The year is 1853, and the Habsburgs are Europe’s most powerful ruling family. With his empire stretching from Austria to Russia, from Germany to Italy, Emperor Franz Joseph is young, rich and ready to marry. Fifteen-year-old Elisabeth, “Sisi,” Duchess of Bavaria, travels to the Habsburg Court with her older sister, who is betrothed to the young emperor. But shortly after her arrival at court, Sisi finds herself in an unexpected dilemma: she has inadvertently fallen for and won the heart of her sister’s groom.

BERLIN is a history book that reflects the nature of the city itself. In its architecture, through its literature, in its movies and songs, Berliners have conjured their hard capital into a place of fantastic human fantasy. No other city has so often surrendered itself to its own seductive myths. No other city has been so shaped and defined by individual imaginations. BERLIN captures, portrays and propagates the story of those myths and their makers.

The tragic death of hockey star Derek Boogaard at 28 was front-page news across the country in 2011 and helped shatter the silence about violence and concussions in professional sports. Now, acclaimed reporter John Branch tells the shocking story of Boogaard's life and heartbreaking death. BOY ON ICE raises deep and disturbing questions about the systemic brutality of contact sports and the damage that reaches far beyond the game.

Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, he spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire. While those around him are haunted by what they think they see, only Jack Peter knows the truth behind the frightful occurrences as the outside world encroaches upon them all.

The setting is quiet Newton, Massachusetts, where nothing ever happens. Nothing, that is, until two months after Henry Dudlow’s 13th birthday, when his neighbor, Mr. Hanley, suddenly starts to look…different. While everyone else sees a balding man with a beer belly, Henry suddenly sees a nasty, bilious, rage-filled demon. Once Henry catches on to the real Mr. Hanley, he starts seeing demons all around him, and his boring, adolescent life is transformed.

Mary Catherine lives in Los Angeles with her roommate, Sami, and volunteers at a local youth center with coach Tyler Ames and LA Dodger Marcus Dillinger. Despite Mary Catherine’s intention to stay single, she finds herself drawing close to Marcus, and their budding romance offers an exciting life she never dreamed of. That is, until she receives devastating news from her doctor --- news that alters her future and forces her to make a rash decision.

Christmas is coming, but Savannah antiques dealer Weezie Foley is doubly distracted: by her upcoming wedding to her longtime love, chef Daniel Stipanek, and also by the fact that her best friend and maid-of-honor, BeBe Loudermilk, is due to give birth any day --- and is still adamantly refusing to marry her live-in-love Harry.

In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered, and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said.

In the latest installment of the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, it is 1915, and Kit is now a full-blown spy in England, working undercover in a castle owned by a suspected British government mole, Sir Stockman. His mother, world-famous actress Isabel Cobb, is attempting to seduce Stockman as a spy, but finds herself falling in love with him. As Kit follows his mother and Stockman to Berlin, he must stay undercover under the very nose of the Kaiser.

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of 40 years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis’ sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America. Moonis and Clyde follow Cecily’s trail until it leads them into the atomic-ravaged heart of the Midwest, an outlaw territory of dark legends and darker truths where Cecily is being held captive by a brutal gang lord.

HOW TO BE BOTH is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real --- and all of life’s givens are given a second chance.

In JOAN OF ARC: A LIFE TRANSFIGURED, Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time --- a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

After 10 years’ absence, Roland Nair returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend, Michael Adriko. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune, newly engaged to a college girl named Davidia from Colorado. Together the three set out to visit Adriko’s clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland --- but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Adriko, Nair and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.

Through Frank Bascombe, we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the 20th century. Now, in LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU, author Richard Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity.

Waiting to be rediscovered in the British Library is an ancient manuscript of the early Church, copied by an anonymous monk. The manuscript is at least 1,450 years old, possibly dating to the first century. And now, THE LOST GOSPEL provides the first-ever translation from Syriac into English of this unique document that tells the inside story of Jesus’ social, family and political lives.

On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip meet a marine biologist who says she has sighted mermaids in a coral reef. As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.

