Coming Soon

In the farm country outside Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan --- a border town where life moves slow and dreams run fast --- most kids want out. Not Everett Lindt. He’s set on staying put, rebuilding his family’s sheep farm, and carving a future from the land he loves. Then he meets Mary, a new girl in town with restless energy and bigger plans. When their relationship reaches a crossroads, Everett sees a life together. Mary, however, is desperate to find a way out. Together, they make an impulsive choice --- one that could change everything.

Viveca Stevenson has it all: a handsome and successful husband, an adorable 10-year-old son, and a coastal dream house in Greenwich, Connecticut. She has a solid group of girlfriends and is content with the afterglow of the film career she’s left behind. But when a threatening letter arrives --- from a man she does not remember --- it cracks open a part of her past she thought was buried for good. A terrifying chain of events is set in motion, forcing Viveca to confront what happened on a shattering Halloween night in high school when she had a different name, a different face and a different voice. Who is the man contacting her now, and was he really the best boy on her most famous film, Misty? Why can’t she remember him --- or that night?

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class and region --- from New England to Florida to California --- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels. “In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death,“ one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples’ good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

You know my name, but you do not know me. Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall. Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves. Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children. How willfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic and divinely blessed to rule. Death will silence me no longer. This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.

Pasadena, 1903: Eighteen-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada staggers off the boat from Yokohama, Japan, ready to reinvent himself after the untimely deaths of his parents. He does his best to settle into his work as an art dealer’s apprentice while adjusting to his new home. From his enigmatic photographer roommate, Jack, to the beautiful seamstress living downstairs, Ryui finds himself surrounded by colorful characters and unbelievable opportunities and is soon utterly swept up in all that “Crown City” has to offer. But tensions are seething under Pasadena’s bustling prosperity. Ryui is the victim of an anti-Japanese attack, and a painting is stolen from the studio of Toshio Aoki, Pasadena’s most successful Japanese artist, who then hires Ryui and Jack to investigate. It’s not long before their sleuthing leads them into real danger.

Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends. But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she just might be the last woman standing.

ENCOUNTERS WITH UNEXPECTED ANIMALS takes readers deep into the heart of bestselling author Bret Anthony Johnston’s home state of Texas, where teenagers search for love, parents grasp at connections with their children, and animals --- real or imagined, familiar or unexpected --- are reminders of the mystery, danger and beauty of being alive. In “Caiman,” a father buys a baby alligator in hopes of keeping his family safe. In “Soldier of Fortune,” a teenage boy dog-sits for his neighbors after tragedy strikes, and his innocent snooping uncovers the family’s most guarded secret. And in the luminous “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses,” an elderly man’s heart is laid bare with the raw and breathtaking power of wild horses.

Toño Azpilcueta --- writer of sundry articles, aspirant to the now defunct professorship of Peruvian studies --- is an expert in the vals, a genre of music descended from the European waltz but rooted in New World Creole culture. When he hears a performance by the solitary and elusive guitarist Lalo Molfino, he is convinced not only that he is in the presence of the country’s finest musician, but that his own love for Peruvian music has a profound social function. If he could just write the biography of the man before him and tell the story of both the vals and its attendant inspiring ethos, huachafería (Peru’s most important contribution to world culture, according to Toño), he might capture his country’s soul and inspire his fellow citizens to remember the ties that bind them.

Marla Gibbs, the star of such classic television series as “The Jeffersons” and “227,” has been a Hollywood icon for generations of fans. Now, at 93, she chronicles her climb from a difficult youth in which she yearned for safety and love, to the high-stakes world of Hollywood where she became a confident powerbroker learning to work behind the scenes for fair pay, access, and more creative control for herself and her colleagues. Told in her forthright voice, IT’S NEVER TOO LATE illuminates Gibbs' daring move to Los Angeles to rebuild her life after an abusive marriage, how she became an actor, and how she eventually learned to balance acting with show running. 

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at 18 for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF --- Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all. But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Riley and her brother, Oliver, set off in the pitch-black night, fleeing their troubled home. They are heading for Nowhere --- an abandoned ranch, once the playground of its former eccentric movie-star owner, now a haven for runaways. What awaits could be the freedom they crave. But this mysterious clan guards dark secrets, and the scorched grounds hold the ghosts of the past. Riley quickly realizes that while she and Oliver may have escaped the devil they knew, something darker lurks in the burnt shell of Nowhere. Something that asks a terrible price for sanctuary.

When Fliss, the eccentric grown daughter of the powerful Fitzmaurice clan, is found dead on a beach in Bali, what seems like a tragic accident stirs more suspicion than closure for those who have traded favors with --- and within --- her family for decades. There is Ben, Fliss’ brother, eager to minimize his sister’s passing, since it’s suddenly clear he’s next in line to be Prime Minister. And Martin --- Ben’s erstwhile best friend --- who is just happy that Fliss’ memorial gives him the chance to re-enter the Fitzmaurice orbit, seeking revenge and acceptance. Where does Richard Take, Ben's disgraced colleague who is determined to make his big comeback, fit in? And circling them all is Andrew Jarvis and his money: Has he been their loyal hero, or the one who has thrown his weight around just to keep them all in check?

In Michigan, Sarah’s childhood was defined by fear and silence. As a teenager, she saw a chance to escape and took it. Now, in 1999, she is an artist living on the rugged coast of Donegal, Ireland, where she is known as Saoirse (pronounced Sear-sha) --- a name that sounds like the sea and means freedom in the language of her adopted country. Her partner and two beloved daughters are regular subjects of her paintings, and together they have made the safe home she always longed for. But Saoirse's secrets haunt her. No one must learn of the identity she has stolen in order to survive; they cannot know of the dangers that she crossed an ocean to escape. When her artwork wins unexpected acclaim at a Dublin exhibition, the spotlight of fame threatens to unravel the careful lies that hold her world together.

