What if a political party in disarray turned to a man to lead them with no political background? What if a country torn apart by ideology turned to a man whose charisma belied a complete lack of governing experience? What if a country elected a President based not on qualifications, but on hope? Would this man lead the country into a new era of fortune and prosperity? Or would he lead them into total and complete chaos?

Madeleine d'Leon doesn't know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book. But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about --- his charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel. Edward McGinnity can't get Madeleine out of his mind– --- softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author, and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?

When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly to the brink of ruin. Marco confides in a close friend, the unnamed narrator, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth --- until the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid.

At 19, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie --- now renamed Harmony --- renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.

They say that the love of money is the root of all evil, but for Ken Swift, it's the love of a woman. Ken is 21, hurting people for cash to try to pay his way through college, when he lays eyes on Jimi Lee, the woman who will change the course of his entire life. What's meant to be a one-night stand with the Harvard-bound beauty turns into an explosion of sexual chemistry that neither can quit. And when Jimi Lee becomes pregnant, their two very different worlds collide in ways they never could have anticipated.

One-time socialite Maud Warner polishes up the rags of her once-glittering existence and bluffs her way into a signature New York restaurant on a sunny October day. When she walks out again, a man will have been shot. Maud has grown accustomed to being underestimated and invisible, and she uses her ability to fly under the radar as she pursues celebrity accountant Burt Sklar, the man she believes stole her mother's fortune and left her family in ruins. Her fervent passion for poker has taught Maud that she can turn weakness into strength to take advantage of people who think they are taking advantage of her, and now she has dealt the first card in her high-stakes plan for revenge. One unexpected twist after another follows as Maud plays the most important poker hand of her life.

Eli Bell’s life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli’s life is Slim --- a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes --- who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother. Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this 12-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli’s path --- most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane’s legendary drug dealer. But the real trouble lies ahead.

Rick Atkinson has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy, he recounts the first 21 months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a gripping saga alive with astonishing characters. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling.

It’s 1924 in Branchville, South Carolina, and three women have come to a crossroads. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters. Retta, a first-generation freed slave, comes to Gertrude’s aid by watching her children, despite the gossip it causes in her community. Annie, the matriarch of the influential Coles family, offers Gertrude employment at her sewing circle, while facing problems of her own at home. These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together.

THE CAPITAL transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of 21st-century Brussels. Fenia Xenopoulou is a Greek Cypriot who was recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets.

In 1940, 19-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters. But when she makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Now 89 years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life --- and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it.

One August afternoon, two sisters --- Sophia and Alyona --- go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. Taking us through the year that follows, DISAPPEARING EARTH enters the lives of women and girls in this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty --- open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, dense forests, the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska --- and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

Summer has started in idyllic Sag Harbor, and for Emma Mapson that means greeting guests at the front desk of The American Hotel. But when artist Henry Wyatt dies suddenly, Emma learns he has mysteriously left his waterfront home to her teenage daughter, Penny. Legendary art patron Bea Winstead, Henry’s lifelong friend and former business partner, is determined to reclaim the house and preserve Henry's legacy. While Emma fights to defend her daughter's inheritance, Bea discovers that Henry left a treasure trove of sketches scattered around town. With Penny's reluctant help, Bea pieces them together to find a story hidden in plain sight: an illustration of their shared history with an unexpected twist that will change all of their lives.

Corey Halpern, a local high schooler with a troubled home life, is desperate to leave the Hamptons and start anew somewhere else. His last summer before college, he settles for the escapism he finds in sneaking into neighboring mansions. One night, just before Memorial Day weekend, he breaks into the wrong home at the wrong time: the Sheffield estate, where he and his mother, Gina, work. Under the cover of darkness, Leo Sheffield --- a billionaire CEO, patriarch and the owner of the vast lakeside manor --- arrives unexpectedly with a companion. After a shocking poolside accident, everything depends on Leo burying the truth before his family and friends arrive for the holiday weekend.

Clara Falkenberg, once Germany’s most eligible and lauded heiress, earned the nickname “the Iron Fräulein” during World War II for her role operating her family’s ironworks empire. It’s been nearly two years since the war ended, and she’s left with nothing but a false identification card and a series of burning questions about her family’s past. Clara decides to return home and take refuge with her dear friend, Elisa. Narrowly escaping a near-disastrous interrogation by a British officer who’s hell-bent on arresting her for war crimes, she arrives home to discover the city in ruins, and Elisa missing. As Clara begins tracking down Elisa, she encounters Jakob, a charismatic young man working on the black market, who, for his own reasons, is also searching for Elisa.

Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears --- imperfection, failure, loneliness --- she spirals down anorexia and depression until she weighs a mere 88 pounds. Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where pale, fragile women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Women like Emm, the veteran; quiet Valerie; Julia, always hungry. Together, they must fight their diseases and face six meals a day. Every bite causes anxiety. Every flavor induces guilt. And every step Anna takes toward recovery will require strength, endurance and the support of the girls at 17 Swann Street.

