Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that is the key that unlocks every door. She begins dating women --- soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads, jobs go off the rails, and evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that her friend, Tig, begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

When an old college friend leading a religious tour in Assisi asks interpreter Rick Montoya to fill in for their guide who's gone missing, Rick is happy to oblige. He's looking forward to seeing his old friend, and the food and wine of Umbria sound like the perfect reward for a tense translation job he's just completed for the police in Palermo involving witness testimony against the mafia. But when the shady tour guide is found dead the next morning under suspicious circumstances, Rick's relaxing gig turns into an unofficial job assisting the local police inspector with her interviews of the tour group members. Could one of the pious pilgrims be a cold-blooded killer? Or has one of the victims' many shady dealings finally caught up with him?

Greta lives with her friend, Sabine, in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’ voice in town, and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware that Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines --- a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan --- and increases her dosage on a regular basis. Following her doctor’s orders, Melissa takes the pills night after night; her body begins to shut down, and she collapses while holding her infant daughter. Only then does Melissa learn that her doctor --- like many doctors --- has over-prescribed the medication, and quitting cold turkey could lead to psychosis or fatal seizures.

Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare bookstore that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable 51 rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans. As they interact with various literary figures of the time --- Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (George Orwell's widow), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim and others --- these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

After her husband Alan’s decades of financial fraud are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison. Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity. Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he ruined demand restitution. But when Suzanne finds herself awestruck at a major whale stranding, she makes an apparently high-minded decision that ripples with devastating effect not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of Suzanne and Alan’s son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother and, ultimately, Suzanne herself. When damage is done, who pays? Who loses? Who is responsible?

Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave her marriage for true love --- so a fearsome Vietnamese witch cursed Oanh and her descendants so that they would never find love or happiness, and the Duong women would only give birth to daughters. Oanh’s current descendant, Mai Nguyen, is divorced, estranged from her younger sisters, and has three adult daughters who are successful in their careers --- though the same can’t be said for their love lives. Desperate for guidance, Mai consults Auntie Hua, her trusted psychic in Hawaii, who delivers an unexpected prediction: this year, her family will witness a marriage, a funeral and the birth of a son.

Seven years on the run from her abusive father, and with no hope of sanctuary among the dwindling pockets of human civilization, Lark is out of options. Her only leverage is a cursed power: she can thrust fear onto others, leaving all threats fleeing in terror. If the campfire myths of her childhood are true, Lark’s sole chance for refuge could lie in Cagmar, the city of trolls --- a brutal species and the sworn enemies of humanity. Her gift makes her invaluable as a monster slayer to fight off the unspeakable creatures that torment the trolls’ hanging city. Lark will do anything to make Cagmar her home, but her new role comes with a caveat: use her power against a troll, and she’ll be killed. Her loyalty is quickly put to the test when she draws the hatred of a powerful troll who loathes humankind.

Tucker Snow is as tough as they come, hardened by decades working as an undercover narcotics agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Through special dispensation from the governor, he and his brother Harley cut a wide swath through the criminal element of Northeast Texas. But tragedy comes calling after taking a dream job as a special ranger with the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, when Tucker's wife and toddler are killed in a horrific traffic accident. Close to breaking, Tucker sets his badge aside to move his surviving teenage daughter outside of Ganther Bluff, a quiet town with enough room for them to mourn their unexpected loss. But instead of settling into small-town life to heal from such an unimaginable loss, a fresh kind of hell hits them with full force.

Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night? As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Conner Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict.

1310, Berwick-upon-Tweed, England. Edward II knights Frederick Kohl for his bravery fighting the Scots. But Sir Frederick is not the man the king believes him to be; instead, it is his sister, Christina, who assumes her dead brother's identity. Still posing as Frederick, Christina escorts Lady Cecily, a young noblewoman joining Queen Isabella's court at Westminster Palace, to London. Unexpectedly, Christina and Cecily fall in love. But the wife of one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the city is Christina's bitter enemy. Katharine Volker, whose lascivious advances Christina rejects, goads her into voyaging from her London home to the Baltic waters of her birthplace. Christina journeys not to engage in trade. She sails for a far deadlier purpose --- to exact revenge on the pirates who killed her father and brother.