After the double blow of divorce and her mother’s death, Emma Shrader receives an invitation to meet her estranged father for the first time. Alex Spencer is a wealthy, renowned author who had a brief fling with Emma’s mom and then disappeared. Now he’d like Emma to come stay at his beautiful home on Cheshire Lake in Maine. The Spencer house is a towering Victorian steeped in history and lore. It should be an inspiring place for Emma to finish working on her own novel. But when a neighbor is found dead under strange circumstances, the surroundings begin to feel less idyllic and welcoming. Not everyone is happy about Emma’s arrival --- especially Alex’s other daughter, Sunny. What exactly has been going on in this quiet, close-knit community? And how much of it has to do with Emma’s arrival?

Marybeth Pickett gets the call she has always dreaded: her husband, Joe, is in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head. Joe was found in his pickup at Antler Creek Junction, a crossroads connecting three ranches. Each road leading to a dangerous family. Each family with a different bone to pick with the local game warden. Marybeth and the new sheriff assume that Joe was ambushed by one of the families, but they have no idea which one since Joe didn’t say where he was going or why. With Joe unconscious and fighting for his life with Marybeth at his side, Sheridan, April and Lucy split up and investigate each of the families to uncover the truth of what happened to their father before it’s too late.

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. Audrey is a search-and-rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

Alex Ivanov is a brilliant young innovator, designing cutting-edge train engines. But Alex isn’t really Alex Ivanov. As a boy, he was pulled from the Thames with no memory of who he was. Rescued and raised by the formidable Ryder Sherbrooke, Alex has built a new life, but his past is catching up with him. Lady Camilla Rohman has problems of her own. She is trapped by a scheming stepmother and a family determined to see her married off. When fate throws her into Alex’s path, their connection is undeniable. But as their whirlwind romance turns into marriage, danger follows. On their honeymoon, a series of deadly attacks make one thing clear --- someone wants Alex dead. As they race to uncover the truth, old enemies and long-buried secrets come to light, leading them to a shocking revelation that will change everything.

What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In THE IRISH GOODBYE, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships --- with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between five former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town, for which she poses. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction, a form Fennelly innovated in the genre-defying HEATING & COOLING. 

Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He’s a magician, able to enchant 14-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara goes from kindergarten thief to a high school genius, Silicon Valley celebrity, and, finally, animal rights activist turned terrorist. But to tell Clara’s story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan and his rivalry and friendship with his head of school, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows.

On the morning of the most important booking in the long history of the celebrated restaurant, Aunt Orsa's erupts into chaos with the discovery that 22 ribeye steaks have been stolen. Hers is the most august of fine-dining establishments in this Midwestern college town, and tonight Orsa is set to host a large party honoring a very special guest --- a bestselling author of national renown. And what's up with the recent spate of online reviews, from insulting to frankly terrible? Is Orsa, who wants only to be loved, being sabotaged on several fronts? No one is above suspicion, not the Mennonite baker or the tattooed hard-ass chef de cuisine. Could the culprit be among the servers, or even the inexperienced undergrad working as hostess? 

The ritualistic murder of a British professor at the University of Exeter points to a startling cast of suspects: his own students. All are enrolled in a postgraduate program covering the history of witchcraft, folklore and spiritualism. All evidence points to Sharyn Karr, an American student. Prior to the professor’s death, he had thrust a centuries-old book upon her. It appears to be the handwritten and encrypted diary of an 18th-century mystic and occultist, the Comte de Saint-Germain. The professor begged her to keep the text safe, ending with a warning: Trust no one. Such a responsibility forces her into cooperation with Duncan Maxwell, a fellow postgrad and the 16th in line to the British Crown. The pair clash at every level, but they both need one another. Especially when they discover the book’s opening words: Herein lies the secret to my immortality. Come find me, if you dare.

Over a decades-long, distinguished career, award-winning journalist Norah O’Donnell has made it her mission to shed light on untold women’s stories. Now, in honor of America’s 250th birthday, O’Donnell focuses that passion on the American heroines who helped change the course of history. WE THE WOMEN presents a fresh look at American history through the eyes of women, introducing us to inspiring patriots who demanded that the country live up to the promises made 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Since the signing of that document, the pressing question from women has been: Why don’t those unalienable rights apply to us?

Ana Robbins was an Olympic star in the making --- until tragedy forced her to leave that world behind. At the age of 16, she gave up her dream and never looked back. Fourteen years later, she’s a successful defense attorney, revered for her work with minors. But when her former coach turns up dead, Ana lands right back where it all began, and abruptly ended: The Palace, a world-renowned skating facility nestled high in the mountains of Colorado. Ana returns to The Palace to defend the young skater accused of the brutal crime. Despite her claims of innocence, all evidence points squarely at Grace Montgomery’s guilt. But Ana’s investigation dredges up childhood memories of her own, triggering the fear that permeates this place where she once lived and trained far from home as an “Orphan.”

After years of rejection, Fern’s debut novel has sold, and she’s ready to join the supportive online community of fellow debuts. But when she discovers that her high school bully, Haven, has landed a major book deal and will be debuting alongside her, old wounds reopen. As the pandemic forces everyone online, tensions escalate in their writing community. While Haven seems to succeed effortlessly, Fern watches her own career crumble. Yet beneath their polished personas lies a darker truth about their shared past --- one involving a lost friend, Dani, and secrets neither wants revealed. Fern isn’t the same person Haven bullied all those years ago. She’s learned that the best revenge stories aren’t written --- they’re lived. And she’s been plotting this one for years. What begins as an online rivalry escalates into a dangerous obsession.