When faced with an event that disrupts every aspect of our lives, how do we avoid succumbing to hopelessness, bitterness and other destructive habits of the mind, and instead find ways to allow joy, kindness and generosity to fill our hearts in the midst of suffering? Rebecca Li explains how we can, through the cultivation of clear awareness, transform challenging circumstances into fertile soil for wisdom and compassion to grow by facing each moment with tenderness, clarity and courage.

When Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton's corpse is discovered behind the easels of Manhattan's famed art school, whispers in the art community say he had it coming. As Benton's list of enemies lengthens to include League instructors, Vietnam War protesters and members of Andy Warhol's entourage, one art student is ultimately pinned for the crime. The only problem: the suspect has vanished. Why would an art student murder Benton? And if he were innocent, why would he run? When TJ Fitzgerald, son of Detective Juanita Diaz and Captain Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, discovers that his classmate is the prime suspect, he uses his investigative skills to try and clear his name.

Del Sol native Sunshine Vicram has returned to town as the elected sheriff, and she expects her biggest crime wave to involve an elderly flasher named Doug. But a teenage girl is missing, a kidnapper is on the loose, and all of this is reminding Sunshine why she left Del Sol in the first place. Add to that the trouble at her daughter’s new school, and a kidnapped prized rooster named Puff Daddy, and, well, the forecast looks anything but sunny. But even clouds have their silver linings. This one has Levi, Sunshine's sexy, almost-old-flame, and a fiery-hot US Marshal. With temperatures rising everywhere she turns, Del Sol's normally cool-minded sheriff is finding herself knee-deep in drama and danger.

As First Lady of the United States of America --- the first African American to serve in that role --- Michelle Obama established herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. In her memoir, Michelle invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her --- from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address.

First cousins Eli Winfield and Delia Green grow up across the street from one another in Green Branch, South Carolina, in the 1960s and '70s. After Eli's tragic childhood accident, the trajectory of their lives and of those connected to them changes. Shunned by his peers for his disfigurement, Eli struggles for acceptance as Delia devotes herself to defending him. Delia's vivid narrative voice presents Eli as a confident young man in adolescence, the visible damage to his body gone, but underneath hides indelible wounds that rule his impulses. And while Eli cherishes Delia more than anyone and attempts to protect her from her own troubles, he cares not for protecting himself.

Former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and political stunts. At the end of his life, he came to renounce his views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But after her own political awakening, his daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, dedicated her life to spreading the new Wallace message --- one of peace and compassion. In her new memoir, Peggy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.”

The unlikeliest of champions, the 1949–50 City College Beavers were extraordinary by every measure. City College was a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for its intellectual achievements and political radicalism than its athletic prowess. Every single member of the Beavers was either Jewish or African American, and they stunned the basketball world by becoming the only team in history to win the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. However, during the following season, all of the team’s starting five were arrested, charged with conspiring with gamblers to shave points. The story centers on two teammates, Eddie Roman and Floyd Layne --- one white, one black --- each caught up in the scandal, each searching for a path to personal redemption.

Cait Monaghan and Rebecca McRae are on a desolate road that slices through the New Mexican desert. They've never met before tonight. Both have secrets to protect. Both of their lives are in danger. When a truck pulls up fast behind them, they assume it's punk teenagers or run-of-the-mill road rage, but it soon becomes clear that whoever is driving the truck is hunting them for sport --- and they are out to draw blood. As the miles unspool and the dangers mount, the pasts they've worked so hard to keep buried have come back to haunt them. Someone wants one of them dead. But which one? And given the lives the two women have been leading, that someone could be almost anyone. If Cait and Rebecca are going to survive, they'll have to learn to trust one another --- and themselves.

An accomplished herbalist and geographer, Dara Saville has produced an ecological manual for developing relationships with the land and plants in a new theoretical approach to using herbal medicines. Designed to increase our understanding of plants’ rapport with their environment, this trailblazing herbal speaks to our innate connection to place and provides a pathway to understanding the medicinal properties of plants through their ecological relationships. With 39 plant profiles and detailed color photographs, Saville provides an extensive materia medica in which she offers practical tools and information alongside inspiration for working with plants in a way that restores our connection to the natural world.

Percy is pregnant. She hasn’t told a soul. Probably she should tell her husband --- certainly she means to --- but one night she wakes up to find she no longer recognizes him. Amid this alienation, a package arrives. In it: an exhibition catalog for a photography show. The photographs consist of a series of digitally manipulated images of a woman lying on a bed in a red room. It takes a moment for even Percy to notice that the woman is herself, but no one else sees the resemblance. Percy must now come to grips with the fundamental question of identity in the digital age: To what extent do we own our own image, and to what extent is that image shaped by the eyes of others?

Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson are hired by the widow of an environmentalist who died while monitoring water quality in the nearby Pigeon River. No soil or water samples were found near the deceased, and his widow doesn't believe his death was an accident. Sam had, in fact, witnessed a public altercation between the man and local mill heir Luke Kirkpatrick just two days prior. Both Luke and his father, Ted, are prime suspects because of the threat that contamination poses to their proposed business expansion. Meanwhile, preparations for a local festival suffer some violent setbacks. Are the events related? And can Sam and Nakayla identify the killer and serve justice before Asheville is threatened once again?

After a reminder goes off for the Caribbean sailing trip Anna was supposed to take with her fiancé, she impulsively goes to sea in the sailboat he left her, intending to complete the voyage alone. But after a treacherous night’s sail, she realizes she can’t do it by herself and hires Keane, a professional sailor, to help. Much like Anna, Keane is struggling with a very different future than the one he had planned. As romance rises with the tide, they discover that it’s never too late to chart a new course.

In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son, Xavier, who’s headed to college in the fall. All is well until the Whitmans --- a family with new money and a secretly troubled teenage daughter --- raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins --- aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony --- and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Bryce Quinlan had the perfect life --- working hard all day and partying all night --- until a demon murdered her closest friends. When the accused is behind bars but the crimes start up again, Bryce finds herself at the heart of the investigation. Hunt Athalar is a notorious Fallen angel, now enslaved to the Archangels he once attempted to overthrow. His brutal skills and incredible strength have been set to one purpose --- to assassinate his boss's enemies, no questions asked. But with a demon wreaking havoc in the city, he's offered an irresistible deal: help Bryce find the murderer, and his freedom will be within reach. As Bryce and Hunt dig deep into Crescent City's underbelly, they discover a dark power that threatens everything and everyone they hold dear.

The Kennedys have always been a family of charismatic adventurers, raised to take risks and excel, living by the dual family mottos: "To whom much is given, much is expected" and "Win at all costs." And they do --- but at a price. Across decades and generations, the Kennedys have occupied a unique place in the American imagination: charmed, cursed, at once familiar and unknowable. THE HOUSE OF KENNEDY is a revealing, fascinating account of America's most storied family, as told by America's most trusted storyteller.

Where do you see yourself in five years? When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan. But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment and beside a very different man. The date is December 15, 2025, five years in the future. After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. Determined to ignore this odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind. That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.

The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability that his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine --- as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.

Former crime reporter Russell Avery spends his days reluctantly keeping sideways cops out of the crosshairs of the Internal Affairs department. Until Keyonna Jackson, a social justice activist, presents him with a troubling video: a made-for-YouTube cell phone snippet chronicling the same kind of questionable use-of-force that had set New York City, Ferguson and Cleveland on fire in recent years. The same use-of-force that he’s been covering up for Newark PD. Now, the young black man who filmed this video is dead, and the more questions Russell asks, the less his cop buddies like him. For the first time in his life, Russell finds himself on the wrong side of the guys with the badges and guns.

Missy Carmichael's life has become small. Grieving for a family she has lost or lost touch with, she's haunted by the echoes of her footsteps in her empty home; the sound of the radio in the dark; the tick-tick-tick of the watching clock. Spiky and defensive, Missy knows that her loneliness is all her own fault. She deserves no more than this --- not after what she's done. But a chance encounter in the park with two very different women and one lovable dog opens the door to something new. Another life beckons for Missy, if only she can be brave enough to grasp the opportunity. But 79 is too late for a second chance. Isn't it?

Loretta Lynn and the late Patsy Cline are legends --- country icons and sisters of the heart. For the first time ever, Loretta tells their story: a celebration of their music and their relationship up until Patsy's tragic and untimely death. Full of laughter and tears, this eye-opening, heartwarming memoir paints a picture of two stubborn, spirited country gals who'd be damned if they'd let men or convention tell them how to be. Set in the heady streets of the 1960s South, this nostalgia ride shows how Nashville blossomed into the city of music it is today.

Nina Garrity learned the hard way that her missing husband, Glen, had been leading a double life with another woman. But with Glen gone --- presumably drowned while fishing on his boat --- she couldn't confront him about the affair or find closure to the life he blew apart. Now, a year and a half later, Nina has found love again and hopes she can put her shattered world back together. Simon, a widower still grieving the death of his first wife, thinks he has found his dream girl in Nina. Her teenage son, Connor, embraces Simon as the father he wishes his dad could have been, while her friends see a different side to him. Nina wants so badly to believe her life is finally getting back on track, but she’ll soon discover that the greatest danger to herself and her children are the lies people tell themselves.

