The 12 stories in A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY examine the myriad ways that we try --- and sometimes fail --- to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world. The book charts with subtlety and precision the ebb and flow of both the families we make for ourselves and the ones we're born into, as it asks how we know the ones we love and, in turn, ourselves.

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty" --- tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear and fantasy. These narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful Internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime --- even as life beyond work grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant, and her daughter, Miriam, who flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.

NINE INCHES, Tom Perrotta’s first true collection, features 10 stories --- some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing. Whether he’s dropping into the lives of two teachers --- and their love lost and found --- in “Nine Inches,” or documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.

Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death, 16-year-old Jon Mosher turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive father. Jon and Ray form a tight friendship, but it’s not until Ray falls in love with Karen Dorsey that the three friends begin to dream of breaking away from Brewster for good. Freedom, however, has its price.

In the small town of Oakpine, Wyoming, four men try to make peace with who they are in the world. In high school, they were in a band, and readers learn what has become of these friends and the different directions of their lives. Now that they are reunited, getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.

While the 13 colonies came together in 1776 and agreed to secede from the British Empire, the British were dispatching the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic to crush the rebellion in the cradle. The Continental Congress and the Continental Army were forced to make decisions on the run, improvising as history congealed around them. In REVOLUTIONARY SUMMER, Joseph J. Ellis meticulously examines the most influential figures in this propitious moment.

After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. In these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well --- though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband. But will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well?

Philipp Meyer, the acclaimed author of AMERICAN RUST, returns with THE SON. This utterly transporting novel is an epic of the American West and a multigenerational saga of power, blood, land and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family --- from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the oil booms of the 20th century.