Coming Soon

From the moment she first sang at church in McComb, Mississippi, Brandy knew her voice was special. At 14 she landed her first record deal. At 15 her album went platinum. At 16 she was starring in the hit sitcom "Moesha" and became the first Black actress to play Cinderella on screen alongside fairy godmother, Whitney Houston. Yet as the accolades piled up, so too did the pressure the maintain a flawless image. To onlookers, she had crafted the blueprint for the teenage “it” girl. But behind closed doors “The Vocal Bible” as she was known, was struggling. Now, for the first time, Brandy reveals the real story behind her life in the spotlight, the stratospheric highs and the unimaginable lows, the groundbreaking moments and the relatable journey she had to take to discover her authentic self --- as a woman, a mother, an artist --- as Brandy.

The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time --- until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly 30 centuries later. As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition and grief.

Meet Sam, an adjunct professor at a public university in Baltimore who takes a last-minute gig at the private liberal arts college down the road. Overworked and underpaid, her life is a blur of back-to-back classes, side hustles and job applications as she attempts to claw her way toward a full-time position. But her already precarious existence is thrown into disarray when she runs into her former grad school adviser, Dr. Tom Sternberg, on campus. Tom and Sam have a complicated history, the lasting impact of which has haunted her academic career. Then she learns that Tom left his old job for undisclosed reasons --- and his long-awaited second novel is about a professor’s reckoning with his checkered past. As whispers spread that Sam is the inspiration behind a central character, she fights to regain control of the story while questioning everything she thought she knew about her future --- and herself.

1937. It’s been seven years since the dust storms started in Colorado. Folks can barely remember a time when the clouds were filled with rain instead of dirt, and when the fields were green instead of brown. High school student Martha Helen Kessler and her family are luckier than most; they still eke out a living from the land. When Martha Helen’s compassionate mother insists they take in Otis Hobbs, a handsome drifter who saves a local boy from a vicious storm, she quickly discovers a darker side to their rural community. Suspicion, jealousy, and prejudice grip their neighbors --- and emotions reach a frenzy after Martha Helen’s best friend, Frankie, disappears and is then found murdered. Ultimately, Martha Helen is forced to make sense of her conflicting feelings and loyalties in order to help find retribution and to reconcile the difference between the law and justice.

On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river. In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The 11 stories transport readers across continents and eras. Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend; Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

A decade after her daughter was murdered, Bree Winter is finally moving on. Then a deathbed confession from the convicted killer throws Bree off. He readily confesses to murdering four girls. But not Melanie. At first, Bree doesn't buy a word of it. Until inconsistencies about the crime emerge. The only way she can get to the truth is to return to the town in upstate New York where Melanie’s life came to a brutal end. Bree will do anything to find justice for her daughter. But as Bree begins to dig through Melanie’s past, what she discovers calls into question everything she has believed --- about the crime and about Melanie herself.

The Naik sisters escaped their traumatic past in Mumbai to come to the States, but their journeys have been vastly different. Simi is working toward a bright future as a pediatric nurse in a small town in Kentucky when Rupi shows up at her door in distress, on the run and as always, dragging trouble in her wake. With Rupi’s safety in jeopardy, the sisters hatch a desperate plan to keep her in the country: Rupi must get married even if it means Simi recruiting the man she’s been secretly dating as her sister’s groom. A perfect plan? Not quite. But there aren’t many alternatives. As the big day inches closer, Simi and Rupi face a storm of wedding shenanigans and romantic surprises, not to mention sisterly jealousies. As the stakes and tensions rise, will their secrets tear them apart or will they find a way to risk everything for love?

Phil is ordinary. A mid-level Washington lobbyist for a decidedly unsexy organization, unhappy in the way all mildly successful, minimally influential men are. That is until the spring of 2019, when Phil’s picks for the NCAA March Madness Tournament start panning out, and heads begin to turn his way. He really may do it: predict a perfect bracket, for a billion-dollar prize. At first, Cassandra is just along for Phil’s soaring rise --- she had foreseen it happening, after all. Despite moving in different circles since their shared university days and Cassandra never much liking him, she recognizes in Phil the making of a legend worthy of the highest art. What Cassandra fails to predict, though, is just how much she’d grow to care about Phil’s wife, Raleigh --- and that the grandest narrative arcs sometimes unfold at the steepest of personal costs.

