Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, AIRPLANE MODE parses who gets to travel and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal history as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life. Woven throughout the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism. But as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

Alpine skiing G.O.A.T. Claudine Potts and her daughter, Wylie, have been bred for gold medal glory. They’re skiing their way to fame, but this gilded future is cut short when a fall forces Claudine’s retirement and Wylie’s debilitating anxiety sends her off the slopes. With the collapse of their ski careers, their relationship falters, and now it’s been years since Wylie and Claudine have even spoken. They live on opposite coasts, pursuing different passions, until a chance opportunity to pair up in a European fitness competition drives them back together. Can this duo survive snow-buried regrets and family secrets and have the happy reunion they’re hoping for?

After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and housemate in Exeter. She’s avoided dwelling on the past, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A foreboding fortress, Penryth Hall is home to Ruby’s once dearest friend, Tamsyn, and her husband, Sir Edward Chenowyth. It’s an unsettling place, and after a more unsettling evening, Ruby is eager to depart. But her plans change when Penryth’s bells ring for the first time in 30 years. Edward is dead; he met a gruesome end in the orchard, and with his death brings whispers of a returned curse.

In THE END OF THE WORLD IS A CUL DE SAC, women’s lives are etched by poverty --- material, emotional, sexual --- but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they’ve been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate, with blood on her hands. An expectant mother’s worst fears about her husband’s entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed. A sister is tormented by visions of the man her brother murdered during the Troubles. A woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage.

When a prominent Sacramento businessman is killed and his wife injured in a brutal home invasion, Detective Emily Hunter and her partner, Javier Medina, are called to investigate. At first glance, it seems like a crime of opportunity gone horribly wrong, but Emily soon finds there might be more to both the crime and the dead man. The high-stakes investigation also comes at a time when Emily is caring for her mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Emily struggles to balance her job with her personal life. The city’s political elite seem to want the case solved quickly, but darker forces want it buried. Could there have been a motive behind the attack, making it more than a random home invasion? Emily uncovers clues that cause her to reconsider her understanding of the crime.

A decade ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga went to collect the ashes of his recently deceased mother. Years before, she ran away from her husband and son without explanation or any further contact, only to die alone in an apartment far away. Now in Tokyo, Michiko Oshitani is found dead many miles from home. She lived far away in Sendai, with no known connection to Tokyo --- and neither her family nor her friends have any idea why she would have gone there. Hers is the second strangulation death in that approximate area of Tokyo. The other was a homeless man, killed and his body burned in a tent by the river. As the case unfolds, an unexpected connective emerges between the murder (or murders) now and the long-ago case of Detective Kaga's missing mother.

Twenty-seven-year-old Emily doesn’t have a lot going well in her life right now. She dreams of a creative career but works as a receptionist in an auto shop. She longs for big city life but lives in a small town on Prince Edward Island. She craves a close group of friends but is stuck with irritating, car-obsessed coworkers. What Emily does have is a 300+ day streak on the New York Times Wordle. But one day, with only one guess left and no clue what the answer is, she’s forced to turn to one of her irritating, car-obsessed coworkers, John, for help --- and in doing so, she realizes that he might not be so irritating after all. As they make their way, word by word, toward a 365-day streak, Emily is drawn into a surprising romance that will take her outside of her comfort zone.

Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It’s been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother’s handwriting: Perdóname si te falle. Recuerda que siempre te quise. (“Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.”) But what would Paula need forgiveness for? Now newfound doubts and old memories come flooding in, complicating each woman’s efforts to carve out a good life for herself and support the other in the same. When Flores and Paula learn they will be forced to move, they finally must confront their complicated past --- and decide if they share the same dreams for the future.

This collection of three interconnected novellas follows each generation of the iconic Swagger family. In “City of Meat,” Charles Swagger is on the hunt for notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson when he traces a tip to the Chicago stock yards. While there, he’s brutally assaulted and discovers that the madman who attacked him is involved in a nearby narcotics ring. Earl Swagger investigates a violent bank robbery in “Johnny Tuesday” that left two dead and a fortune missing in small-town Maryland. At every turn, however, he’s met with silence and hostility from the townsfolk. Finally, in “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” a 32-year-old Bob Lee Swagger is back from Vietnam nearly broken over good men lost for nothing. But one afternoon he’s wakened from his nightmares by two men with a problem.

Fledgling actress Amelia Grant is at rock bottom when offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to star in a biopic about the world-renowned romance author Gloria Diamond, who used her own tragic love story as inspiration for her bestselling books. To prepare for the role, she’ll spend a week with Gloria at her secluded Washington estate. It’s a chance to get out of LA, away from her cheating ex-boyfriend, and to make her recently deceased mother proud. However, Amelia’s excitement is short-lived once she actually meets Gloria, who is cold, verging on rude and mostly unavailable. If not for Gloria’s frustratingly handsome son, Will, the visit might be a complete waste of her time. But when Amelia stumbles upon a secret from Gloria’s past, she realizes that Gloria’s life story is more fiction than fact.

A former actress, Vivian Parry now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them. Angling for a promotion, she reluctantly agrees to an interview, a conversation that reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. Then her interviewer disappears, and she learns --- from his devastated fiancée --- that she was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian does what she promised herself she would never do again: she plays a part. Assuming the role of amateur detective, she turns her critical gaze toward an unsanitary private eye, a sketchy internet startup, a threatening financier, fake blood and one very real corpse.

It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from the Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

Madison Rivera lands the internship of a lifetime working for Judge Kathryn Conroy. But Madison has a secret that could destroy her career. Her troubled younger brother, Danny, has been arrested, and Conroy is the judge on his case. When Danny goes missing after accusing the judge of corruption, Madison’s quest for answers brings her deep into the judge’s glamorous world. Is Kathryn Conroy a mentor, a victim or a criminal? Is she trying to help Madison or use her as a pawn? And why is somebody trying to kill her? As the two women circle each other in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, will they save each other, or will betrayal leave one of them dead?

It begins in the highlands of Scotland in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, the last desperate stand of the Stuart “pretender” to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his rabidly loyal supporters. Vanquished with his comrades by the forces of the Hanoverian (and Protestant) British crown, the novel’s eponymous hero, Jamie MacGillivray, narrowly escapes a roadside execution only to be recaptured by the victors and shipped to Marshalsea Prison, where he cheats the hangman a second time before being sentenced to transportation and indentured servitude in colonial America "for the term of his natural life." His travels are paralleled by those of Jenny Ferguson, a poor village girl swept up on false charges by the English and also sent in chains to the New World.

In the frigid summers of the Antarctic continent, the sun never sets, and Olivia Campbell has long dreamed of spending a sunlit night in this beautiful, remote place. So when her boyfriend --- a high-powered art dealer --- decides to stage an ostentatious, career-making auction aboard a luxury cruise liner to Antarctica, Olivia can hardly believe her luck. That is, until the ship sets sail and her boyfriend is nowhere to be found, and she is left to manage both the auction and her own creeping fear of the open ocean entirely alone. And as though that weren't enough, the first bodies turn up soon after. It seems like a terrible accident. But as the situation deteriorates, it soon becomes clear that there is real danger on board --- and the closest help is hundreds of miles away.

In a close-knit English village, Chrissy and Alice were once best friends. So were their sons, Leo and Robbie. Until the night Leo killed Robbie with a single, devastating punch. Now Leo has gone to prison, Chrissy has lost her pub, and Alice has been pouring her anger into a twisted project. As Leo’s parole date approaches, the villagers are incensed and fearful about the prospect of his return. But when Chrissy arrives to collect Leo from prison, he isn’t there. The staff tells her that he already has been released, but nobody knows where he’s gone. As the village closes ranks, Chrissy realizes her former friends are suspects in her son’s disappearance, not the least of whom is still-bitter Alice. Is Leo being punished for what happened that terrible night? Or do the answers lie further back, in a dark past none of them wants to revisit?

Fifteen-year-old Ámbar has never known any parent other than her father, Víctor Mondragón, nor any life other than his. On any given Friday night, Ámbar longs to be at the arcade or a rock concert, but she’s more likely to be patching up Víctor’s latest bullet hole in a dingy motel or creating a new set of fake identities for the both of them. When a tattooed mercenary kills Víctor’s best friend and vows that Víctor is next, father and daughter set off on a joyride across Argentina in search of bloody retribution. But Ámbar’s growing pains hurt worse than her beloved sawed-off shotgun’s kickback as she begins to question the structure of her world. How much is her father not telling her? Could her life ever be different? And will she survive long enough to find out?

Eli North is not okay. His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local sheriff’s department. And that’s only because the sheriff is his mother --- and she’s overwhelmed with small town Shaky Lake’s dwindling budget and the fallout from the opioid epidemic. The Northwoods of Wisconsin may be a vacationer’s paradise, but amidst the fishing trips and campfires and Paul Bunyan festivals, something sinister is taking shape. When the body of a teenage boy is found in the lake, it sets in motion an investigation that leads Eli to a wealthy enclave with a violent past, a pharmaceutical salesman and a missing teenage girl.

Beloved author Jill McCorkle offers an intimate look at the moments when a person’s life changes forever. A woman uses her hearing impairment as a way to guard herself from her husband’s commentary. A telephone lineman strains to communicate with his family even as he feels pushed aside in a digital world. And a young couple buys a confessional booth for fun, only to discover the cost of honesty. Moving and unforgettable, the stories in OLD CRIMES capture moments of great intensity, longing and affection.

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend, Agnes, died. No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Margaret's mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic that always end happily. Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’ death.

Lewis has helped Peter Ash out of more trouble than Peter cares to remember, so he doesn’t hesitate when Lewis asks for a favor in return. Lewis has left his criminal past behind, but he and Peter must drive into a blizzard to help a former associate. They learn that someone has stolen notebooks full of incriminating secrets about Lewis' long-ago crimes, and they realize the situation is much worse than they'd thought. To save Lewis’ wife and two boys, Lewis and Peter must find the notebooks. With Peter's longtime girlfriend, they begin the search --- facing ruthless and violent foes at each turn, including one powerful person who will stop at nothing for revenge. Will Lewis and Peter be able to keep that dark past buried? Or will they need to step into the darkness to save the people they love most?

Claudia Lin --- mystery novel superfan and, until recently, clichéd underemployed English major --- has scored her dream job: co-running Veracity, a dating detective agency for chronically online New Yorkers who want to know if their prospective partners are telling the truth. Unfortunately, along the way, she and her colleagues have uncovered a far-reaching AI conspiracy. And the corporate matchmakers may be resorting to murder to protect their secrets. In the wake of a client’s sudden death, Claudia convinces his ex, an industry insider, to turn on his employer and feed the verifiers information about what the powerful dating platforms are really up to. But even as Claudia starts to get a feel for this new genre, she fears that her beloved older brother is unwittingly being drawn into the matchmakers’ deadly web.

Adam Gallagher has knocked on thousands of doors. An ex-Mormon and almost-famous memoirist, he is used to sharing his life story with strangers. But this day, this house, is different. For it belongs to none other than Roland Rogers: Hollywood Hunk and soon-to-be author. Roland has a story to tell, a decades-old secret to spill, and he’s decided that Adam is just the guy to help him do it. Except there’s a problem. Roland Rogers is dead. Not in the metaphysical realm --- if he focuses, he can summon enough energy to communicate via the kitchen speaker --- but certainly in the physical, and he needs Adam to pen his story before his body is found frozen beneath the avalanche of snow that squashed it. That means one month, a hundred thousand words, no breaks. It isn’t long before Roland’s idea of what his book should be clashes with Adam’s vision for what it could be.

In SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION, acclaimed presidential historian Douglas Brinkley pays tribute to those who combated the mauling of the natural world in the Long Sixties (1960-1973). Rachel Carson (a marine biologist and author), David Brower (director of the Sierra Club), Barry Commoner (an environmental justice advocate), Coretta Scott King (an antinuclear activist), Stewart Udall (the secretary of the interior), William O. Douglas (Supreme Court justice), Cesar Chavez (a labor organizer) and other crusaders are profiled with verve and insight.

Far from the neon glare of the Vegas Strip, attorney Piper Danes walks away from a hotshot law firm to work as a guardian ad litem (GAL). Piper was once a vulnerable youth herself, and a GAL gave her hope when she needed it most. Now she’s committed to paying it forward. Her latest case is unlike any other: 15-year-old Sophie Grace is the sole survivor of a gruesome family murder. Teaming up with the formidable Judge Hope Dawson and enigmatic Detective Lazarus Holloway, Piper delves into a world more sinister than she could have imagined. Their hunt for the truth leads to a serial killer known only as “the Creeper,” a predator who hides in the shadows. But as the team inches closer to unveiling the murderer, they find themselves in the crosshairs.

The late Anthony Veasna So’s debut story collection, AFTERPARTIES, was a landmark publication. And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker and The Millions. SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt’s illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief and longing with inimitable humor and depth.

On paper, Gemma Jones' life is just like any other successful, single thirtysomething. But every day of her life, the high school history teacher can't get one thing out of her mind: the baby she gave up for adoption when she was just 16 years old. This is the year that Baby --- the only name Gemma has for her little girl --- will turn 18. And it might be the year she actually meets her daughter face-to-face. Or maybe she already has. Katie, a new student who's moved into the area, shares Gemma's hair color (bright red) and build (long and lean). She also shares the same birthday (October 3) as Baby. And they're both about to turn 18. But Gemma and Katie's mom are becoming good friends, and Gemma is concerned that their newly minted friendship will unravel fast if Katie is indeed her birth daughter.

Three years ago, sports agent Myron Bolitar gave a eulogy at the funeral of his client, renowned basketball coach Greg Downing. Myron and Greg had history: initially as deeply personal rivals, and later as unexpected business associates. Myron made peace and moved on --- until now, when two federal agents walk into his office, demanding to know where Greg Downing is. According to the agents, Greg is still alive --- and has been placed at the scene of a double homicide, making him their main suspect. Shocked, Myron needs answers. Myron and Win, longtime friends and colleagues, set out to find the truth, but the more they discover about Greg, the more dangerous their world becomes.

Nealon returns from prison to his house in the West of Ireland to find it empty. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child. It is as if the world has forgotten or erased him. Then he starts getting calls from a man who claims to know what's happened to his family --- a man who will tell Nealon all he needs to know in return for a single meeting. In a hotel lobby, in the shadow of an unfolding terrorist attack, Nealon and the man embark on a conversation shot through with secrets and evasions, a verbal game of cat and mouse that leaps from Nealon's past and childhood to the motives driving a series of international crimes launched against "a world so wretched it can only be redeemed by an act of revenge."

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, when a robbery spiraled out of control and escalated into a brutal murder, Barbara became the centerpiece of a media circus. Her beauty enraptured the press, and they were quick to portray her as a villainous femme fatale despite abundant evidence to the contrary --- a fiction the prosecution eagerly promoted. The frenzy of public interest and willful distortion paved a treacherous path for Barbara Graham. In TRIAL BY AMBUSH, Marcia Clark investigates the case, exposing the fallacies in the demonizing picture they painted and the critical evidence that was never revealed.

Following the death of her father, Keyanna “Key” MacKay finds herself thrust into the world he’d always refused to speak of. With just a childhood bedtime story about a monster that saved her father’s life and the name of her estranged grandmother to go off of, Key has no idea what she’ll find in Scotland. Lachlan Greer has his own secrets to keep, especially from the bonnie lass he pulls to safety from the slippery shore. He’s looking for answers as well, and Key’s presence on the grounds they both now occupy presents a real problem. It’s even more troublesome when he gets a front row seat to the lukewarm welcome Key receives from her family and the strange powers she begins to develop. When their secrets collide, it becomes clear that Lachlan could hold the answers Keyanna is after --- and that she also might be the key to uncovering his.

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall --- until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters --- an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister’s best friend --- Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is.

In 11 stories, THE WORLD WITH ITS MOUTH OPEN follows the inner lives of people in Kashmir as they walk the uncertain terrain of their days, fractured from years of war. From a shopkeeper’s encounter with a mannequin, to an expectant mother walking on a precarious road, to a young boy wavering between dreams and reality, to two dogs wandering the city, these stories weave in larger, devastating themes of loss, grief, violence, longing and injustice with the threads of smaller, everyday realities that confront the characters’ lives in profound ways. Although the stories circle the darker aspects of life, they are --- at the same time --- an attempt to run into life, into humor, into beauty, into another person who can offer refuge, if momentarily.