Near the top of Mount Everest, on May 10, 1996, eight climbers died. It was the worst tragedy in the mountain's history. Lou Kasischke was there. AFTER THE WIND tells the harrowing story of what went wrong, as it has never been told before --- including why the climbers were so desperately out of time as the rogue storm struck. His personal story, captured in the title, tells about the intense moments near the top. These moments also revealed the love story that saved his life.

One cold winter night, a young wife and mother named Carrie Helm disappears, leaving behind everything she owns. Carrie’s husband, Jared, claims his wife has always been unstable and that she has abandoned the family. Linda Wallheim, a devout Mormon and the wife of a bishop, doesn’t trust him. As Linda snoops in the Helm family’s circumstances, she becomes convinced that Jared has murdered his wife and painted himself as a wronged husband.

After his wife’s death and the collapse of his newspaper, David Harwood has no choice but to uproot his nine-year-old son and move back into his childhood home in Promise Falls, New York. David believes his life is in free fall, and he can’t find a way to stop his descent. Then he comes across a family secret of epic proportions that will affect not only his family, but the entire town.

Beryl Markham's unconventional upbringing transforms her into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature’s delicate balance. But when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships. Beryl forges her own path as a horse trainer, and her uncommon style attracts the eye of the Happy Valley set. But it’s the ruggedly charismatic Denys Finch Hatton who ultimately helps Beryl navigate the uncharted territory of her own heart.

Darkness has a way of creeping up when Ian is with Priss. Even when they were kids, playing in the woods of their small Upstate New York town, he could feel it. Still, Priss was his best friend, his salvation from the bullies who called him "loser" and "fatboy"...and from his family's deadly secrets. Now that they've both escaped to New York City, Ian no longer inhabits the tortured shell of his childhood. He is a talented and successful graphic novelist, and Priss...Priss is still trouble.

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke --- her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor. Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

Finding a mysterious novel at her bedside plunges documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft into a living nightmare. Though ostensibly fiction, The Perfect Stranger recreates in vivid, unmistakable detail the terrible day she became hostage to a dark secret, a secret that only one other person knew --- and that person is dead. Now that the past is catching up with her, Catherine’s world is falling apart. Her only hope is to confront what really happened on that awful day…even if the shocking truth might destroy her.

Evelyn Beegan has long felt like an outsider to her privileged peers, but when she lands a job at a social-network startup aimed at the elite, she has no choice but to infiltrate their world. Soon she finds herself navigating the promised land of Adirondack camps, Hamptons beach houses and the island of Manhattan itself. Intoxicated by the wealth, access and influence of her new set, Evelyn can’t help but try to pass as old money herself. But when the lies become more tangled, she grasps with increasing desperation as the ground beneath her begins to give way.

After her sister-in-law dies, retired FBI agent Brigid Quinn’s niece, Gemma Kate, comes to live with her and her husband, Carlo. There's always been something unsettling about Gemma Kate, but family is family. Meanwhile, Brigid agrees to help a local couple by investigating the death of their son --- until dangerous things start to happen. As the menace comes closer and closer to home, Brigid begins to wonder if she can trust anyone.

A FINE ROMANCE begins with Candice Bergen’s charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood. As Chloe grows up, Bergen finds her comic genius in the biggest TV role of the '80s, "Murphy Brown," and makes unwanted headlines when Dan Quayle pulls her into the 1992 presidential campaign.

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Their life --- as she sees it --- is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything has changed.

For two months every year, from 1946 to his death 18 years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica’s stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming’s iconic post-war hero and traces his relationship with the land and the people of Jamaica.

In 1886 New York, a respectable architect shouldn't have any connection to the notorious gang of thieves and killers that rules the underbelly of the city. When John Cross' son racks up an unfathomable gambling debt to Kent's Gents, Cross must pay it back himself. All he has to do is use his inside knowledge of high society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives won't solve. But Cross' entire life has become a balancing act, and it will only take one mistake for it all to come crashing down --- and for his family to go down too.

Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her “nest” of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn’t seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora (Lee?) to a weekend away in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. Forty-eight hours later, she wakes up in a hospital bed injured but alive, with the knowledge that someone is dead.

A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their 20s, and respected police officer, Joe O'Brien begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s disease.

It is 1880, and Gracy Brookens is the only midwife in a small Colorado mining town where she has delivered hundreds, maybe thousands, of babies in her lifetime. The women of Swandyke trust and depend on Gracy, and most couldn't imagine getting through pregnancy and labor without her by their sides. But everything changes when a baby is found dead...and the evidence points to Gracy as the murderer. She didn't commit the crime, but clearing her name isn't so easy when her innocence is not quite as simple, either.

