Henry North is a down-on-his-luck cybersecurity expert from New Orleans. Adam Zhang is the cofounder of one of Austin’s most successful venture capitalist firms. These two men didn’t know each other. Yet they died together, violently, in a place neither had any business being. When Henry doesn’t return from a business trip, his wife, Kirsten, gets an anonymous phone call: “Your husband is dead in Austin.” Flora Zhang knew her husband was keeping secrets. She suspected an affair, but she had decided she could forgive him for his weakness --- until he ended up dead. And with no explanation for her husband’s murder, the police begin to suspect her. Together, these two widows will face a powerful foe determined to write a false narrative about the murders.

Phoebe Hayes is in search of excitement and adventure. But the recent death of her father has so devastated her that her mother wants her to remain home in Baltimore to recover. Phoebe wants to return to New York, not only to chase the glamorous life she so desperately craves but also to confront Ivan, the older man who wronged her. With her best friend Carmen, she escapes to the East Village, disappearing into an underworld haunted by artists, It Girls and lost souls. Carmen juggles her junkie-poet boyfriend and a sexy painter, while, as Astrid the Star Girl, Phoebe tells fortunes in a nightclub and plots her revenge on Ivan. When the intoxicating brew of sex, drugs and self-destruction leads Phoebe to betray her friend, Carmen disappears, and Phoebe begins an unstoppable descent into darkness.

It’s Brooklyn. It’s winter. It’s so cold outside you could execute billionaires in the street about it. Sam lives with Eleanor, and they are in love. He has three or four outstanding invoices that would each cover rent for a month. At some point, the President is going to make some absolutely wild announcements that will only end in doom. In a surreal, funny and heartbreaking version of reality, Sasha Fletcher’s highly anticipated first novel occupies that rare register that manages to speak to an increasingly incomprehensible world.

New Zealand's remote Milford Track seems the perfect place for forensic investigator Alexa Glock to reconnect with her brother, Charlie. But their backpacking trip seems ill-fated from the start when she must stop on the way to examine nine skeletons --- most likely Mori tribespeople --- whose graves have been unearthed by highway construction. Before she opens the first casket, a Mori elder gives her a dire warning: "The viewing of bones can unleash misfortune to the living. Or worse." When a fellow hiker goes missing and is later found dead, Alexa has all she can do to focus on the science as she investigates two murders, while trying not to become the third victim.

Directly descended from the Vatican Bank priests who served Hitler during World War II, the Brotherhood is on a frantic search for a lost train loaded with $30 billion in Nazi gold, untouched for over 75 years somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Europe. Straight-as-an-arrow special agent Kate O’Hare and international con man Nick Fox know that there is only one man who can find the fortune and bring down the Brotherhood --- the same man who taught Nick everything he knows --- his father, Quentin. As the stakes get higher, they also must rely on Kate’s own father, Jake, who shares his daughter’s grit and stubbornness. Too bad they can never agree on anything.

On Hawaii Island, an anonymous 911 caller reports a body at Pohakuloa, the Army’s live-fire training area. Hilo Chief Detective Koa Kane, a cop with his own secret criminal past, finds a mutilated corpse --- bearing all the hallmarks of ancient ritual sacrifice. He encounters a host of obstacles as he pursues the murderer --- an incompetent local medical examiner, hostility from both haoles (Westerners) and sovereignty advocates, and a myriad of lies. Koa races to discover whether the victim stumbled upon a gang of high-tech archaeological thieves, or learned a secret so shocking it cost him his life and put others in mortal danger.

Abigail Baskin never thought she’d fall in love with a millionaire. Then she met Bruce Lamb, a stable, level-headed, kind guy. But right before the wedding, Abigail has a drunken one-night stand on her bachelorette weekend. She puts the incident out of her mind and now believes she wants to be with Bruce for the rest of her life. Then the mysterious stranger suddenly appears --- and Abigail’s future life and happiness are turned upside down. He insists that their passionate night was the beginning of something much, much more --- and he’s tracked her down to prove it. To make the situation worse, Abigail sees a terrified woman in the night shadows, and no one at the resort seems to believe anything is amiss…including her perfect new husband.

Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his home the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life --- his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home. Devastated by the grief of losing his mother, Vince is also consumed by an act so incomprehensible that it overshadows every happy memory of life growing up in his seemingly idyllic middle-class family. In EVERYTHING IS FINE, Vince examines the disease that irrevocably changed his family’s destiny.

Edo, February 1566: When a samurai’s corpse is discovered in the ruins of a burned-out bookshop, master ninja Hiro Hattori and Jesuit Father Mateo must determine whether the shopkeeper and his young apprentice are innocent victims or assassins in disguise. The investigation quickly reveals dangerous ties to Hiro’s past, which threaten not only Edo’s fledgling booksellers’ guild, but the very survival of Hiro’s ninja clan. With an arsonist on the loose and a murderer stalking the narrow streets, Hiro and Father Mateo must save the guild --- and themselves --- from a conflagration that could destroy them all.

