Isla Hansen, a mother reeling from a devastating loss, is beside herself when a mysteriously orphaned child appears on the outskirts of the Hansens’ secluded Colorado property. Although strange and unexplainable, the child’s presence breathes new life into Isla. But as the child settles in, Isla’s husband, Luke, and their five children notice peculiarities that hint at something far beyond the ordinary --- anomalies that challenge the very fabric of reality itself. The tension within the Hansen household grows, and with it, the sense that there is something very wrong with the new kid in the house.

Marissa, Jeannie, Samira and Nicole are beginning to grapple with their own identities. As their children become more independent, they struggle to find purpose. But when they meet at a bowling night fundraiser for their kids’ school, they discover a shared interest in true crime that crystalizes around a mysterious double homicide that took place in their hometown a decade earlier. A couple in their 60s vanished overnight from their home and mysteriously shuttered their family business, leaving millions of dollars unaccounted for. Initially believed to have absconded with the money, they went from suspects to victims when their bodies were discovered in their car at the bottom of a steep ravine. And then the case turned cold. But what if the moms could solve it? What if they could bring a killer to justice and give closure to a grieving family?

British scientist Kesta Shelley has spent her life looking down the barrel of a microscope rather than cultivating personal relationships. But that changed when she met Tim. So when he was one of the last people in London to be infected with a perplexing virus that left the city ravaged, Kesta went into triage mode. Though the government has rounded up and disposed of all the infected, Kesta is able to keep her husband (un)alive --- and hidden --- with resources from the hospital where she works. As she races against the clock, her colleagues start noticing changes in her behavior and appearance. There are whispers of a top-secret lab working on a cure, and Kesta clings to the possibility of being recruited like a lifeline. But can she save her husband before he is discovered? Or worse, will they trigger another outbreak?

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat and sailed away? So in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests.

Alice Haserot thought she’d escaped the curse. For 16 years, she’s lived far from her family and the ghosts she used to conjure. But her past isn’t so easily left behind. When Alice discovers she’s pregnant and her estranged sister, Bronwyn, turns up on her doorstep, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn offers an ultimatum: one of her daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their abusive mother and expose her location. Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice returns home to face the inheritance of her family curse.

Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he had intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived and is in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected --- and who has no idea who Lucy really is. As their lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize that the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother.

Etgar Keret is the world’s most famous living Israeli writer. His work explores life’s smallest, most unremarkable interactions in ways that are profound and unusual. The characters populating his fiction live in a world of ever-advancing technology, but it is always degraded by the baseness of human passions and brutality. A character’s partner is a reality show contestant from a parallel dimension. Another finds that the asteroid they paid to have named after their wife is scheduled to collide with earth. An elderly widow convinces a popular AI program to commit suicide. These stories speak to our current moment in time: the uncertainty and fragility --- full of misunderstandings and miscommunications --- while looking for reasons and the strength to find hope.

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain that a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends. Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it's a good thing that Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.

The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning. The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced that her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel’s fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard. As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet’s characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm.

When Nathan Carman, a young man with a complicated past, is miraculously rescued from a lifeboat bobbing in the unforgiving North Atlantic, questions swirl about the fate of his mother, who is presumed to have drowned when their fishing boat sank. Nathan is in remarkably good shape for being lost at sea for a week, and his account of what exactly happened out there on the waves raises questions from family members and law enforcement. Nathan's story of a fishing trip gone awry doesn't quite add up, and suspicion mounts. The mysterious murder of Nathan's multi-millionaire grandfather a few years before had made Nathan's mother an extremely wealthy woman. With a seven-million-dollar fortune at stake, did Nathan commit the ultimate betrayal? Or is there more to this tragic tale than meets the eye?