French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens.

This collection of short essays, Christopher Buckley’s first since WRY MARTINIS, contains 89 pieces written for publications such as Forbes, the New York Times and The Daily Beast. Some of the pieces are serious, most notably his tributes to deceased friends and a report on his visit to Auschwitz. But most of the essays contain the sardonic humor one expects from a writer who, while riding a train’s quiet car, appoints himself “Shush, Destroyer of Conversation.”

Not only has Che Milan’s longtime lover abruptly dumped her, but her eccentric, demanding mother has recently died. When an urn of ashes arrives, along with a note reminding Che of a half-forgotten promise to take her mother to Canterbury, Che finds herself reluctantly undertaking a pilgrimage. Within days she joins a group of women who are walking the 60 miles from London to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, reputed to be the site of miracles. The women swap stories as they walk, each vying to see who can best describe true love.

It’s been weeks since Sister Eve Divine heard from her sister, Dorisanne. And her gut tells her that something sinister has happened to her difficult sibling. There’s only one place Eve can find the answers she’s looking for: in Dorisanne’s world, under the bright lights of Las Vegas. Late night visits to the casino and some clever clues hidden in an address book set Eve on a trail that soon reveals that Dorisanne’s life is darker and more complicated than Eve ever expected.

Like all citizens since the Ruining, Carrington Hale knows the importance of this day. But she never expected the moment she’d spent a lifetime preparing for --- her Choosing ceremony --- to end in disaster. Ripped from her family, she’ll spend her days serving as a Lint, the lowest level of society. But then Carrington is offered an unprecedented chance at the life she’s always dreamed of, yet she can’t shake the feeling that it may be an illusion. With a killer targeting Lints and corruption threatening the highest levels of the Authority, Carrington must uncover the truth before it destroys her.

Eleven-year-old Michael Murray has heard a secret, one that might explain the bruises on his mother’s face. When the whispers at home and on the street become too loud to ignore, he begins to wonder if there is an even bigger secret waiting to be discovered. Scared of what might happen if anyone finds out, and desperate for life to be normal again, Michael sets out to piece together the truth.

Having already lost his mother and only brother, 24-year-old Will Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father's estate, Boast is deep inside his grief when he stumbles upon documents revealing a secret his father had intended to keep: He’d had another family before Will's --- a wife and two sons in England. This revelation leads to a flood of new questions. Did his father abandon this first family, or was he pushed away?

Detective Alex Cross is being stalked by a psychotic genius, forced to play the deadliest game of his career. Cross' family --- his loving wife Bree, the wise and lively Nana Mama, and his precious children --- have been ripped away. Terrified and desperate, Cross must give this mad man what he wants if he has any chance of saving the most important people in his life. What will Cross sacrifice to save the ones he loves?

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful --- and underappreciated --- command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR’s White House Oval Study --- his personal command center --- and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.

When most people think of Michael Jordan, they think of the beautiful shots, his body totally in sync with the ball, hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, there's also a dark side to Jordan: a ruthless competitor, a gambler. Drawing on personal relationships with Jordan's coaches; countless interviews with friends, teammates, family members, and Jordan himself; and a career in the trenches covering Jordan in college and the pros, Roland Lazenby provides the first truly definitive study of Jordan.

A family watches in horror as their patriarch transforms into the singing, wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. A renowned art collector relishes publicly destroying his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by helplessly as their father stages an all-consuming war on the raccoons living in the woods around their house. In this new collection of short stories, Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked.

She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. NEVERHOME is a novel that tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed, hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause.

When Teresa Casali was young, she discovered she had a strange gift: the ability to read people’s memories. But the gift seemed more like a curse as her mob boss father used her to gain the upper hand in his world of corruption and violence. Exposed by her own family to the darkest impulses of mankind, Teresa is alone and unprotected. She realizes that if she is to survive, she has to run.

When Quaker Pastor Sam Gardner is asked by the ill Unitarian minister to oversee a wedding in his place, Sam naturally agrees. It's not until the couple stands before him that he realizes they're two women. In the tempest of strong opinions and misunderstandings that follows the incident, Sam faces potential unemployment. Deeply discouraged, he wonders if his pastoral usefulness has come to an end. Perhaps it's time for a change.

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father's best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She's fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down, and struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.
 

Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the “real ground of literature,” she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES.

Eve and Teddy Morrison are Savannah’s power couple, but things aren’t as good as they look. Their teenage daughter, Gwen, is rebelling, and Cooper is blaming this on Eve’s preoccupation with work. The Morrison marriage is taut with tension, but when Cooper is involved in a car accident with Eve’s sister, Willa, the questions surrounding the event bring the family close to breaking point. Sifting between the stories, Eve has to find out what really happened --- and just who she believes.

SUPREME CITY is the story of Manhattan's growth and transformation in the 1920s and the brilliant people behind it. In less than 10 years, Manhattan became the social, cultural and commercial hub of the country, transformed by its night clubs, radio, skyscrapers, movies and ferocious energy. The 1920s was the Age of Jazz and the Age of Ambition.

While Daisy Shoemaker tries to identify the root of her recent dissatisfaction --- maybe her distant husband, "handful" of a daughter or thriving but still trivial-feeling cooking business --- she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling. While Daisy’s driving carpools, Diana is chairing meetings. While Daisy’s making dinner, Diana’s making plans to reorganize corporations. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental, and perhaps the slight punctuation mishap that kickstarted the emails wasn't a mistake after all. Who IS this other woman, and what does she want with Daisy?

Jason Kendall and sportswriter Lee Judge team up to bring you --- the fan, player, coach, or curious statistician --- an insider’s view of the game from a player’s perspective. This is a book about pre-game rituals, what to look for when a pitcher warms up between innings, the signs a catcher uses to communicate with the pitcher, and so much more.

When the body of a teenage Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a mythical beast, the Windigo, or a vengeful spirit called Michi Peshu. Such stories have been told by the Ojibwe people for generations, but they don’t solve the mystery of how the girl and her friend, Mariah Arceneaux, disappeared a year ago. At the request of the Arceneaux family, Cork O’Connor, former sheriff turned private investigator, is soon on the case.