In his long career as an acclaimed journalist covering the “hot” moments of the Cold War and its aftermath, Robert D. Kaplan often found himself crossing paths with Bob Gersony, a consultant for the U.S. State Department whose quiet dedication and consequential work made a deep impression on Kaplan. Gersony, a high school dropout later awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, conducted on-the-ground research for the U.S. government in virtually every war and natural-disaster zone in the world. Kaplan saw in Gersony a powerful example of how American diplomacy should be conducted. Set during the State Department’s golden age, THE GOOD AMERICAN is a story about the loneliness, sweat and tears, and the genuine courage, that characterized Gersony’s work in far-flung places.

"JUST AS I AM is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and mother, a sister, and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by His hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.” –Cicely Tyson

London, 1939. Eva Harlow and her best friend, Precious Dubose, are trying to make their way as fashion models. When Eva falls in love with Graham St. John, an aristocrat and Royal Air Force pilot, she can’t believe her luck. Then the Blitz devastates her world, and Eva finds herself slipping into a web of intrigue, spies and secrets. All it takes is one unwary moment to change their lives forever. London, 2019. American journalist Maddie Warner, whose life has been marked by the tragic loss of her mother, travels to London to interview Precious about her life in pre-WWII London. She finds herself drawn to both Precious and Colin, her enigmatic surrogate nephew. As Maddie gets closer to her, she begins to unravel Precious’ haunting past.

Sophie Jones is a physics prodigy on track to unlock the secrets of the universe. But when she meets Jake Kristopher during their first week at Yale, they instantly feel a deep connection, as if they’ve known each other before. Quickly, they become a couple. Slowly, their love lures Sophie away from school. When a shocking development forces Sophie into a new reality, she returns to physics to make sense of her world. She grapples with life’s big questions, including how to cope with unexpected change and loss. Inspired by her connection with Jake, Sophie throws herself into her studies, determined to prove that true loves belong together in all realities.

The residents of Santa Claus Lane do their best to stay out of each other’s way, but desire, fury and mischief too often propel these suburban neighbors to collide. Precocious Korean American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide, and they must fight to keep their home; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; a sardonic gay horror novelist finds that aging is more terrifying than any monster; and a white hippie mom and her adopted Vietnamese daughter realize that their anger binds them rather than pushes them apart.

A woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world. She must navigate the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats --- from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness --- begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong" and "How soon can you get here?"

Spending her 30th birthday alone is not what dating columnist Cleo Wilder wanted, but she plans a solo retreat to a remote Irish island in the name of re-energizing herself and adding a new perspective to her column. With his life in Boston deteriorating in ways he can’t bring himself to acknowledge, Mack Sullivan’s soul-searching has brought him to the same Irish island to explore his roots and find some clarity. Unfortunately, a mix-up with the bookings means that both have reserved the same one-room hideaway on exactly the same dates. Cleo and Mack are instantly at odds. But as the days go by, they no longer seem to mind each other’s company quite as much as they thought they would.

The day of her wedding, 17-year-old Ada's life looks good. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide if she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Fleeing the comfort and wealth of her East Coast upbringing, Inez Stannert became a saloon owner and card sharp in the rough silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. Then the teenaged daughter of a local prostitute is orphaned by her mother's murder, and Inez steps up to raise the troubled girl as her own. When a skeleton tumbles from the wall of her latest business investment, the police only seem interested in the bag of Civil War-era gold coins that fell out with it. With her trusty derringer tucked in the folds of her gown, Inez uses her street smarts and sheer will to unearth a secret that someone has already killed to keep buried. The more she digs, the muddier and more dangerous things become.

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next 12 months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally --- and willing to fight to the end. In THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless."

Texas Ranger Tom Bell is simply tracking a fugitive killer in 1931 when he rides into Kilgore, a hastily erected shanty town crawling with oil drillers in search of work. The sheriff of the boomtown is overwhelmed, and none of the roughnecks are inclined to assist the young Ranger in his search for the wanted man. In fact, it soon becomes apparent that the lawman's presence has irritated the wrong people. When two failed attempts are made on his life, Bell knows he's getting closer to finding out who is responsible for cheating and murdering local landowners to access the rich oil fields flowing beneath their farms. When they ambush him for a third time, they make the fatal mistake of killing someone close to him and leaving the Ranger alive.

Maren Walker told herself she wouldn't need to sell pills for long, that it was only means to an end. But there’s always another bill for Granny's doctor, another problem with the car, another reason she's getting nowhere. She dreams of walking through her little door to leave it all behind. The doors have appeared to the people in her mountain town for as long as anyone can remember, though no one knows where they lead. All anyone knows is that if you go, you'll never come back. Maren's mother left through her door when Maren was nine, and her shadow has followed Maren ever since. When she faces the possibility of escaping her struggles for good, Maren must choose just what kind of future she wants to build.

When John Edgar Wideman won the PEN Malamud Award in 2019, he joined a list of esteemed writers --- from Eudora Welty to George Saunders --- all of whom are acknowledged masters of the short story. Wideman’s commitment to short fiction has been lifelong, and here he gathers a representative selection from throughout his career, stories that challenge what defines, separates and unites us; dare to push form and defy convention; and, to quote Wideman, seek to “deconstruct the given formulas of African American culture and life.”