takes the pills night after night; her body begins to shut down, and she collapses while holding her infant daughter. Only then does Melissa learn that her doctor --- like many doctors --- has over-prescribed the medication, and quitting cold turkey could lead to psychosis or fatal seizures.

Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare bookstore that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable 51 rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans. As they interact with various literary figures of the time --- Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (George Orwell's widow), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim and others --- these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

Tucker Snow is as tough as they come, hardened by decades working as an undercover narcotics agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Through special dispensation from the governor, he and his brother Harley cut a wide swath through the criminal element of Northeast Texas. But tragedy comes calling after taking a dream job as a special ranger with the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, when Tucker's wife and toddler are killed in a horrific traffic accident. Close to breaking, Tucker sets his badge aside to move his surviving teenage daughter outside of Ganther Bluff, a quiet town with enough room for them to mourn their unexpected loss. But instead of settling into small-town life to heal from such an unimaginable loss, a fresh kind of hell hits them with full force.

Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night? As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict.

1310, Berwick-upon-Tweed, England. Edward II knights Frederick Kohl for his bravery fighting the Scots. But Sir Frederick is not the man the king believes him to be; instead, it is his sister, Christina, who assumes her dead brother's identity. Still posing as Frederick, Christina escorts Lady Cecily, a young noblewoman joining Queen Isabella's court at Westminster Palace, to London. Unexpectedly, Christina and Cecily fall in love. But the wife of one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the city is Christina's bitter enemy. Katharine Volker, whose lascivious advances Christina rejects, goads her into voyaging from her London home to the Baltic waters of her birthplace. Christina journeys not to engage in trade. She sails for a far deadlier purpose --- to exact revenge on the pirates who killed her father and brother.