In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Dr. Ramola "Rams" Sherman receives a frantic phone call from Natalie, a friend who is eight months pregnant. Natalie's husband has been killed --- viciously attacked by an infected neighbor --- and Natalie, too, has been bitten. Her only chance of survival is to get to a hospital as quickly as possible to receive a rabies vaccine. The clock is ticking for her and for her unborn child. Natalie’s fight for life becomes a desperate odyssey as she and Rams make their way through a hostile landscape filled with dangers beyond their worst nightmares.

On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal arts college in upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, his plea of temporary insanity raising more questions than it answered. In the wake of his acquittal, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara's body to the junior reporter who senses its connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan. Others are looking for retribution or explanation: Sara's half-sister, stifled by her family's bereft silence about Blake, poses as a babysitter and seeks out her own form of justice, while the teenager Sara used to babysit starts writing to Logan in prison.

While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. With very little to go on, our narrator invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past. We must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.

Eighteen years old, pregnant and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (with whom she has more in common than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother. In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.

Newly arrived in Alabama, teenager Max already expects some of the raucous behavior of his new, American friends, but he doesn’t anticipate the comradery --- or how quickly he would be welcomed into their world of basement beer drinking. In his new canvas pants and thickening muscles, Max feels like he’s “playing dress-up.” That is until he meets Pan, the school “witch,” in Physics class. Suddenly, Max feels seen, and the pair embarks on a consuming relationship: Max tells Pan about his supernatural powers, and Pan tells Max about the snake poison initiations of the local church. The boys, however, aren’t sure whose past is darker, and what is more frightening --- their true selves, or staying true in Alabama.

Mikel Jollett was born into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children were separated from their parents when they were six months old and handed over to the cult’s “School.” After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. Raised by a clinically depressed mother, tormented by his angry brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled stepfathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Mikel slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician.

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study has produced some of the world’s best minds. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years completely removed from the outside world. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire. But when tragedy strikes, Ines Murillo --- a member of this year’s incoming class --- begins to suspect that the school might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

This powerful collection of short stories traces an emotional arc inspired by Madeleine L'Engle's early life and career, from her lonely childhood in New York to her life as a mother in small-town Connecticut. In a selection of 18 stories discovered by one of her granddaughters, we see how L'Engle's personal experiences and abiding faith informed the creation of her many cherished works. Some of these stories have never been published; others were refashioned into scenes for her novels and memoirs. Almost all were written in the 1940s and '50s, from L'Engle's college years until just before the publication of A WRINKLE IN TIME.

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where 14-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. But then Lacey May’s mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves her daughter and runs off with a man she barely knows. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes.