In 1940, the year Gaëlle de Barbet turned 16, the German Army moved in to occupy France and issued an edict that made clear its position about Jews. By 1944, Gaëlle had lost her brother and father --- a member of the Resistance --- as well as her closest friend. Fueled by her loss, Gaëlle risks her own life to bring Jewish children to safety, and later to salvage France’s great works of art. While Gaëlle goes on to have a rich and fulfilling life in the years following, she speaks little of her wartime experience. Until 77 years later, when her granddaughter succeeds in getting her named as a recipient of the Legion of Honor Medal.

When a top-secret weapon goes missing on Colonel Maggie Black's watch, her honor and her career are on the line. But finding her experimental missile won't be easy --- thanks to the revenge-fueled ambitions of Asdrubal Torres, whose hallucinatory encounter with the Great Spirit challenges him to refill Lake Cahuilla, the ancient inland sea that once covered much of southern California. To fulfill his blessed mission, Torres needs wizardry and weaponry, and the Great Spirit provides both. It turns into a race against time for Maggie and Jordan, who together must stop Torres from destroying Hoover Dam --- and turning the Colorado River into a tsunami that would kill hundreds of thousands and wipe out the Southwest's water supply.

Sixteen-year-old Lucy Gold is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy’s default parent for most of their lives, Charlotte has seen her youth marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy’s dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.

In 1939, barred from places that once felt like home and stripped of their possessions, Hannah Rosenthal and her best friend Leo Martin make a pact: Come what may, they promise to have a future together. A chance to have that future appears in the form of the St. Louis, a transatlantic liner that can supposedly provide Jews safe passage to Cuba. Seven decades later, Anna Rosen receives a package from Hannah, a great aunt she has never met. She and her mother travel to Havana to meet her, and learn the story of how Hannah and Leo honored the solemn pact they made.

In THE GIRL WITH THE LOWER BACK TATTOO, Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress and writer Amy Schumer mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships and sex, and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is --- a woman with the courage to bare her soul to stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh. Ranging from the raucous to the romantic, the heartfelt to the harrowing, this highly entertaining and universally appealing collection is the literary equivalent of a night out with your best friend.

When Mele Bart told her boyfriend Bobby she was pregnant with his child, he revealed to her that he was engaged to someone else. Fast forward two years, Mele’s daughter is a toddler, and Bobby and his fiancée want Ellie to be the flower girl at their wedding. Mele, who also has agreed to attend the nuptials, knows she can’t continue obsessing about Bobby and his cheese-making, Napa-residing fiancée. So she answers a questionnaire provided by the San Francisco Mommy Club in elaborate and shocking detail and decides to enter their cookbook writing contest. As the wedding date approaches, Mele uses her fellow club members’ stories to both inspire recipes and find comfort.

The once-close Sunday sisters have not done a bang-up job of keeping in touch. Cassie is consumed with trying to make her life work as a Manhattan wife and mom to twin toddlers, while her bighearted sister, Sid, lives an expat’s life of leisure in far-off Singapore. So Sid, who shuns social media, challenges Cassie to reconnect through old-fashioned letters. Soon, the letters become a kind of mutual confessional that have real and soul-satisfying effects. They just might have the power to help Cassie save her marriage, and give Sid the strength to get her life back on track. But first, one of Cassie’s infamous lapses in judgment comes back to bite her, and all of the letters wind up in the one place you’d never, ever want to see them: the internet.

In A LIFE IN PARTS, Bryan Cranston traces the many roles he inhabited throughout his remarkable life, both on and off screen. For the first time he shares the story of his early years as an actor on the soap opera “Loving,” his recurring spots on “Seinfeld” and his time as bumbling father Hal on “Malcolm in the Middle,” to his tour-de-force, Tony-winning performance as Lyndon Baines Johnson in Broadway’s “All the Way,” to his most iconic role of all: Walter White of “Breaking Bad” fame.

Walter Lavender Jr. is a master of finding. A wearer of high-tops. A maker of croissants. A son keeping vigil, 12 years counting. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Silenced by his motor speech disorder, Walter’s life gets lonely. Fortunately, he has The Lavenders, his mother’s enchanted dessert shop, where marzipan dragons breathe actual fire. He also has a knack for tracking down any missing thing --- except for his lost father. So when the Book at the root of the bakery’s magic vanishes, Walter, accompanied by his overweight golden retriever, journeys through New York City to find it --- along the way encountering an unforgettable cast of lost souls.

Robert Quinlan is a 70-year-old historian, teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert’s own family are more apparent. He has almost no relationship with his brother, Jimmy. Their father, a veteran of WWII, is coming to the end of his life. And an unstable homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.

It's the summer of 1954, and the residents of Cottonwood, California are dying. At the center of it all is six-year-old Danny McCray, a strange and silent child who appears to bring ruin to those around him. Even his own mother is plagued by an illness that is slowly consuming her. Sheriff Jim Kent has watched the people of his town suffer, increasingly aware of the whispers and rumors surrounding the boy --- and he worries someone might take drastic action to protect their loved ones. Then a stranger arrives, and Danny and his 10-year-old brother Sean go missing. In the search that follows, everyone is a suspect, and the consequences of finding the two brothers may be worse than not finding them at all.

Best friends Evie, Krista and Willow are just trying to make it through their mid-20s in New York. They’re regular girls, with average looks and typical quarter-life crises: making it up the corporate ladder, making sense of online dating, and making rent. Until they come across Pretty, a magic tincture that makes them supermodel gorgeous. And it’s certainly not their fault if the sudden gift of beauty causes unexpected doors to open for them. But there’s a dark side to Pretty, too, and as the gloss fades for these modern-day Cinderellas, there’s just one question left: What would you sacrifice to be Pretty?

Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother and tried three times to kill him when he was still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and the magical powers of the black dog Musti, who guards him. When Kullervo is sold into slavery, he swears revenge on the magician. But he will learn that even at the point of vengeance, there is no escape from the cruelest of fates. Published here for the first time with J.R.R. Tolkien’s drafts, notes and lecture essays on its source work, the Kalevala, THE STORY OF KULLERVO is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien’s invented world.