Chosen as FDR’s fourth term Vice President for his well-praised work ethic, good judgment and lack of enemies, Harry S. Truman was the prototypical ordinary man. That is, until he was shockingly thrust in over his head after FDR’s sudden death. During the climactic months of the Second World War, Truman had to play judge and jury, pulling America to the forefront of the global stage. THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT escorts readers into the situation room with Truman during this tumultuous, history-making 120 days, when the stakes were high and the challenge even higher.

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion and his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost. Jonathan Eig sheds important new light on Ali’s politics, religion, personal life and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Ali’s life, more than 500 interviews, and thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and audiotaped interviews from the 1960s.

Sophie Whitehouse has a lovely home, two adorable children, and a handsome, successful husband. But everything changes the night James comes home and confesses an indiscretion. It turns out that his revelation is just the tip of the iceberg: a larger scandal is about to explode. James stands accused of a terrible crime, and their family is shoved into the spotlight as his trial begins. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, another woman is working to destroy Sophie’s husband. Sophie remains convinced of James’ innocence and is desperate to protect her precious family from the rumors that threaten to rip them apart. Is James the guilty perpetrator or an innocent victim of a toxic agenda?

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle. Its denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, but crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population. When a strange new visitor arrives --- a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side --- the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Clara Kelley is not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home. Serving as a lady's maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie requires skills he doesn't have, answering to an icy mistress who rules her sons and her domain with an iron fist. What Clara does have is a strong resolve coupled with an uncanny understanding of business, and Andrew begins to rely on her. But Clara can't let her guard down, not even when Andrew becomes something more than an employer.

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as code breakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history. Now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service and scientific accomplishment.

Sydney Wells’ perfect life with her wealthy, devoted husband vanishes when he dies suddenly in an accident. Widowed at 49, she discovers he has failed to include her in his will. With Andrew’s vicious daughters in control of his estate, and no home or money, Sydney finds a job in fashion, despite her own designer daughters’ warnings. Naïve, out of her element, and alone in a world of shady international deals and dishonest people, she is set up by her boss and finds herself faced with criminal prosecution. What happens when you lose everything? Faced with prison, Sydney must rebuild her life from the bottom to the top again, with honor, resourcefulness and dignity.

A woman disappears on her 21st birthday. The following day her body is found, wrapped neatly like a gift. What does Detective Cooper Devereaux have to go on? Very little. Then another victim is discovered. Again, she was killed on her 21st birthday. Again, her body was wrapped like a gift. By the third murder the tabloids have dubbed the homicidal monster the Birthday Killer --- and Devereaux is under the gun. While Devereaux’s own violent and mysterious past nips at his heels, and his fragile home life threatens to unravel, he can’t afford to be anything but totally obsessed with the frantic search through the many layers of this city, from its wealthy enclaves to its dark criminal underbelly.

THE FLOATING WORLD takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina with the story of the Boisdorés, whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora, the family’s fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city, forcing her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from a freed slave who became one of the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic --- the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.

Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail,” Jeffrey Eugenides’ first collection of short fiction presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family leads her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist.

In the autumn of 1960, Angie Glass is living an idyllic life in her Wisconsin hometown. At 21, she is married to charming, handsome Paul and has just given birth to a baby boy. But when Paul’s niece, Ruby, reports that her father, Henry, has committed suicide and that her mother, Silja, is missing, Angie and Paul drop everything and fly to the small upstate town of Stonekill, New York, to be by Ruby’s side. Angie thinks they’re coming to the rescue of Paul’s grief-stricken young niece, but Ruby is a composed and enigmatic 17-year-old who resists Angie’s attempts to nurture her. As Angie learns more about the complicated Glass family, she begins to question the very fabric of her own marriage.

Trouble comes in bunches for Stephanie Plum. First, professional grave robber and semi-professional loon, Simon Diggery, won’t let her take him in until she agrees to care for his boa constrictor, Ethel. Events take a dark turn when headless bodies start appearing across town. At first, it’s just corpses from a funeral home and the morgue that have had the heads removed. But when a homeless man is murdered and dumped behind a church, Stephanie knows that she’s the only one with a prayer of catching this killer. If all that’s not enough, Diesel is back in town. Trenton’s hottest cop, Joe Morelli, isn’t pleased at this unexpected arrival nor is Ranger, the high-powered security consultant who has his own plans for Stephanie.

A.J. Jacobs has received some strange emails over the years, but this note was perhaps the strangest: “You don’t know me, but I’m your eighth cousin. And we have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database.” Who are these people, he wondered, and how do I find them? So began A.J.’s three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history. His journey would take him to all seven continents. He drank beer with a US president, found himself singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and unearthed genetic links to Hollywood actresses and real-life scoundrels. After all, we can choose our friends, but not our family.

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology.

Allyson Worthy, daughter of the renowned homicide detective Christopher Worthy, has landed a dream internship with the Venice police. On her first day, she is assigned to assist with a bizarre case --- the apparent suicides of two wealthy Americans in the city. Linking the two persons are their similar cancer diagnoses and strange incisions on their bodies. The family of the second victim doubt the suicide verdict and hire Christopher Worthy to look into the death. After speaking at a conference in Rome, Father Nicholas Fortis is asked by the Vatican to look into the recent theft of relics, bones of saints, from Venetian churches. As clues fall into place, Allyson is unexpectedly put in danger as she unknowingly agrees to rendezvous with the killer.

The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one --- a 16-year-old girl --- missing. Was she lucky to have escaped? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister? Detective D. D. Warren is on the case --- but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading, Look for me.