Brett had been in love with Charlie from the day she laid eyes on him in college. When Charlie is found murdered, Brett is devastated. But if she is honest with herself, their marriage had been hanging by a thread for quite some time. Though all clues point to Charlie’s brother Eli, who’s been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years, any number of people might have been driven to slit the throat of Charlie Moss --- a handsome, charismatic man who unwittingly damaged almost every life he touched. Brett is determined to understand how such a tragedy could have happened --- and if she was somehow complicit.

In THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband, who was just 49. Reflecting with gratitude on the exquisite beauty of her married life that was, grappling with the subsequent void, and feeling a re-energized devotion to her two teenage sons, Alexander channels her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid prose that describes a very personal and yet universal quest for meaning, understanding and acceptance.

Coco Chanel was a woman with a vision who fought every convention of her time to become the most iconic fashion designer the world has ever known. She hit her stride in the 1920s with a style that freed women and money that brought her a freedom she had never known. As her reputation and business reached new heights, Chanel became the woman every man wanted and every woman wanted to be.

MY SUNSHINE AWAY unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when 15-year-old Lindy Simpson --- free spirit, track star and belle of the block --- experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.

France, 1939. In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. As danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious 18-year-old girl. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

Rachel Rabinowitz is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Mildred Solomon, who subjected her to X-ray treatments that left her disfigured as a child. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveals to Rachel the complexities of her own nature.

Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Despite her family's objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home. Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow's past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she's willing to go to help a stranger.

Opening in Normandy on June 29, 1944, THE RACE FOR PARIS follows two American female war correspondents on their quest to document (and make) history by covering the Allied liberation of Paris. Jane is a young, single journalist for the Nashville Banner. When she’s assigned to cover a field hospital, she meets Olivia, “Liv,” an Associated Press photographer. However, due to their gender, Liv and Jane are constantly confronted by red tape. Reluctantly accompanied by Fletcher, a male British military reporter, the two women go AWOL and chase their story through gunfire, carnage and death scarring the French countryside. 

Alice and her husband, Jake, have a loving marriage and thriving business, but Alice still feels that something is missing. Carla is a strong-willed young girl who is acting as caretaker to her six-year-old brother, Junior. Years ago, her mother left the family behind in Honduras to make the arduous, illegal journey to Texas. But when her grandmother dies, Carla takes fate into her own hands. The lives of Alice and Carla will intersect in a profound and surprising way.

The town of Medgar, Kentucky, is beset by a massive Mountaintop Removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Fourteen-year-old Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the “company” and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Kevin’s friend, Buzzy, witnesses the brutal murder of the opposition leader, a sequence is set in play that tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.

Alexander Feldmann is a revered and sought-after performer. After years of searching, he acquires a glorious cello, the Silver Swan, a rare Stradivarius masterpiece long lost to the world of music. Mariana is Alexander’s only child, and the maestro has large ambitions for her. By the age of 19 she emerges as a star cellist in her own right, and is seen as the inheritor of her father’s genius. Mariana believes the Silver Swan will be hers one day, until a stunning secret from her father’s past entwines her fate and that of the Silver Swan in ways she never could have imagined.

Jess, Courtney and Dani Campbell live on a remote ranch in Western Canada where they work hard and try to stay out of the way of their father's temper. One night, a fight gets out of hand, and the sisters are forced to go on the run. As events spiral out of control, they find themselves in a horrifying situation and are left with no choice but to change their names and create new lives. Eighteen years later, they are still trying to forget what happened that summer. But when one of the sisters goes missing, followed closely by her niece, they are pulled back into the past.

London, 1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous, artistic friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.

Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England.

Whiskey is everything his twin brother, Charlie, is not --- bold, daring, carefree --- and Charlie blames his brother for always stealing the limelight. When they were just boys, the secret language they whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies connected them. As the brothers grew up, they grew apart, and in their adulthood, they are barely even speaking to each other. When Charlie hears that Whiskey has been in a terrible accident, he can’t make sense of it. Who is he without Whiskey?

Alice Pearse is a mostly happily married mother of three, an attentive daughter, an ambivalent dog-owner, a part-time editor, a loyal neighbor and a Zen commuter. When her husband makes a radical career change, Alice is ready to lean in --- and she knows exactly how lucky she is to land a job at Scroll, a hip young start-up that promises to be the future of reading. She is proud of her new “balancing act” until her dad gets sick, her marriage flounders, her babysitter gets fed up, her kids start to grow up, and her work takes an unexpected turn.

With three hit shows on television and three children at home, the uber-talented Shonda Rhimes had lots of good reasons to say NO when an unexpected invitation arrived. Then Shonda’s sister laid down a challenge: just for one year, try to say YES to the unexpected invitations that come your way. Shonda reluctantly agreed --- and the result was nothing short of transformative. In YEAR OF YES, Shonda Rhimes chronicles the powerful impact saying Yes had on every aspect of her life --- and how we can all change our lives with one little word. Yes.