Dava and Barr Pennington are professors at a Midwestern university. Dava is unhappy in their marriage and secretly in love with a colleague. Spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter. But the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail. Tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. After a precipitous decline, Dava moves to a memory-care facility. Soon afterward, Barr discovers her hidden manuscript and extrapolates her affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years, he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth.

In these stories spanning six centuries, we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th-century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans, we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina, and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee. The title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

In this deeply personal and insightful book, Isabel Allende delves into her creative process, reflecting on nearly half a century of writing that has captivated millions of readers worldwide. For Allende, writing is more than a craft. It is an addiction, a means of preserving memory, and a way to make sense of life. She offers readers an intimate glimpse into her creative world, where stories take shape through intuition, discipline and deep connection to the human experience. It is also a glimpse into the life of a writer who views literature as a portal to understanding the chaos of life.

The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away. Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly or insignificant next to M. But what truths --- about the very experience of living --- might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. She stumbles upon Sunrise, a town of the Old West that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making. In 2003, Sand Daw’s golden boy, Coll, is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city --- and himself. In 1902, town founder, gunslinger and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet and contained until they encounter a spark.

Matthew Quick traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed. And some days, he didn’t want to live. Years earlier, when he first told his father that he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: “Idiot!” Quick channeled his pain into his debut novel, THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, which became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Still, the approval he longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper he sank into anxiety and addiction. In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father’s cognitive decline.

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, 12 years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life. But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms. No sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales. Then Miles stumbles upon a bizarre --- perhaps ridiculous --- local legend, which might not be just a legend after all.

Reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term. After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation. Desperate to retain power, the president enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, “The Real West Wing.” But as Rasputin’s appeal threatens to exceed the president’s, and the wrestler’s supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control.

In September 2022, the unthinkable happened: 19-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen in a stunning face-to-face match. Within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating --- a bombshell allegation that rocked the chess world. As the scandal spiraled, Chess.com --- the dominant force in online chess --- launched a high-stakes investigation igniting a global media firestorm. But CHECKMATE is about more than a cheating scandal. It’s the story of a teenager willing to risk everything to rise to the top; a reclusive genius suddenly fighting to protect his legacy; and a centuries-old game transforming into a billion-dollar industry fueled by streaming, sponsorships and Silicon Valley power players.

Tom Coyne, the New York Times bestselling author of A COURSE CALLED AMERICA and numerous other contemporary classics of golf literature, has spent his career traveling the world and playing legendary courses from St. Andrews to Shinnecock. One day, at the urging of a course superintendent who is hoping to save his local nine-hole gem from shuttering just shy of its 100th anniversary, Coyne pays a visit to Sullivan County Golf & Country Club in upstate New York. When he arrives, the course is buried under ice and snow, and what he can see of the clubhouse is falling apart. By the time he leaves, all he can see is his next adventure: discovering how owning a course is vastly different from playing one.