Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world. It earned Baltimore its nickname Bodymore, Murderland, and was made notorious by David Simon’s classic HBO series “The Wire.” Drug deals dominate street corners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds. Montana Barronette was the leader of the gang “Trained to Go” (or TTG), and when he was finally arrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been nicknamed “Baltimore’s Number One Trigger Puller.” After a string of murders are linked to TTG, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison for life. Now an acclaimed journalist who spent his youth in the white suburbs of Baltimore, Mark Bowden returns to the city with exclusive access to the FBI files and unprecedented insight into one of the city’s deadliest gangs and its notorious leader.

For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it? In THE REAL WORK --- the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick --- Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods.

Margaret Atwood’s collection of 15 stories --- some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine --- looks deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love --- and what comes after.

Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring and mercurial father --- the writer, theater critic and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was 10 years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations --- about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity --- fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents and develop the island as a vacation destination.

“It all started with my balls.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” The second essay in this collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, the setting for many of Tóibín’s novels and stories, including BROOKLYN, THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP and NORA WEBSTER. Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality.

Jane Morgan is a valued member of her law firm --- or was, until a prudish neighbor observes her having sex on the roof of her NYC apartment building. Police are summoned, and a punishing judge sentences her to six months of home confinement. With Jane now jobless and rootless, life looks bleak. When a doorman lets slip that Jane isn't the only resident wearing an ankle monitor, she strikes up a friendship with fellow white-collar felon Perry Salisbury. As she tries to adapt to life within her apartment walls, she discovers she hasn’t heard the end of that tattletale neighbor --- whose past isn’t as decorous as her 9-1-1 snitching would suggest. Why are police knocking on Jane’s door again? Can her house arrest have a silver lining? Can two wrongs make a right?

Every so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely --- until it’s not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince. Equipped with a fan’s admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class and centuries --- each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose legacy resounded far beyond their own time.

Aspiring writers and readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this engaging book from the internationally bestselling author. Haruki Murakami now shares with readers his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists and musicians. Here are the personal details of a life devoted to craft: the initial moment at a Yakult Swallows baseball game when he suddenly knew he could write a novel; the importance of memory, what he calls a writer’s “mental chest of drawers”; the necessity of loneliness, patience and his daily running routine; the seminal role a carrier pigeon played in his career; and more.

NAVIGATING GRIEF AND LOSS is a book for anyone who has experienced the pain of mourning, struggled to find a job, or is devastated by a bad breakup. It's a guidebook filled with relatable stories and practical meditations to help navigate the profound experience of death and loss. Filled with traditional Buddhist wisdom into the nature of life, each short chapter honestly describes a personal experience dealing with death or grief, followed by compassionate and mindful practices --- meditations, exercises or contemplations that readers can use to discover insights and truths, and bring comfort and friendship to their own struggles and sorrow.