On a cold, icy night, patrolman Ronny Forbert chases after a car driven by his old friend turned nemesis, Matt Laferiere. Within minutes, what begins as a clear-cut arrest for drunk driving spirals out of control into a heated argument between two young men with a troubled past and ends in a fatal hit and run. As uneasy relationships, dark secrets and old grievances reveal themselves, there are people in town who believe that a crime must have been committed, and someone --- Officer Forbert --- must pay a price, a choice that will hold devastating consequences for them all.

Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker and a secretary at the Moorehead boys’ prison, is consumed with resentment and self-loathing that she tempers with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. She also spends her nights and weekends shoplifting and stalking a prison guard named Randy. When the bright and beautiful Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a budding friendship. 

Frank Gold’s family, Hungarian Jews, have fled the perils of World War II for the safety of Australia, but not long after their arrival, thirteen-year-old Frank is diagnosed with polio. He is sent to a sprawling children’s hospital called the Golden Age, where he meets Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. Soon, Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one another’s rehabilitation, facing the perils of illness and adolescence hand in hand --- and scandalizing the prudish staff of the Golden Age.

On New Year’s Eve, journalist and former Parade Editor-in-Chief Janice Kaplan makes a promise to be grateful and look on the bright side of whatever happens. She realizes that how she feels over the next months will have less to do with the events that occur than her own attitude and perspective. Relying on both amusing personal experiences and extensive research, Kaplan explores how gratitude can transform every aspect of life, including marriage and friendship, money and ambition, health and fitness.

Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an 11-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Aunt Kate is bossy, opinionated, argumentative and tyrannical, prompting Donal to leave. He is joined by Herman the German, and the pair have rollicking misadventures along the way.

In the past 50 years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. THE MAKING OF ASIAN AMERICA tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present day.

In 1844, shy Missouri belle Julia Dent met Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, a brilliant horseman and reluctant soldier. The two fell deeply in love, but the groom’s abolitionist family refused to attend their wedding ceremony. Despite her new husband’s objections, Julia kept as her slave another Julia, known as Jule. Both women risked certain danger as they traveled to and from the field of war. Though Julia secretly taught Jule how to read, the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation inspired Jule to make a daring bid for freedom. 

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. 

For years, the American Zone of the Panama Canal mesmerized the world, working in uneasy coexistence with the Panamanian aristocrats. It’s in this buffered Zone where, in 1909, James Holt takes that first step to protect a defenseless girl named Saffire, expecting a short and simple search for her mother. Instead it draws him away from safety, into a land haunted by a history of pirates, gold runners and plantation owners, all leaving behind ghosts of their interwoven desires, sins and ambitions, ghosts that create the web of deceit and intrigue of a new generation of revolutionary politics. It will also bring him together with a woman who will change his course --- or bring an end to it.