One day, Ceinwen Reilly discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. She is determined to track down the film, impress her neighbor, and become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue. Ceinwen and a bumbling but charming math professor she has just met will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld.

Dee Aldrich’s marriage is falling apart, and she’s starting to believe that her husband has his eye on a new life. Just as she begins determining the course of the future, she makes a discovery that will change her life: her mother left her a lot of money, and her own husband seems to know more about it than Dee does. Now, before it’s too late, she must investigate her suspicions and untangle conspiracy from coincidence, using her mother’s advice to steer her through the blind spots.

Harry Mills is a guardian angel on a mission: help 24-year-old Addie Folsom get her life back on track and help her find love. Posing as a teacher at a local college, Harry is up to the task, but not even he can predict the surprises that lay in store when Addie and her polar-opposite next-door neighbor, Erich, are forced to spend Christmas together. However, Addie and Erich soon find they have more in common than they thought --- and that two people who seem so wrong for each other may actually be just right.

High school senior Addison Schacht is taking the prompt for his college entry essay to the University of Chicago to heart: What are your best and worst qualities? He begins to look back on his life so far and considers what getting into college, selling some pot to his classmates, his relationship with his best friend (not girlfriend) Digger, Virgil’s AENEID, and his growing obsession with the murder of a classmate, Kevin Broadus, all mean. The more he digs into his own past, the farther he stumbles into the middle of the murder investigation.

Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters. One woman’s letters stood out: those from Valy, her grandfather’s lover who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria. Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman.

It is 1864, and Eliza Spooner's husband, Will, has joined the Kansas volunteers to fight the Confederates. When the unthinkable happens, she takes in a woman and child who have been left alone and made vulnerable by the war, and she finds solace and camaraderie amongst the women of her quilting group. When she is asked to help hide an escaped slave, she must decide for herself what is right, and who she can count on to help her.

The death of a young heroin dealer causes no great concern for NYPD Detective Frank Parrish --- Danny Lange is just another casualty of the drug war. But when Danny’s teenage sister winds up dead, questions are raised that have no clear answers. As the homicides continue --- and a disturbing pattern emerges --- Frank tries desperately to make some sense of the deaths, while battling with his own demons.

In STALIN, Stephen Kotkin offers a biography that, at long last, is equal to this shrewd, sociopathic, charismatic dictator in all his dimensions. The character of Stalin emerges as both astute and blinkered, cynical and true believing, people oriented and vicious, canny enough to see through people but prone to nonsensical beliefs. STALIN also gives an intimate view of the Bolshevik regime’s inner geography of power, bringing to the fore fresh materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police.

London, 1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous, artistic friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.

Are you waiting for God to answer your prayers? Do the days, weeks and years go by without evidence that your deepest longings could ever come true? If so, you’re not alone. In fact, you are facing a common faith-building challenge in the Christian life, and WAITING ON GOD has the guidance you need to endure victoriously. Dr. Charles Stanley gives you the practical wisdom you need to make the most of the delays and follow God’s lead to the blessings you long for.

Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But here, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some 1,500 African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence --- not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force.

Arriving at Princeton for her freshman year, Thea Slavin finds herself alone. Away from her family and her Eastern European homeland for the first time, she struggles to adapt to unfamiliar American ways and the challenges of college life --- including an enigmatic young man whose brooding good looks and murky past intrigue her. Drawn to the elusive Rhys and his equally handsome and mysterious brother, Jake, she ventures into a sensual mythic underworld as irresistible as it is dangerous.

Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket's Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four. Patrick, the eldest, is a hedge fund manager with a guilty conscience. Kevin, a bartender, is secretly sleeping with a housekeeper named Isabelle. Ava, a school teacher, is finally dating the perfect guy but can't get him to commit. And Bart, the only child of Kelley's second marriage to Mitzi, has recently shocked everyone by joining the Marines. As Christmas approaches, Kelley is looking forward to getting the family together for some quality time. But when he walks in on Mitzi kissing Santa Claus, utter chaos descends.