On All Hallow’s Eve in 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther posted a document he hoped would spark an academic debate, but that instead ignited a conflagration that would forever destroy the world he knew. Five hundred years after Luther’s now famous Ninety-five Theses appeared, Eric Metaxas paints a startling portrait of the wild figure whose adamantine faith cracked the edifice of Western Christendom and dragged medieval Europe into the future. MARTIN LUTHER tells the searing tale of a humble man who, by bringing ugly truths to the highest seats of power, caused the explosion whose sound is still ringing in our ears.

Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, Alison Donnelly hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent college professor, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion. Both sisters’ lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.

When Paula picks up her last passenger of the night, all she sees is a few more dollars to put toward her husband's medical bills. That's before she recognizes the quiet stranger in her back seat as a world-famous musician and realizes the woman waiting at his destination is not his equally famous wife. So, Paula does what any down-on-her-luck woman would do. She asks for money in exchange for silence. But when a woman is murdered in the same building days later, Paula discovers she is the only witness to the secret affair --- an affair that incriminates the musician. Now, Paula's silence comes at a much more dangerous price.

For Jill Bialosky, certain poems stand out like signposts at pivotal moments in a life: the death of a father, adolescence, first love, leaving home, the suicide of a sister, marriage, the birth of a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In POETRY WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge.

The richest of New York's rich gather at The Pierre's Cotillion Room to raise money for those less fortunate. A fatal blast rocks the room, stirring up horrifying memories of 9/11. Is the explosion an act of terrorism --- or a homicide? A big-name female filmmaker is the next to die, in a desolate corner of New York City. Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald investigate. But the crimes keep escalating as a shadowy killer masterfully plays out his vendetta --- and threatens to take down NYPD Red in the bargain.

Abortion is once again illegal in America, in vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people’s stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a new collection of short fiction that takes readers into the innermost lives of everyday people. From a family saved from ruin by a mysterious benefactor, to a downtrodden boxer who shows unexpected kindness to a mugger, these tales reveal not only the precarious balance maintained between grief and happiness in our lives, but also how the echoes of personal tragedy can shape us for the better.

Rosa Guerrero beat the odds as she rose to the top of the corporate world. A leader who wields power with grace and discretion, she has earned the devotion and loyalty of her staff. No one admires Rosa more than her doting lieutenant Leo Smalls, a benefits vice president whose whole world is Ellery. While Rosa is consumed with trying to address the needs of her staff within the ever-constricting limits of the company’s bottom line, her associate director, Rob Hirsch, a happily married father of two, finds himself drawing closer to his "work wife," Lucy Bender, an enterprising single woman searching for something to fill the vacuum in her personal life. For Kenny Verville, a senior manager with an MBA, Ellery is a temporary stepping-stone to bigger and better places --- that is, if his high-powered wife has her way.

It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run through Manhattan’s Riverside Park. In the immediate aftermath, Poppy spiraled into an oblivion of grief, disappearing for several days only to turn up ragged and confused. Those lost days have never stopped haunting her. Poppy starts having nightmares and blackouts --- there are periods of time she can’t remember, and she’s unable to tell the difference between what is real and what she’s imagining. When she begins to sense that someone is following her, Poppy is plunged into a game of cat and mouse, determined to unravel the mystery around her husband’s death. But can she handle the truth about what really happened?

Twenty years ago, college student Axel Prince Wolfe --- heir apparent to his Texas family's esteemed law firm and its "shade trade" criminal enterprises --- teamed up with his best friend, Billy, and a Mexican stranger in a high-end robbery that went wrong. Abandoned by his partners, he was captured and imprisoned, his family disgraced, his wife absconded, his infant daughter Jessie left an orphan. Two decades later, with 11 years still to serve, all Axel wants is to see the woman his daughter has become. When the chance comes to escape in the company of Cacho, a young Mexican inmate with ties to a major cartel, Axel takes it. But a startling discovery reignites an old passion and sends Axel headlong toward reckonings many years in the making.

Football is the heartbeat of Brownwood, Texas. Every Friday night, for as long as assistant principal Tylene Wilson can remember, the entire town has gathered in the stands, cheering their boys on. But the war has changed everything. Most of the Brownwood men over 18 and under 45 are off fighting. Could this mean a season without football? No one counted on Tylene, who knows more about the game than most men and does the unthinkable, convincing the school to let her take on the job of coach. Faced with extreme opposition, Tylene remains resolute. And when her boys rally around her, she leads the team --- and the town --- to a Friday night and a subsequent season they will never forget.

Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. There she is forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. But haenyeo are women of power and strength. She will find her way home. South Korea, 2011. Emi has spent more than 60 years trying to forget the sacrifice her sister made, but she must confront the past to discover peace. Seeing the healing of her children and her country, can Emi move beyond the legacy of war to find forgiveness?

Attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeks an exit strategy from his family’s deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Caught between the criminals and the FBI, Leo charts his own path in defending a young woman who was manipulated into brazenly murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. When the consequences strike heartbreakingly close to home, Leo, his brother Teddy, and the rest of the family are forced into a winner-takes-all confrontation with men who don’t care how many innocents they harm in achieving their goals.

It began on New Year’s Eve. The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered, law and government collapsed --- and more than half of the world’s population was decimated. As the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere. In a world of survivors where every stranger encountered could be either a savage or a savior, none of them knows exactly where they are heading, or why. But a purpose awaits them that will shape their lives and the lives of all those who remain.