FBI agent Nell Flynn hasn't been home in 10 years. Nell and her father, Homicide Detective Martin Flynn, have never had much of a relationship. And Suffolk County will always be awash in memories of her mother, Marisol, who was murdered when Nell was just seven. When Martin dies in a motorcycle accident, Nell returns to the house she grew up in so that she can spread her father's ashes and close his estate. At the behest of her father's partner, Detective Lee Davis, Nell becomes involved in an investigation into the murders of two young women in Suffolk County. The further Nell digs, the more likely it seems to her that her father should be the prime suspect --- and that his friends on the police force are covering his tracks.

Soldier, son, lover, husband, breadwinner and churchgoer, Henry Maxwell has spent his whole life trying to live with honor. A native Pittsburgher and engineer, he's always believed in logic, sacrifice and hard work. Now, 75 and retired, he feels the world has passed him by. It's 1998, the American century is ending, and nothing is simple anymore. His children are distant, their unhappiness a mystery. Only his wife Emily and dog Rufus stand by him. Once so confident, as Henry's strength and memory desert him, he weighs his dreams against his regrets and is left with questions he can't answer: Is he a good man? Has he done right by the people he loves? And with time running out, what, realistically, can he hope for?

Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies --- check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right,” but she felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart.

The case begins for Athens' Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis with a literal bang when a corrupt former police colonel who runs a protection racket on Mykonos is gunned down. Suddenly, Kaldis is face-to-face with Greece's top crime bosses on an island whose natural beauty and reputation as an international playground belies the corruption lurking just beneath the surface. While Kaldis and his Special Crimes unit wrestle for answers, his wife, Lila, meets an American expat named Toni, a finder of stolen goods and a piano player in a gender-bending bar. As Lila and Toni bond over a common desire to mentor young island girls trapped in an exploitative and patriarchal culture, they soon find that their efforts intersect with Kaldis' investigation in ways that prove to be dangerous for all involved.

In a small country town during one long, hot summer, the Bloom family is beginning to unravel. Martha is straining against the confines of her life, lost in regret for what might have been, when an old flame shows up. In turn, her husband Mike becomes frustrated with his increasingly distant wife. Marital secrets, new and long-hidden, start to surface --- with devastating effect. And while teenagers Tilly and Ben are about to step out into the world, nine-year-old Ada is holding onto a childhood that might soon be lost to her. When Ada discovers an abandoned well beneath a rusting windmill, she is drawn to its darkness and danger. And when she witnesses a shocking and confusing event, the well’s foreboding looms large in her mind --- a driving force, pushing the family to the brink of tragedy.

Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa 14-year-old in 1943 --- aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her.

London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate newborn at the Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the daughter she has never known. Dreading the worst, that she has died in care, she is astonished to discover that someone pretending to be Bess has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl --- and why. Less than a mile from Bess’ poor lodgings, in a quiet Georgian townhouse, lives Alexandra, a reclusive young widow. When a close friend persuades her to hire a nursemaid to help care for her daughter, she is hesitant to welcome someone new into her home. But her past is threatening to catch up with her and tear her carefully constructed world apart.

Barbara Pierce Bush was one of the country's most popular and powerful figures, yet her full story has never been told. THE MATRIARCH tells the riveting tale of a woman who helped define two American presidencies and an entire political era. Written by USA Today's Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, this biography is informed by more than 100 interviews with Bush friends and family members, hours of conversation with Mrs. Bush herself in the final six months of her life, and access to her diaries that spanned decades. The book examines not only her public persona but also less well-known aspects of her remarkable life.

Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realize it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own. Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.

In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident. A powerful showdown unfolds as the story moves across characters who are all maybe keeping secrets, hiding betrayals. Chapter by chapter, we shift alliances and gather evidence: Was it the careless mother of a patient? Was it the owners, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? Could it have been a protester, trying to prove the treatment isn’t safe?

Beth Fraser finally has her life together. She has built a successful career in the tech sector, has a bright 15-year-old daughter, and has completely erased all evidence of her troubled past. At least that's what she thought. Dana Fraser always wondered why she's the only kid with two backup phones, emergency drills and a non-negotiable check-in time every single day. When a stranger approaches her on the street claiming to be her grandmother, Dana starts to question what else her mother has been hiding. Soon Beth's worst nightmare is coming true: Dana is in grave danger, and unless Beth is willing to pull one last con job for her parents, she may never see her daughter again.