In 1958, Feron Hood and Merry Jellicoe are roommates at Lovegood Junior College for Girls. Feron, who has narrowly escaped from a dark past, instantly takes to Merry and her composed personality. Surrounded by the traditions and four-story Doric columns of Lovegood, the girls --- and their friendship --- begin to thrive. But underneath their fierce friendship is a stronger, stranger bond, one comprised of secrets, rivalry and influence --- with neither of them able to predict that Merry is about to lose everything she grew up taking for granted, and that their time together will be cut short. Ten years later, Feron and Merry haven't spoken since college. Life has led them into vastly different worlds. But, as Feron says, once someone is inside your “reference aura,” she stays there forever.

Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia. Two years later, she swept headlines when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple moved among the liveliest group of Socialist activists and dreamers this country has ever seen, including Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears, led labor strikes, and distributed birth control information alongside the country’s earliest feminists. President Woodrow Wilson called her “one of the dangerous influences of the country.” REBEL CINDERELLA unearths the rich, overlooked life of a social justice campaigner truly ahead of her time.

Still bruised by the end of a marriage she thought was her last chance to create a family, Celia Fairchild --- known as advice columnist “Dear Calpurnia” --- receives an unexpected answer to a “Dear Birthmother” letter. She throws herself into proving she’s perfect adoptive mother material only to lose her job. Her one option: sell the Charleston house left to her by her recently departed, estranged Aunt Calpurnia. Arriving in Charleston, Celia learns that Calpurnia had become a hoarder, and selling it will require a drastic makeover. The task of renovation seems overwhelming and risky. But with the help of new neighbors, old friends, and an unlikely sisterhood of strong, creative women, Celia knits together the truth about her estranged family --- and about herself.

Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her anemic dissertation when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. The couple are novice sailors, but Michael persuades Juliet to say yes. With their two kids, Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their 44-foot sailboat awaits them --- a boat that Michael has christened the Juliet. The initial result is transformative: their marriage is given a gust of energy, and even the children are affected by the beauty and wonderful vertigo of travel. The sea challenges them all --- and, most of all, Juliet, who suffers from postpartum depression.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark. Nainoa’s family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods --- a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart. When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawaii --- with tragic consequences --- they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage and the cost of survival.

By all appearances, Frank and Maggie share a happy, loving marriage. But for the past six months, they have not spoken. Maggie isn’t sure what provoked Frank’s silence, though she has a few ideas. Day after day, they have eaten meals together and slept in the same bed in an increasingly uncomfortable silence that for Maggie has become deafening. Then Frank finds Maggie collapsed in the kitchen and an empty package of sleeping pills on the table. She is placed in a medically induced coma while the doctors assess the damage. If she regains consciousness, Maggie may never be the same. Though he is overwhelmed at the thought of losing his wife, will Frank be able to find his voice once again --- and explain his withdrawal --- or is it too late?

The Department of Sensitive Crimes is always prepared to dive into an investigation, no matter how complex. So when the girlfriend of an infamous author who insists her bad-boy beau is being blackmailed approaches Ulf Varg, the department’s lead detective, Ulf is determined to help. The case requires his total concentration, but he finds himself distracted by his ongoing attraction to his co-worker, Anna, whose own fears about her husband’s fidelity are causing a strain on her marriage. When Ulf is also tasked with looking into a group of dealers exporting wolves that seem more canis familiaris than canis lupus, it will require all of his team’s investigative instincts and dogged persistence to put these matters to bed.

Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They’d been together for more than a decade, and Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But she was wrong. On Lydia’s 28th birthday, Freddie died in a car accident. So now it’s just Lydia, and all she wants is to hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life --- and perhaps even love --- again. But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened.

Big Burr, Kansas, is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone, and everyone shares the same values --- or keeps their opinions to themselves. But when a national nonprofit labels Big Burr "the most homophobic town in the US" and sends in a task force of queer volunteers as an experiment --- they'll live and work in the community for two years in an attempt to broaden hearts and minds --- no one is truly prepared for what will ensue. As tensions roil the town, cratering relationships and forcing closely guarded secrets into the light, everyone must consider what it really means to belong.

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field --- an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.

The newspaper refers to the body only as Victim 2117 --- the 2,117th refugee to die in the Mediterranean Sea. But to three people, the unnamed victim is so much more, and the death sets off a chain of events that throws Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division led by Detective Carl Mørck, into a deeply dangerous --- and deeply personal --- case. A case that not only reveals dark secrets about the past, but has deadly implications for the future.

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. To soothe her daughter and pass the time, Róza tells her a story about a girl in an enchanted garden: The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. Music helps the flowers bloom. In this make-believe world, Róza can shield Shira from the horrors that surround them. But the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Róza must make an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart.