LEAVING HOME is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life.

Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician turned schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that has gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were --- and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies --- and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it? Crowds of people and animals --- worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead --- arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, and two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for his post-death future.

Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert. One is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout. Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure. As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by change and pulled apart by irreconcilable obligations. Differences of class, talent and prospects take on new importance; options dwindle, and their decisions grow ever more consequential and perilous. It feels inevitable, finally, that something must give.

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair 12 years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work. So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past --- an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son --- en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present.

Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure? How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in EVERY DAY I READ, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.

On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans were embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the 13 colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what Joseph J. Ellis calls the “great contradiction”: How could a government that had been justified and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of Indian lands? In THE GREAT CONTRADICTION, Ellis addresses the questions that lie at America’s twisted roots --- questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the Revolutionary generation into mental contortionists.

Joe McGinniss was a paradox: a brilliant writer whose dazzling achievements were overshadowed by personal demons. At age 26, he became the youngest living person to top the New York Times bestseller list, for his book THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT, about Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. Shortly after, he walked out on his wife and their three young children. His oldest son, Joe McGinniss Jr., went on to become a writer himself, known for his critically acclaimed novels THE DELIVERY MAN and CAROUSEL COURT. In DAMAGED PEOPLE, McGinniss Jr. vividly recounts his affectionate yet stormy relationship with his famous father, capturing moments of tenderness and humor amid the chaos and tension.

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together --- of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She’s afraid of her own floorboards, and “WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME” plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn’t know who they are. Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she’ll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened: time and memories pass straight through her body. “I’m sorry not to respond to your email,” she writes, “but I live completely in the present now."

It’s 1915, and life is falling apart for 13-year-old twins Bolt and Eleanor. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee. Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives.