Nearly 25 years ago, Nicholson Baker published U AND I, the groundbreaking tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U AND I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is a writer out there in the world who you must read. B & ME is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker --- and discovering himself in the process.

Ellen is a Midwestern literature professor who is drawn into the war when her legal ward, Michael, enlists as a Marine. Lacey is a proud Army wife who struggles to pay the bills and keep things going for her son while her husband is deployed. Ellen and Lacey cope with the fear and stress of a loved one at war while trying to get by in a society that often ignores or misunderstands what war means to women today. When Michael and Eddie are injured in Iraq, Ellen and Lacey’s lives become intertwined in Walter Reed Army Hospital, where each woman must live while caring for her wounded soldier.

At the turn of the 19th century, Frank Leong, a fabulously wealthy shipping industrialist, moves his family from China to the island of Oahu. But when Frank is murdered, his family is thrown into a perilous downward spiral. Left to rebuild in their patriarch’s shadow, the surviving members try their hand at a new, ordinary life, vowing to bury their gilded past. Now the Leongs’ survival rests with young Theresa, Frank’s only grandchild, the heir apparent to her ancestors’ punishing knots.

She is an iconic member of the British Royal Family, beloved for her beauty and charitable works, resented by her former husband and his mother, the Queen of England. But when a bomb explodes aboard her holiday yacht, British intelligence turns to one man to track down her killer: legendary spy and assassin Gabriel Allon. Gabriel's target is Eamon Quinn, a master bomb maker and mercenary of death who sells his services to the highest bidder.

When native New Yorker Nicholas Grand applies for an international student exchange program, he thinks it's an opportunity to broaden his horizons and meet some interesting people. He never imagines that a single year would have repercussions that would follow him throughout his lifetime. Nicholas is sent to Estonia, where he meets shy, sensitive Paavo; his beautiful sister, Mari; and their gruff father, Leo --- a family grappling with the challenges of life in a small country struggling to assert its post-Soviet identity. Nicholas sets off on an unforgettable journey through a foreign landscape that ultimately teaches him that some bonds can never be broken.

The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. When the lights come back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy --- with pitch-black skin --- born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. I AM RADAR begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design.

On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson meets the stunning and mysterious Lily Kintner. He talks about his marriage that’s going stale and his wife Miranda, who he’s sure is cheating on him. When Ted jokes that he could kill Miranda for what she’s done, Lily calmly states that she would like to help --- and they begin to plot Miranda's demise. Suddenly these co-conspirators are embroiled in a chilling game of cat-and-mouse, one they both cannot survive…with a shrewd and very determined detective on their tail.

A revolution has taken over the government of the United States, and the environment has been saved. But now the U.S. is ruled by a dictatorship, and the corporations are fighting back. Joining them are an increasing number of rebels angered by the dictatorship of Chairman Rahma. However, cracks are beginning to show as new weapons are developed by the old corporate powers and strange reports of mutants filter through the government's censorship.

Mother’s Rest is a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes Jack Reacher for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal. Before long, Reacher is plunged into a desperate race through LA, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco, and ultimately back to Mother’s Rest, where he must confront the worst nightmare he could imagine.

Still healing from a Somali hijacking gone wrong and a brutal attack that left her near death, Vanessa Michael Munroe joins her lover, Miles Bradford, in Japan where he’s working as a security consultant protecting high-value technology from industrial espionage. In the domesticity of their routine, she finds long sought-after peace --- until Bradford is arrested for murder, and the same interests who targeted him come after her, too.

Kateryn Parr, a 30-year-old widow in a secret affair with a new lover, has no choice when a man old enough to be her father who has buried four wives --- King Henry VIII --- commands her to marry him. Despite being a leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in English, Kateryn cannot save the Protestants, under threat for their faith, and Henry’s dangerous gaze turns on her. The traditional churchmen and rivals for power accuse her of heresy. The punishment is death by fire, and the king’s name is on the warrant.

Frieda Klein learns from her former classmate, Maddie Capel, that Maddie’s teenage daughter, Becky, claims she was raped in her own bed one night while her mother was downstairs. Becky’s story awakens dark memories of an eerily similar incident in Frieda’s own past that she’s been avoiding for decades. When Becky is found hanging from a beam in her bedroom, Frieda seeks out her old high school friends to ask what they remember about the night that prompted Frieda to leave town for good. But confronting the ghosts of the past turns out to be more dangerous than she ever expected.

Suleiman the Magnificent, the feared Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, issues an invitation to every king in Europe: You are invited to send your finest player to compete in a chess tournament to determine the champion of the known world. Thousands converge on Constantinople, including the English court’s champion and his guide, the esteemed scholar Roger Ascham. Seeing a chance to enlighten the mind of a student, Ascham brings along Elizabeth Tudor, a brilliant young woman not yet consumed by royal duties in Henry VIII’s court. On the opening night of the tournament, however, a powerful guest of the Sultan is murdered.

When NPR’s Scott Simon began tweeting from his mother’s hospital room in July 2013, he didn’t know that his missives would soon spread well beyond his 1.2 million Twitter followers. Over the course of a few days, Simon chronicled his mother’s death and reminisced about her life, revealing her humor and strength, and celebrating familial love. UNFORGETTABLE expands on those famous tweets to create a memoir that is rich, deeply affecting, heart-wrenching and exhilarating.

Graham Gage is battling cancer, but must delay treatment in order to repay the woman who saved his life in San Francisco's Chinatown 30 years earlier. She has come out of hiding after her troubled teenage son was ensnared and killed in a multimillion-dollar microchip robbery executed by the United Bamboo Triad. Gage heads to Asia to untangle a brilliantly orchestrated deal bartering the chips for a billion dollars of China White heroin. In attempting to tie the conspiracy directly to the US-based godfather behind her son's death, Gage is soon drawn into a deadly confrontation with the godfather himself.