Alyssa Macallan is terrified when she’s dumped by her wealthy and powerful husband. With a devastating divorce looming, she begins to suspect her toxic and manipulative soon-to-be-ex is scheming to ruin her --- leaving her alone and penniless. And when the FBI shows up at her door, Alyssa knows she really needs a friend. And then she gets one. A seductive new friend, one who’s running from a dangerous relationship of her own. Alyssa offers Bree Lorrance the safety of her guest house, and the two become confidantes. Then Bree makes a heart-stoppingly tempting offer. Maybe Alyssa and Bree can solve each other's problems. But no one is what they seem. And the fates and fortunes of these two women twist and turn until the shocking truth emerges.

All her life, Zofia has found comfort in two things during times of hardship: books and her best friend, Janina. But no one could have imagined the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. As the bombs rain down and Hitler’s forces loot and destroy the city, Zofia finds that now books are also in need of saving. With the death count rising and persecution intensifying, Zofia jumps to action to save her friend and salvage whatever books she can from the wreckage, hiding them away, and even starting a clandestine book club. She and her dearest friend never surrender their love of reading, even when Janina is forced into the newly formed ghetto. But the closer Warsaw creeps toward liberation, the more dangerous life becomes for the women and their families --- and escape may not be possible for everyone.

Ariel del Mar and her sisters --- together known as the band Siren Seven --- have been a pop culture phenomenon since they were kids. Siren Seven is wrapping up their farewell tour, and Ariel can’t wait to spend the summer just living a normal life. But her father, the head of Atlantica Records, has other plans: begin her breakout solo career immediately, starting with a splashy announcement on a morning talk show. The night before, Ariel and her sisters head out for a night of incognito fun at a rock concert in Brooklyn. It’s there that Ariel crosses paths with Eric Reyes, the dreamy lead singer of an up-and-coming band. Unaware of her true identity, Eric spontaneously invites her on the road for the summer. And for the first time in her life, Ariel disobeys her father --- and goes with him.

After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious “sleep” holds the answers to their life’s most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve’s identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.

Facing an empty nest and a broken marriage, CIA analyst Beth Bradford is moving from the cul-de-sac she’s long called home, and the CIA is removing her from the case that’s long been hers: tracking an elusive Iranian intelligence agent known as The Neighbor. Madeline Sterling moves into Beth’s old house. She has what Beth once had: an adoring husband, three beautiful young children, and the close-knit group of neighbors on the block. Now she has it all. And Beth --- who can’t stop watching the woman stepping into her old life --- thinks the new neighbor has something else too: ties to Iranian intelligence. Is Beth just jealous? Paranoid? Or is something more at play?

Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge is determined to make it through yet another summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s house. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. When the posters begin appearing everywhere, people wonder who is behind them and start to panic. Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge gets a call that threatens to upend her carefully built life: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that?

Britain, 1961: A beautiful blonde baby is born to Viscount Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom. But Diana grows up amid the fallout of her parents’ messy divorce. She struggles at school. Her refuge throughout is romantic novels. She dreams of falling in love and being rescued by a handsome prince. In royal circles, there is concern about the Prince of Wales. Charles is nearing 30, and the right girl needs to be found, fast. She must be young, aristocratic and completely free of past liaisons. Pure and innocent. Eighteen-year-old Diana Spencer is just about the only candidate. Her yearning to be loved dovetails with royal desperation for a bride. But the route to the altar is perilous. There are hidden dangers. Ruthless schemers. Can Diana’s romantic dream survive?

During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Ben Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis.

1930: Nell Fagan is looking for a second chance at a career in investigative journalism, and the call of Blackstone Fell's sanatorium is irresistible. In 1606, a man vanished from a locked gatehouse in a remote Yorkshire village, and 300 years later, it happened again. Nell confides in the best sleuth she knows, Rachel Savernake. Looking for answers, Rachel travels to lonely Blackstone Fell in Yorkshire, with its eerie moor and sinister tower. With help from her friend, Jacob Flint --- who's determined to expose a fraudulent clairvoyant --- Rachel will risk her life to bring an end to the disappearances at Blackstone Fell where people go in but never come out.

When she was 12 years old, Kirra Mandarian’s parents were murdered. Fourteen years later, Kirra is a commonwealth attorney, and her goal is to find out who killed her parents and why. She quickly learns that big-time criminals are very dangerous indeed and realizes she needs Dillon Savich’s help. Emma Hunt, a piano prodigy and the granddaughter of powerful crime boss Mason Lord, was only six years old when she was abducted. She was saved by her adoptive father, San Francisco federal judge Ramsey Hunt. Now a 12-year-old with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, she narrowly saves herself from a would-be kidnapper. Lacey Sherlock and officers from METRO are assigned to protect her, but things don’t turn out as planned.

The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces that the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs. Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children --- the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear.

At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day, for better or for worse. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification --- never far from anyone’s mind --- is ticking louder now than ever. In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure. We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.

In a tiny village in Provence, nine guests arrive at a luxury holiday home. The visitors know each other well, or at least they think they do. The only stranger among them is Lulu, the young woman catering their stay. But Lulu is not exactly the woman on the video the guests thought they’d hired. It turns out Lulu has plenty to hide --- and nowhere to run as the heat rises. In this seemingly idyllic getaway, under the scorching sun, loyalties will be tested, secrets exposed, and tensions pushed to the brink.

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Smithy decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn’t just a writer of forgotten children’s stories. The Twyford Code holds a great secret, and Smithy may just have the key.

July, 1940. Blitz-ridden London: Marnie Fern’s life is torn apart when her grandfather is killed in an air raid. But once she discovers that he’d been working undercover as a radio operative --- or pianist --- for the Dutch resistance, Marnie knows she must complete his mission, no matter the cost. Nazi-occupied Amsterdam: At the other end of the wireless, fellow pianist Corrie Bakker is caught in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse as she desperately tries to keep her loved ones out of the line of fire --- even if it means sacrificing herself. Bound together by the invisible wires of their radios, the two women lead parallel lives in their home cities, as both are betrayed by those they trust the most. But when the Nazis close in on one of them, only the other can save her.

Colette “Coco” Weber has relocated to her Catalina Island home, where she was the sole survivor of a deadly home invasion 20 years ago. All Coco wants is to see her aunt Gwen, get as far away from her ex as possible, and get back to writing obituaries. Thankfully, her college best friend, Maddy, owns the local paper and has a job sure to keep her busy, considering the number of elderly folks who are dying on the island. But as Coco learns more about these deaths, she quickly realizes that the circumstances surrounding them are remarkably similar…and not natural. Then she receives her own obituary in the mail. As Coco begins to draw connections between a serial killer’s crimes and her own family tragedy, she fears that the secrets on Catalina Island might be too deep to survive.

Cassie Quinn knows a few things. One: money can’t buy happiness, but it’s certainly better to have it. Two: family matters most. Three: her younger brother, Billy, is not a rapist. When Billy, a junior at Princeton, is arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Cassie joins forces with her big brother, Nate, and their parents, Lawrence and Eleanor. The Quinns scramble to hire the best legal minds money can buy, but Billy fits the all-too-familiar sex-offender profile --- white, athletic and privileged --- that makes headlines and sways juries. As reporters converge outside their Upper East Side landmark building, Cassie vows she’ll do whatever it takes to save Billy. But what if that means exposing her own darkest secrets to the world?

Wren and Thessaly collide when they land coveted jobs at a glamorous New York City boutique wine importer. Hardworking, by-the-book Wren comes from a modest background and has everything to prove, while Thessaly hails from a family of prestigious California growers --- but she is plagued by self-doubt. Thrown together at work, where they're expected to have exquisite palates, endless tolerance for alcohol and socializing, and the ability to sell, sell, sell, they regard each other with suspicion. It’s only on an important European business trip --- with everything on the line for both of them --- that they unexpectedly forge an alliance that will change the course of their careers and personal lives.

Lauren Fox is the bookkeeper for Cold World, a tourist destination that's always a winter wonderland despite being located in humid Orlando, Florida. Her coworker, Asa Williamson, is all about finding ways to enliven his days at Cold World. When the owner asks Lauren and Asa to propose something to raise more revenue, their rivalry heats up as they compete to come up with the best idea. But the situation is more dire than they thought, and it might take these polar opposites working together to save the day. If Asa thought Lauren didn't know how to enjoy herself, he's surprised by how much he enjoys spending time together. And if Lauren thought Asa wasn't serious about anything, she's surprised by how seriously he seems to take her.