India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life, though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do --- she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie. Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi. Her twin 10-year-olds know they need help --- and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India is not just an adoptive mother.

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island’s small, close-knit community. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together was once all she needed. But now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn, and her place on the island, by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out. One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. Yet her careful illusion suddenly begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain. Her choices ripple through generations, across continents and into the depths of the sea.

Sasha has had it. She cannot bring herself to respond to another inane, “urgent” email or participate in the corporate employee joyfulness program. Armed with good intentions to drink kale smoothies, try yoga and find peace, she heads to the seaside resort she loved as a child. But it’s the off-season, the hotel is in dilapidated shambles, and she has to share the beach with the only other occupant: a grumpy guy named Finn, who seems as stressed as Sasha. How can she commune with nature when he’s sitting on her favorite rock, watching her? Nor can they agree on how best to alleviate their burnout. When curious messages, seemingly addressed to Sasha and Finn, begin to appear on the beach, the two are forced to talk --- about everything.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only 30. Through Zoetrope’s experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than 50 years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker’s dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades-in-the-making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis. Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait.

Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors and folklore. Now they're Mark Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between. Featuring historical images and his own pen-and-ink drawings, he begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid–spewing plant, then digs through its 20 varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated and pickled. THE CORE OF AN ONION also includes a recipe section featuring more than 100 dishes from around the world.

Yayoi, a 19-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, lately has been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day. As if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home. When she is not working, she spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at 2am to be her drinking companion and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A child study desk, old stuffed animals --- things Yukino wants to forget --- are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories.

In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the many themes that feed into her novels --- revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia.

LET US DESCEND is a reimagining of American slavery --- a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take.

Rome is the protagonist, not the setting, of Jhumpa Lahiri's nine stories. In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering --- until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, 16-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls. Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research and, most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil. But how much of the story is true?