When the immortal goddess Hera and her brother, Zeus, overthrow their tyrannical father, she dreams of ruling at his side. But as they establish their reign on Mount Olympus, Hera begins to see that Zeus is just as ruthless and cruel as the father they betrayed. While Zeus ascends, Hera is relegated to the role of wife and mother, a role she never wanted. She was always born to rule, but must she lose herself in perpetuating this cycle of violence and cruelty? Or can she find a way to forge a better world?

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont in A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.

After a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, Julia Ames resides on the placid plateau of her mid-50s. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she believes she has a firm handle on things. She’s unprepared, though, for a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenage daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which place her on the kind of razor’s edge that she knows all too well.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.

Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of 22, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon --- a journey that McBride promised would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.” The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined --- and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both.

For decades, Joni Mitchell’s life and music have enraptured listeners. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Mitchell has inspired countless musicians --- from peers like James Taylor, to inheritors like Prince and Brandi Carlile --- and authors, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing. At the same time, Mitchell has always been a force beckoning us still closer, as --- with the other arm --- she pushes us away. Given this, music critic Ann Powers wondered if there was another way to draw insights from the life of this singular musician who never stops moving, never stops experimenting. In TRAVELING, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys.

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations. So the arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture feels like a boon to her. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

Writing as Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler has led several generations of young readers into that special and curious space of being hopelessly lost, and joyfully finding yourself, in the essential strangeness of literature. The wondrous and perilous journey of the Baudelaire orphans sprung from the author’s own path, from his childhood discovery of Baudelaire’s poetry through the countless peculiarities of his pursuit of a literary life --- abject failure and startling success, breakthrough and breakdown, concordance and controversy --- lit along the way by the books and culture he loved best. AND THEN? AND THEN? WHAT ELSE? is a book not just for anyone curious about the creator of Lemony Snicket, but for anyone who loved books when they were a child and still loves them now.

Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death. When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days or return to a place where she’s already been. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s.