After a childhood spent combing the dive bars of Sarsaparilla Falls to collect her fun-loving momma, Cordelia West now enjoys a simple, respectable life in Dallas. Then one phone call from the hometown she’s spent years trying to forget throws it into chaos. Cordelia's great-aunt Penelope has passed away, naming Cordelia the sole heir to the Chickadee Motel. But upon her arrival, Cordelia discovers the Chickadee isn’t a motel --- it’s a brothel, housing three women in their sixties known as the Chicks. For decades, Daisy, Arline, and Belinda Sue have entertained the men of Sarsaparilla Falls  --- including the upright Pastor Reed-Smythe. Cordelia can’t just sell the only home the Chicks have known --- especially not after the pastor is found poisoned in Daisy’s bed. Things are heating up in Sarsaparilla Falls, and Cordelia may just have to get a little dirty to make a killer come clean.

Nym never told Prince Renn she loved him. And now, as a captive and political pawn to the ruthless King Nicosia, Nym finds herself guarding more than her forbidden feelings for Renn as the kingdoms of Cansere and Sesta clash and the bloodshed of war rages. Nym’s connection to Renn is more than just romantic and King Nicosia will stop at nothing to find Renn’s weakness and claim the kingdoms as his. Now Nym must find a way to escape the cruel and twisted fate of imprisonment as she faces the unimaginable horrors and dangerous secrets hidden within King Nicosia’s palace walls. With the succession of kings on the line and a dangerous prophecy unfolding, Prince Renn faces his own impossible choice. The future of the throne hinges on a political alliance that means forsaking his love for Nym. If he can’t fulfill his destiny and unite the kingdoms, King Nicosia will destroy them all.

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life so that Eleanor could focus on her career as a therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house. Desperate to obey her mother one last time, but finding few options she can afford, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels.

Beautiful, cunning Verbena Montrose must marry to save herself and her odious family from abject poverty. Fortunately, what she lacks in a dowry, she makes up for in the currency of gossip. When she hears an alarming rumor about her very dear, very queer friend Étienne that could ruin him, she comes to his aid with a proposal. But when Verbena discovers that a mysterious and celebrated poet by the name of Flora Witcombe has been publishing verses that hint she is onto their scheme, Verbena has no choice but to pretend to be a poet herself to confront her in a local salon. And --- unexpectedly --- be charmed by her. Flora, in turn, is terrified by and smitten with Verbena in equal measure. Faced with two suitors and a fiancé, Verbena, who has always had to be clever to survive in society, starts to realize she may need to think outside of society’s constraints to find true happiness.

Lore Segal is a master of the short story, and this collection shows her in peak form. Profound, dark and often hilarious, Segal portrays her characters foibles, eccentricities and passions with great compassion and exactness, as they grapple with life, aging and each other. Readers of LADIES' LUNCH will recognize the educated, urbane nonagenarian women who have been friends for a lifetime, as they tackle aging’s affronts with wit, grace and resourcefulness.

Kit Porterfield is coping with the upheaval of her personal life when another shock blindsides her. Maxine Meadows, an aunt she never knew existed, has bequeathed to her a rustic campground in Maine. With it comes a long-buried family secret that Kit’s late mother took great pains to hide for her entire life. When Kit arrives to tenuously claim her inheritance, she learns the town’s history and finds the lakeside sporting camp and its beautiful wooded acres in need of restoration to their former glory. But it’s Kit’s own history that compels her to stay and she’s not returning home until she uncovers the secrets that tore two sisters apart so many years ago. Kit soon discovers clues in old photographs and in the tale of a tragic and enduring love story. For Kit, they could be the path to understanding the mystery that defined her mother’s life --- and her own.

Leah Smith finally has everything she’s ever wanted. Except she doesn't. Her marriage feels more like a loan than a lifelong commitment, and the image she has worked so hard to build is fraying before her eyes. With a new role and a past full of secrets, Leah must decide how far she is willing to go to keep what she has stolen.

