At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Ada adores spending every summer in a Turkish seaside town with her mother and grandmother at the family villa. The glittering waters, endless olive groves and her spirited friends make it easy to leave her idle life in California behind. But no matter how much Ada feels that she belongs to the country where her mother grew up, deep down, her connection to the culture feels as fleeting as the seasons. When Levent, a mysterious man from her mother’s past, shows up in their town, Ada can’t help but imagine a different future for her mother --- one that promises a return to home, to love, to happiness. But while playing matchmaker, Ada has to come to terms with her own intensifying attraction to Levent. Does the future she’s fighting for belong to her mother --- or to her alone?

Kurt Argento is an ex-Detroit street cop who can’t let injustice go. If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he's going to rescue her and cause some damage. When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he’s brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison. Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor's daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues. Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety. All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri.

Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, AIRPLANE MODE parses who gets to travel and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal history as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life. Woven throughout the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism. But as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

Pearl Harris has learned the hard way to be careful in work and in love. She has the chance to make lasting change at OurCode --- a nonprofit aimed at inspiring high schoolers to code --- but a recent scandal puts its reputation at risk. Further complicating things, Pearl didn't expect the one man she never stopped thinking about to join as the newest member of her board of directors. Cord Matthews fell for Pearl when they met in an elevator eight years ago. But when she broke his heart, he decided love wasn't for him. When they reconnect after years with no contact, Cord is tempted to consider breaking his ban on serious relationships. But going public with a romance between them might derail Pearl’s career and the progress she’s made at OurCode.

When a young nanny is found dead under mysterious circumstances, new mom Tash is intrigued. She has been searching for a story to launch her career as a freelance journalist. But she also has been searching for new friends to help her navigate motherhood. She sees them at her son’s new playgroup. The other mothers. A group of sleek, sophisticated women. When the mothers welcome her into their circle, Tash discovers the kind of life she has always dreamt of and is quickly swept up into their wealthy world. But when another young woman is found dead, it’s clear there’s much more to the community than meets the eye. Are these women really her friends? Or is there another, more dangerous reason that she has been so quickly accepted into their exclusive world?

Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her. Jackie is an ex–emotional eater and mother of four who finally has lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her. Jacqueline’s only salve is her best friend, Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward 15 years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life.

Meet Celine and Luke. For all intents and purposes, the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more interested in piano than domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest) is the only one with any emotional distance and observes her friends like ants in a colony. As the wedding approaches and their five lives intersect, these characters will each look for a path to the happily ever after. But does it lie at the end of an aisle?

Claire Keegan gifts us three exquisite stories that together forms a brilliant examination of gender dynamics. In "So Late in the Day," Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in "The Long and Painful Death," a writer's arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Bèoll for a two-week writing residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his criticisms and opinions; and in "Antarctica," a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger. Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence.

Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news. She’s met the love of her life, and they’re getting married with a baby on the way. That’s the moment her widowed father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement. At 60, he’s getting married as well, to Frankie’s best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon. As Frankie and Ariel struggle to adjust to their new relationship, Ariel’s estranged mother, Carlotta, returns after a decade-long absence. She claims to be a changed woman. But is she really? And where has she been all these years? Frankie is suspicious, and as Carlotta’s unpredictable behavior intensifies, Frankie must untangle the threads of the past to protect Ariel’s future --- and her own.