When Emma’s husband, Ben, falls in love with a large Victorian mansion for sale in upstate New York, he swears to her the fixer-upper will be worth the risk. With a baby on the way, Emma would like to live in a charming, safe community --- and in a space larger than a one-bedroom New York City apartment. On impulse, she agrees to Ben’s plan and they put in an offer on the house. Sure, the mansion has a somewhat creepy backstory and is a bit dilapidated, but Emma and Ben are in this together. Aren't they? When strange things start happening, Emma begins to experience a little buyer’s remorse. What’s the real history of this house? Is its dark history repeating itself? Why does her husband suddenly seem so distant? Is she in danger? Is her baby?

It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalism takes root within the social order, his family decides to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar's deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can't find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim. At the same time, Safwa, a young girl living in war-torn Baghdad with her grief-stricken, conservative father, will find a very different and far more dangerous path to America. When Anvar and Safwa's worlds collide as two remarkable, strong-willed adults, their contradictory, intertwined fates will rock their community --- and families --- to their core.

It’s 1938, and women seeking a quick, no-questions split from their husbands head to Reno, Nevada. But they have to wait six weeks to become “residents.” Many of these wealthy, soon-to-be divorcees flock to the Flying Leap, a dude ranch that caters to their every need. Twenty-four-year-old Ward spent one year at Yale before his family lost everything in the Great Depression; now he’s earning an honest living as a ranch hand at the Flying Leap. Two new guests are about to upend everything he thinks he knows: Nina, a St. Louis heiress and amateur pilot back for her third divorce, and Emily, whose bravest moment in life was leaving her cheating husband back in San Francisco and driving herself to Reno.

Cinderella married the man of her dreams --- the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, 13 and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.

The morning of January 12, 1888, was unusually mild, following a punishing cold spell. It was warm enough for the homesteaders of the Dakota Territory to venture out again, and for their children to return to school without their heavy coats --- leaving them unprepared when disaster struck. At the hour when most prairie schools were letting out for the day, a terrifying, fast-moving blizzard blew in without warning. Schoolteachers as young as 16 were suddenly faced with life and death decisions: Keep the children inside, to risk freezing to death when fuel ran out, or send them home, praying they wouldn’t get lost in the storm.

A peaceful Welsh village is thrown into turmoil when a terrified boy stumbles on a body in a nearby river. With little to go on, the village police turn to Scotland Yard for help in identifying the body. When Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent from London to find answers, he is given few clues --- a faded military tattoo on the victim’s arm and an unusual label in the collar of his shirt. They eventually lead him to the victim’s identity: Sam Milford. By all accounts, he was a good man and well-respected. Then why is his death so mysterious? Rutledge uncovers a web of lies swirling around a suicidal woman, a child’s tragic fate, another woman bent on protecting her past. But where among all the lies is the motive for murder?

This is a story of two men who could talk to birds --- but were completely incapable of talking to each other. A father who fled from his family in the dead of night, and the jackdaw he raised like a child. A son obsessed with his absence --- and the young magpie that fell into his path and refused to fly away. This is a story about the crow family and human family; about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one’s own.

Goblin seems like any other ordinary small town. But with Josh Malerman as your tour guide, you’ll discover the secrets that hide behind its closed doors. These six novellas --- "A Man in Slices," "Kamp," "Happy Birthday, Hunter!," "Presto," "A Mix-Up at the Zoo" and "The Hedges" --- tell the story of a place where the rain is always falling, nighttime is always near, and your darkest fears and desires await.

In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere and do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. What awaits him is an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be.

London, 1893: High up in a house on a dark, snowy night, a lone seamstress stands by a window. So begins the swirling, serpentine world of Paraic O’Donnell’s Victorian-inspired mystery, the story of a city cloaked in shadow, but burning with questions: Why does the seamstress jump from the window? Why is a cryptic message stitched into her skin? And how is she connected to a rash of missing girls, all of whom seem to have disappeared under similar circumstances? On the case is Inspector Cutter, a detective as sharp and committed to his work as he is wryly hilarious. Gideon Bliss, a Cambridge dropout in love with one of the missing girls, stumbles into a role as Cutter’s sidekick. And clever young journalist Octavia Hillingdon sees the case as a chance to tell a story that matters.

On the heels of his third tour in Iraq, the fabric of Dave Cartwright’s life has begun to unravel. Gripped by PTSD, he finds himself losing his home, his wife, his direction. When tragedy strikes, Dave makes a dramatic decision: he and his seven-year-old daughter, Bella, will head off the grid to live in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. As they carve out a home in a cave in that harsh, breathtaking landscape, echoes of its past begin to reach them. Bella retreats into herself, absorbed by visions of a mother and son who lived in the cave thousands of years earlier, at the end of the last ice age. Back in town, Dave and Bella themselves are rapidly becoming the stuff of legend --- to all but those who would force them to return home.

Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape the famine in Ireland, only to face anti-immigrant prejudice. Determined never to starve again, he changes his surname to Taylor and heads south to Virginia, seeking work as a traveling blacksmith on the prosperous plantations. Torn from her home and sold to Jubilee Plantation, Sarah must navigate its intricate hierarchy. And now an enigmatic blacksmith is promising her not just the world but also her freedom. How could she say no? Enslaved at Jubilee Plantation, Maple is desperate to return to her husband and daughter. With Sarah’s arrival, she sees her chance to be reunited at last with her family. But at what cost?

Private investigator Nikki Griffin is on a case. The reclusive matriarch of one of San Francisco’s wealthiest and most private families has been defrauded by a con-man, and her furious son enlists Nikki to find the money and the con-man, Dr. Geoffrey Coombs. Quietly running her used bookstore by day, her secret mission is to do everything she can to remove the innocent from dangerous situations --- and punish the men responsible. As Nikki draws closer to Coombs and learns more about who he really is, she is taken aback to realize that they might share more in common than she would like to admit. But while she closes in on Coombs, others are looking for him, too. As Nikki glimpses secrets that powerful people want to remain hidden, she begins to suspect that lives are in peril.

Helen Wilcox has one desire: to successfully launch her daughters into society. From the upper crust herself, Helen's unconventional --- if happy --- marriage has made the girls' social position precarious. Then her husband gambles the family fortunes on an elevated railroad that he claims will transform the face of the city and the way the people of New York live. But will it ruin the Wilcoxes first? As daughters Jemima and Alice navigate the rise and fall of their family, each is forced to re-examine who she is, and even who she is meant to love.

It’s the summer of 1994 in Claypot, Wisconsin, and the lives of 10-year-old Fischer “Fish” Branson and Dale “Bread” Breadwin are shaped by the two fathers they don’t talk about. One night, tired of seeing his best friend bruised and terrorized by his no-good dad, Fish takes action. A gunshot rings out, and the two boys flee the scene, believing themselves murderers. They head for the woods, where they find their way onto a raft. Four adults track them into the forest: Fish’s mother, Miranda, a wise woman full of fierce faith; his granddad, Teddy, who knows the woods like the back of his hand; Tiffany, a purple-haired gas station attendant and poet looking for connection; and Sheriff Cal, who’s having doubts about a life in law enforcement.

For 15 years, August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family who plucked him from an orphan asylum. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-Black staff, along with “Miss Mamie,” the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices. But the Barclays’ fortunes have fallen, and their money is almost gone. When a prospective business associate proposes selling Miss Mamie’s rib sauce to local markets under the brand name “The Rib King” --- using a caricature of a wildly grinning August on the label --- Mr. Barclay agrees. Yet neither Miss Mamie nor August will see a dime. August grows increasingly distraught, his anger building to a rage that explodes in shocking tragedy.

As a child in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Its presence haunts her throughout her youth. Raised in a trailer by her stubborn, bowhunting father, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence and her father’s vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster, and the creature she saw long ago reappears as a portent of the valley’s final reckoning.

Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel. Elin Warner has taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept. Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge --- there's something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her.

Isaiah Quintabe is no longer IQ, the genius of East Long Beach. Instead, he’s a man on the road and on the run, hiding in a small Northern California town when his room is broken into by a desperate young man on the trail of the state’s most prolific serial killer. His old partner, Juanell Dodson, must go straight or lose his wife and child. His devil’s bargain? An internship at an LA advertising agency, where it turns out the rules of the street have simply been dressed in business casual, but where the aging company’s fortunes may well rest on their ability to attract a younger demographic. Dodson --- ”the hustler’s hustler” --- just may be the right man for the job.

They rarely speak to each other, but they take notice --- watching from the safety of their cabins, making judgments from what little they know of their temporary neighbors. At daylight, a mother races up the mountain, fleeing into her precious dose of solitude. A retired man studies her return as he reminisces about the park’s better days. A young woman wonders about his politics as she sees him head for a drive with his wife. A teenage boy escapes the scrutiny of his family, braving the dark waters of the loch in a kayak. This cascade of perspective shows each wrapped up in personal concerns as they begin to notice one particular family that doesn’t seem to belong. Tensions rise, until nightfall brings an irrevocable turn.

Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home. Kieran's parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn. When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl and questions that have never washed away.

Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, colored by jealousy and respect in equal terms. In the years that followed, these two women would not only become iconic figures in literature, but also lead curiously parallel lives haunted by mental illness, suicide attempts, self-doubt and difficult personal relationships. With weekly martini meetings at the Ritz to discuss everything from sex to suicide, theirs was a relationship as complex and subversive as their poetry.

Born to working class parents and the eldest of six children, Gabriel Byrne harbored a childhood desire to become a priest. At 11 years old, he found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, he had been expelled and quickly returned to his native city of Dublin. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary 40-year career in film and theater. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.