After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion. Told with her signature wit, warmth and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies. In this hilariously and deeply affecting meditation on mortality, the actress and activist illuminates life with chronic disease, inequities in care and celebrates tiny victories, the crusty ends of baguettes, the discreet pleasure of sucking at a hobby and the unshakable bond of female friendship. She upends the notion of living each day as if it were your last, as she discovers you can carpe too much diem, embracing, instead, the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

A train derails in Idaho, nearly causing a nuclear disaster. An inferno at a battery facility in Florida disrupts the electrical grid for days. A potentially devastating failure is discovered at Virginia’s Mud River Dam. To computational biologist Theo Cray, these aren’t mere infrastructure accidents. They are virtually undetectable acts of sabotage. Theo sees a mathematical pattern to the madness that few others can comprehend --- except for his associates: rogue FBI agent Jessica Blackwood, private security specialist Brad Trasker and Florida underwater investigator Sloan McPherson. If Theo’s intuition and calculations are correct, the disasters are just a warm-up. The worst is yet to come --- a catastrophe that could trigger the deaths of millions across the country.

Welcome to Baines Creek, a humble hamlet hidden deep in Appalachia, where the last one-room schoolhouse in North Carolina is on the brink of closing. It's summer 1980, and Kate Shaw the teacher has lived in Baines Creek for 10 years. A skeptic at heart, she rejects superstitions and Appalachian folklore, much to the disappointment of Birdie Rocas, a powerful and reclusive witch with a trove of secrets. Yet when Birdie dies, she leaves Kate her collection of handmade books and a shocking legacy that spans centuries; Kate is thrown into a world that overwhelms her. Enter Lydia Brown, a psychic with a curious birthmark whose visions stopped the day her parents died. Grief-stricken without her gift and desperate for spiritual guidance, she travels to Baines Creek in search of Birdie and the answers she might provide.

In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’ life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it's 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret --- her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling. One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program. Allina must keep her Jewish identity a secret in order to survive, but when she discovers the neglect occurring within the home, she’s determined to save not only herself, but also the children in her care.

Rena and Tom have been planning this trip for years: just the two of them, retired, setting out into remote bush country to enjoy nature's dramatic beauty --- and each other's company. When Tom dies unexpectedly just before they are to depart, Rena almost cancels, but there's nothing left at home but painful memories. She hits the road in her kitted-out truck. Not far from her first planned stop, Rena notices a fire burning some distance off the highway. Being a good citizen, she ventures off road, and is horrified to find a vehicle consumed by flames, with what's left of the driver still inside. When she learns that the victim is a fellow geologist, Rena begins an unofficial and unwelcome investigation fraught with deceit, diamond theft and murder. Had her old colleague found a new pipeline for the rare and valuable pink diamond, and been killed for it? And if Rena doesn't mind her own business, will she be next?

A police officer fresh out of the academy becomes acutely aware of the deadly consequences of prejudice and how biases color our actions, leading us to justify faulty choices. A teenager has lost her voice and resorts to violence to get heard, even against those she loves. A university student breaks a law on a night of youthful revelry, which soon has fatal consequences that plunge those involved into an abyss of remorse. A mother commits the very same crime her son is being prosecuted for, in order to protect him. A man extends a helping hand in defiance of state restrictions, keeping a refugee safe from the harsh Swedish winter and deportation. Malin Persson Giolito delivers a poignant portrayal of societal failure, vividly illustrating that actions driven by good intentions may still be considered criminal in the eyes of the law.

Hazel Russon’s life in 1882 Utah territory is defined by three things: the Mormon church, polygamy, and the men who control both. She knows she’s supposed to suppress her sinful dreams of a monogamous life with her sweetheart, and her desire for the freedom to play her beloved piano. Commanded to become the fourth wife of a man she’s never met, Hazel is relieved that Jacob Manwaring is attentive and handsome. However, she is shocked to discover that instead of living separately as is custom, all of Jacob’s wives and children live in the same house --- a large, dilapidated manor that inexplicably fills Hazel with dread. Despite Jacob’s tenderness, Hazel senses dark secrets and resentments among her sister wives. And as her nightmares worsen, Hazel can’t be sure if she has more to fear from the living --- or from a sinister presence that seems to animate the house itself.