When a freak auto accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a "ghost," with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. Alarmingly, a gun is found in the car --- and the gun has recently been fired. The next day, Stride learns that a Duluth college student has also vanished, and he worries that the two incidents are related. His investigation of the girl's disappearance leads him into the midst of a film crew in Duluth, where a movie is being made based on a case in his own past. The actor playing Stride is Hollywood royalty, but Stride soon hears whispers that his cinematic alter ego has a dark side.

How many lives fit in a lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America --- haunted by the political upheaval in the Philippines and disowned by her parents --- she's already on her third. Her uncle gives her a fresh start in the Bay Area, and he doesn't ask about her past. His younger wife knows enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. But their daughter --- the first American-born daughter in the family --- can't resist asking Hero about her damaged hands.

She knew it was a weird place. She’d heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has to leave her native Norway and actually go there: to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. AMERICA. Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity, politics and promise reverberate in every aspect of daily life. Working with --- or, if necessary, against --- the police, she must negotiate the local political minefields and navigate the backwoods of the Adirondacks to uncover the truth before events escalate further.

Part cookbook, part memoir, THE BEST COOK IN THE WORLD is Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg’s loving tribute to the South, his family and, especially, to his extraordinary mother. Here are irresistible stories and recipes from across generations. They come, skillet by skillet, from Bragg’s ancestors, from feasts and near famine, from funerals and celebrations, and from a thousand tales of family lore as rich and as sumptuous as the dishes they inspired.

Everyone knows Dani is going places. With athletic talent and a brilliant mind, she navigates West Point’s predominantly male environment with wit and confidence, breaking stereotypes and embracing new friends. Hannah’s grandfather, a legendary Army general, offers a stark warning about the dangers that lie ahead, but she moves forward anyway, letting faith guide her path. When she meets her soul mate at West Point, the future looks perfect. Wild child Avery moves fast and doesn’t mind breaking a few rules (and hearts) along the way. But she can’t outpace her self-doubt, and the harder she tries, the further it leads her down a treacherous path. As Dani, Hannah and Avery are pulled in different directions, will their hard-forged bond prevail or shatter?

New York psychologist Will Hardy had it all --- a loving family, a flourishing career, a bestselling book. Until the night it all ended in a tempest of fire and ash, leaving only Will and his 15-year-old daughter, Bernadette, to stand in the ruins. Haunted and grief-stricken, Will accepts an enigmatic invitation from his family’s past to begin their lives anew in the small town of Abbeville, Ohio. Meanwhile, Abbeville Chief of Police Ivy Holgrave is investigating the death of a local girl, convinced this may be only the latest in a long line of murders dating back decades --- including her own long-missing sister. But what place does Will's new home have in the story of the missing girls? And what links the killings to the diary of a young woman written over a century earlier?

Jude Dubuisson has the supernatural ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known --- a father who was more than human. But so much was lost during Hurricane Katrina that it played havoc with Jude’s magic, leaving him overwhelmed and cursed. Jude has been lying low since the waters receded, hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the fortune god of New Orleans. When the fortune god is murdered, Jude is drawn back into a world full of magic, monsters and miracles --- and a deep conspiracy that threatens the city’s soul.

René shares a home, a family and a passion for dance with her older brother, Leon. Yet for all they have in common, their lives are on remarkably different paths. In contrast to René, a born spitfire, Leon is a gentle soul. As the years pass, René and Leon’s parents fight with increasing frequency --- and ferocity. Their father spends more time on the road, his sporadic homecomings both yearned for and dreaded by the children. And as René and Leon grow up, they grow apart. They grasp whatever they can to stay afloat as René works to save herself, crossing the border into a larger, more hopeful world, while Leon embarks on a path of despair and self-destruction.

Brett and Kelly have always toed the line between supportive sisters and bitter rivals. Growing up, Brett was the problem child, in the shadow of the brilliant and beautiful Kelly. In adulthood, all that has changed. Kelly is a struggling single mother, and Brett has skyrocketed to such meteoric success, which has been chronicled on a reality TV show called “Goal Diggers.” When Kelly manipulates herself onto the show and into Brett’s world, Brett is right to be threatened. Kelly, and only Kelly, knows her younger sister's appalling secret, and it could ruin her. Still, when the truth comes out in the explosive final weekend of filming, neither of them ever expected that the season would end in murder.

Daniel Green makes crop circles. As a member of a secret organization, he travels across the country creating strange works of art that leave communities mystified. He's always been alone; in fact, he prefers it. But when a dying farmer hires him in a last-ditch effort to bring publicity to a small Vermont town, Daniel finds himself at odds with his heart. It isn't long before he gets drawn into a family struggling to stitch itself back together, and the consequences will change his life forever.

Jane Hawk may be all that stands between a free nation and its enslavement by a powerful secret society’s terrifying mind-control technology. Equipped with superior tactical and survival skills, Jane has struck major blows against the insidious cabal. But if their best operatives can’t outrun her, they mean to bring her running to them, using her five-year-old son as bait. As she moves resolutely forward, new threats begin to emerge: a growing number of brain-altered victims driven hopelessly, violently insane. With the madness spreading like a virus, the war between Jane and her enemies will become a fight for all their lives --- against the lethal terror unleashed from behind the forbidden door.

In a small Midwest town, 28-year-old Krista Larson has made her mark as the youngest female police chief in the country. She’s learned from the best: her father, Keith, a decorated former detective. But as accustomed as they are to the relative quiet of their idyllic tourist town, things quickly turn with Krista’s 10-year high school reunion. With the out-of-towners holed up in a lakefront lodge, it doesn’t take long to stir up old grudges and resentments. Now a successful TV host, Astrid Lund, voted the “Girl Most Likely to Succeed” --- and then some --- is back in town. As the reunion begins, so does a triple murder investigation. Krista and her father never imagined what would be revealed: the secrets and scandals of Krista’s own past.

In 1994, Clemantine Wamariya and her 15-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety. They did not know if their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was 12, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Claire, who for so long had protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased.

Penelope Ruiz-Kar is doing it all --- and barely keeping it together. Meanwhile, her best friend, Jenny Sweet, appears to be sailing through life. Jenny’s passionate marriage, pristine house and ultra-polite child stand in stark contrast to Penelope’s underemployed husband, Sanjay, their unruly brood and the daily grind she calls a career. Then a shocking tragedy reveals that Jenny’s life is far from perfect. Reeling, Penelope vows to stop keeping the peace and finally deal with the issues in her relationship. So she and Sanjay agree to a radical proposal: both will write a list of changes they want each other to make --- then commit to complete and total honesty. What seems like a smart idea quickly spirals out of control, revealing new rifts and even deeper secrets.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation. In this conclusion to her Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering.

It is the wrong time to get sick. Speeding down the highway on the way to work, her two little girls sleeping in the back seat, medical resident Claire Rawlings doesn't have time for the nausea overtaking her. But as the world tilts sideways, she pulls into a gas station, runs to the bathroom and passes out. When she wakes up minutes later, her car --- and her daughters --- are gone. The police have no leads, and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls. All she has to hold on to are her strained marriage, a potentially unreliable witness who emerges days later, and the desperate but unquenchable belief that her daughters are out there somewhere.

Fans of I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE and HOW DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER know Sloane Crosley's life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures. In LOOK ALIVE OUT THERE, whether it's scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on “Gossip Girl,” befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight.

At the height of her career, Barbara Lipska --- a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness --- was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, she exhibited dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors prescribed worked, and Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity. Lipska draws on her extraordinary experience to explain how mental illness, brain injury and age can distort our behavior, personality, cognition and memory. She tells what it is like to experience these changes firsthand. And she reveals what parts of us remain, even when so much else is gone.

Joyce Carol Oates’ latest fiction collection opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot afford on her own. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes --- amorously, murderously --- to her door. NIGHT-GAUNTS AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE stands at the crossroads of sex, violence and longing --- and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.

It’s not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It’s love at first sight, but before Sammy can make his move, an Air Force general named Remy arrives with some urgent business. Meanwhile, a suspicious flying object has been spotted, followed by a mysterious plane crash in a distant patch of desert in New Mexico that goes by the name Roswell. When one of Sammy’s schemes goes south and the Cheese mysteriously vanishes, Sammy is forced to contend with his own dark secrets --- and more than a few strange goings-on --- if he wants to find his girl.

From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, THE OVERSTORY unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late-20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours --- vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The murder of the Romanov family horrified the world, and its aftershocks still reverberate today. In Putin's autocratic Russia, the Revolution itself is considered a crime, and its anniversary was largely ignored. In stark contrast, the centenary of the massacre of the Imperial Family in Ekaterinburg will be a huge ceremony. While the murders themselves have received major attention, what has never been investigated in detail are the various plots and plans behind the scenes to save the family. Helen Rappaport refutes the claim that the fault lies entirely with King George V, as has been the traditional claim for the last century. The responsibility for failing the Romanovs must be equally shared.

Historian Max Boot demonstrates how Edward Lansdale pioneered a “hearts and mind” diplomacy --- first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to never-before-seen documents --- including long-hidden love letters --- Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975.

My mom would never leave me. This has been Mariah Dunning's motto. So when she glimpses her mother --- who's been missing for the past year --- on the other side of a food court, Mariah's conviction becomes stronger than ever. Or is she losing her mind? When Beth Dunning disappeared without a trace, suspicion for her murder immediately fell upon Mariah's father. Until Mariah stumbles upon two other recent disappearances from Lakehaven. And all three women had the same name: Beth. Mariah would give anything to find out what happened to her mother and clear her father's name. But the truth may be more devastating than she could have imagined.

In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet. Married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children, he was the winner of 14 major golf championships and earning more than $100 million annually. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years --- one that unraveled in the aftermath of a Thanksgiving-night car crash that exposed his serial infidelity and sent his personal and professional lives over a cliff. Still, the world has always wondered: Who is Tiger Woods, really? In TIGER WOODS, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian look deep behind the headlines to produce a richly reported answer to that question.

A VOLUNTARY CRUCIFIXION traces the story of 20th-century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J. MacKinnon's life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society “from the bottom up.” A VOLUNTARY CRUCIFIXION recounts the tale of MacKinnon's adventures and misadventures from post-Tiananmen Hong Kong to various ports of call in the Indian Ocean, offering his views on everything from censorship to indigenous issues, all of which reflect his life ethos that the key to life is to refuse to adapt, and to fight tooth-and-nail for every square inch of your freedom before others wrench it from you.

It is 1945, and London is still reeling from years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, seemingly abandoned by their parents, have been left in the care of an enigmatic figure they call The Moth. They suspect he may be a criminal and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect and educate (in rather unusual ways) the siblings. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And how should Nathaniel and Rachel feel when their mother returns without their father after months of silence --- explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand during that time.

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his only daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes, in reckless pursuit of the unknown.