On Susan Gubar’s 70th birthday, she receives a beautiful ring from her husband. As she contemplates their sustaining relationship, she begins to consider how older lovers differ from their youthful counterparts --- and from ageist stereotypes. While her husband confronts age-related disabilities that effectively ground them, Susan dawdles over the logistics of moving from their cherished country house to a more manageable place in town and starts seeking out literature on the changing seasons of desire. Throughout the complications of devoted caregiving, her own ongoing cancer treatments, apartment hunting, the dismantling of a household, and perplexity over the breakdown of a treasured friendship, Susan finds consolation in books and movies.

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she'll take any job for the right price. As far as Cas knows, she’s the only person around with a superpower...until she discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people’s minds and twist their brains into Möbius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world’s puppet master. Cas should run, like she usually does, but for once she's involved. There’s only one problem: she doesn’t know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.

When Shaun Bythell first thought of taking over The Bookshop, it seemed like a great idea: The Bookshop is Scotland's largest second-hand store, with over 100,000 books in a glorious old house with twisting corridors and roaring fireplaces, set in a tiny, beautiful town by the sea. It seemed like a book-lover's paradise. Until Bythell did indeed buy the store. In THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER, he tells us what happened next --- the trials and tribulations of being a small businessman; of learning that customers can be, um, eccentric; and of wrangling with his own staff of oddballs. And perhaps none are quirkier than the charmingly cantankerous bookseller Bythell himself turns out to be.

THE BOY ON THE BEACH is an intimate and poignant memoir about the family of Alan Kurdi --- the young Syrian boy who became the global emblem for the desperate plight of millions of Syrian refugees --- and of the many extraordinary journeys the Kurdis have taken, spanning countries and continents. Alan’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth --- she and her family had already been living it.

In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. WHAT TO READ AND WHY includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.

Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom.

The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools --- machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses and cameras --- and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips and the Hadron Collider. Simon Winchester takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production.

In a year of historic violence and discord --- the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago --- the Apollo 8 mission would be the boldest, riskiest test of America’s greatness under pressure. In ROCKET MEN, Robert Kurson puts the focus on the three astronauts and their families: the commander, Frank Borman, a conflicted man on his final mission; idealistic Jim Lovell, who had dreamed since boyhood of riding a rocket to the Moon; and Bill Anders, a young nuclear engineer and hotshot fighter pilot making his first space flight.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including LILA, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and GILEAD, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection, she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness, or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.

The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the most brilliant, revered and scandalous of the Romantic poets, Ada Byron King was destined for fame long before her birth. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada’s mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination --- or worse yet, passion or poetry --- is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes. When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize that her delightful new friendship with inventor Charles Babbage will shape her destiny.