Growing up in 1950s Detroit, Jo and Bethie Kaufman live in a perfect “Dick and Jane” house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. But the truth ends up looking different from what the girls imagined. As their lives unfold against the background of free love and Vietnam, Woodstock and women’s lib, Bethie becomes an adventure-loving wild child who dives headlong into the counterculture and is up for anything (except settling down). Meanwhile, Jo becomes a proper young mother in Connecticut, a witness to the changing world instead of a participant. Neither woman inhabits the world she dreams of, nor has a life that feels authentic or brings her joy. Is it too late for them to finally stake a claim on happily ever after?

On a bitterly cold winter’s afternoon, Michael and Caitlin, two middle-aged lovers, escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit date. Once a month for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven, the place in which they have abandoned themselves to their love. But on this winter day, they will discover that their lives are on the brink of change. Michael’s wife is battling cancer, and Caitlin’s husband is about to receive a major promotion, which will involve relocating to the Midwest. After half a lifetime together in their most intimate moments, certain long-denied facts must be faced, decisions made, consequences weighed and --- maybe, just maybe --- chances finally taken.

By day, Mary Ballard is dutiful lady’s maid to Charlotte Walden, a wealthy and accomplished belle of New York City high society. But on her nights off, Mary sheds this persona to reveal her true self: Irish exile Maire O’Farren. She finds release from her frustration in New York’s gritty underworld --- in the arms of a prostitute and as drinking companion to a decidedly motley crew consisting of a barkeeper and members of a dangerous secret society. Meanwhile, Charlotte has a secret of her own --- she’s having an affair with a stable groom, unaware that her lover is actually Mary’s own brother. When the truth of both women’s double lives begins to unravel, Mary is left to face the consequences.

Former SAS soldier David Shelley was part of the most covert operations team in the special forces. Now settling down to civilian life in London, he has plans for a safer and more stable existence. But the shocking death of a young woman Shelley once helped protect puts those plans on hold. The police rule the death a suicide, but the grieving parents can't accept that their beloved Emma would take her own life. They need to find out what really happened, and they turn to their former bodyguard, Shelley, for help. When they discover that Emma had fallen into a dark and seedy world of drugs and online pornography, the father demands retribution. But his desire for revenge will make enemies of people from whom even Shelley may not be able to protect them.

When gold is discovered in the foothills just outside of Appaloosa, it sets off a fight between two shrewd local business operations as their hired gun hands square off over the claim. First a young miner disappears, then another. And then one of the businessmen himself is killed, right on his front doorstep. Meanwhile, as Cole and Hitch try to put a stop to the escalating violence, another killer is making his way toward town in pursuit of a long-lost dream, and a mission of vengeance. Cole and Hitch will have their work cut out for them to keep the peace, especially when all these ruffians converge at the huge Appaloosa Days festival, where hundreds of innocent souls might get caught in the crossfire.

Charlotte has everything in life that she ever could have hoped for: a doting, artistic husband, a small-but-thriving flower shop, and her sweet, smart five-year-old daughter, Daisy. Her relationship with her mother might be strained, but the distance between them helps. And her younger brother Rocco may have horrible taste in women, but when he introduces his new girlfriend to Charlotte and her family, they are cautiously optimistic that she could be The One. But as Rocco and Ruth’s relationship becomes more serious, Ruth’s apparent obsession with Daisy grows more obvious. Then Daisy is kidnapped, and Charlotte is convinced there’s only one person who could have taken her.

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on "Pericles," one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In STONY THE ROAD, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

The CIA's deepest secrets are being given away for a larger agenda that will undermine the entire Western intelligence community. Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley wants it stopped but doesn't know who, how or why. Jack Ryan, Jr., is dispatched to Poland on a different mission. The clues are thin, and the sketchy trail dead ends in a harrowing fight from which he barely escapes with his life. If that's not bad enough, Jack gets more tragic news. An old friend, who's dying from cancer, has one final request for Jack. It seems simple enough, but before it's done, Jack will find himself alone, his life hanging by a thread.

The British-born Punjabi Shergill sisters were never close and barely got along growing up. Rajni, a school principal, is a stickler for order. Jezmeen, a 30-year-old struggling actress, fears her big break may never come. Shirina, the peacemaking "good" sister, married into wealth and enjoys a picture-perfect life. On her deathbed, their mother voices one last wish: that her daughters will make a pilgrimage together to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to carry out her final rites. Arriving in India, these sisters will make unexpected discoveries about themselves, their mother and their lives --- and learn the real story behind the trip Rajni took with their mother long ago, a momentous journey that resulted in Mum never being able to return to India again.

At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the honor society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an enigmatic and brilliant, yet perverse, teacher who instructs his students not only about how to reason, but how to prevaricate. As the years go by, LaVerdere's covert and overt instruction lingers in his students' lives as they seek some sense of purpose or meaning. While relationships with his stepmother and sister improve, and a move to upstate New York offers respite from his anxiety about love and work, LaVerdere's reappearance in his life disturbs his equilibrium. Everything he once thought he knew about his teacher --- and himself --- is called into question.