When former party girl and society photographer Theophania Bogart flees to San Francisco to escape a high-profile family tragedy, a series of murders drags her unwillingly out of hiding. In no time at all, she discovers she's been providing cover for a sophisticated smuggling operation, she starts to fall for an untrustworthy stranger, and she's knocked out, tied up and imprisoned. The police are sure she's lying. The smugglers are sure she knows too much. Her friends? They aren't sure what to believe. The body count is rising, and Theo struggles to find the killer before she's the next victim or her new life is exposed as an elaborate fraud.

When Signora A first enters the narrator’s home, his wife, Nora, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. First as their maid and nanny, then their confidante, this older woman begins to help her employers negotiate married life, quickly becoming the glue in their small household. She is the steady, maternal influence for both husband and wife, and their son, Emanuele, whom she protects from his parents’ expectations and disappointments. But the family’s delicate fabric comes undone when Signora A is diagnosed with cancer.

At a neglected secondhand shop, Annie McDee purchases a painting that happens to be a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French painters of the 18th century. But who painted this masterpiece is not clear at first. Soon Annie finds herself pursued by interested parties who would do anything to possess her picture. In her search for the painting’s identity, Annie will unwittingly uncover some of the darkest secrets of European history --- as well as the possibility of falling in love again.

A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore.

Ada, a friend of Alice’s mentioned briefly in ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, is off to visit her friend, but arrives a moment too late --- and tumbles down the rabbit hole herself. Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. If Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.

Chronicling General Lafayette’s years in Washington’s army, Sarah Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette, and various kings, Quakers and redcoats along the way.

Kezia, Nathaniel and Victor are reunited at the extravagant wedding of a college friend. During the reception, an inebriated Victor passes out in the mother of the groom's bedroom. He's woken with a jovial slap to the face, as she dangles a story about a missing necklace before him, one that she has never even told her son. Her tale sets in motion a madcap adventure that leads Victor, Kezia and Nathaniel from Miami to New York and L.A., and ultimately across France, to the estate of Guy de Maupassant, author of the classic short story "The Necklace."

In THE GAP OF TIME, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of "The Winter's Tale" (one of Shakespeare’s “late plays”), we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time; of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.

In FURIOUSLY HAPPY, Jenny Lawson examines her own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest. There are so many people out there struggling with depression and mental illness, either themselves or someone in their family --- and in this book they will find a member of their tribe offering up an uplifting message (via a taxidermied roadkill raccoon).

On her second night of college, Aspen Matis was raped by a fellow student. Dealing with a problem that has sadly become all too common on college campuses around the country, she stumbled through her first semester --- a challenging time made even harder by the coldness of her college's "conflict mediation" process. Her desperation growing, she made a bold decision: She would seek healing in the freedom of the wild, on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada.