“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, BREAD OF ANGELS takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry and then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave and Easter.

Madeline Martin is the young owner of a thriving business, The Next Chapter Bookshop. When Harley Granger, a failed novelist turned true crime podcaster, drifts into her shop in the days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up events that Madeline would much rather forget. She’s the only surviving victim of Evan Handy, the man who was convicted of murdering her best friend, Steph, and is suspected in the disappearance of two sisters, also good friends of Madeline’s. Since Evan Handy went to jail, three other young women have gone missing, most recently a young college dropout named Lolly. Five young women missing in the same area in a decade. Are they connected? Was Evan Handy innocent after all? Or was there someone else there that night? Someone who is still satisfying his dark appetites?

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until --- betrayed and brokenhearted --- she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America --- but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

When an odd request leads Harry Lancaster to agree to meet his former sweetheart, Willow, at a farm on the outskirts of town, Emma’s suspicions run high, and she insists on joining him. Instead of Willow greeting them when they arrive, they discover the farm's owner dead, with a corn rake embedded in his back. After being interrogated by the police, Harry and Emma return to his home to find a bereft Willow, who admits she lost her life savings in a real estate scam involving the farm. To bring the swindlers --- and murderer --- to justice, Harry recruits his potentially shady, financial-whiz brother and a neighborhood teenage hacker. Then Willow’s realtor is declared missing, and Harry’s brother is caught up in the fray. 

Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad’s diner, and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th-century mill. This singular memoir --- a classic American story --- invites readers to Erin's corner of her beloved Maine to share the real person behind the “girl from Freedom” fairy tale, and the not-so-picture-perfect struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and that make Erin’s life triumphant.

Darcy Moore is tired of death. Which would be fine and good...if she wasn’t a Grim Reaper. Determined to outrun her designation as the villain, Darcy decides she won’t be dragging her next assignment to the underworld. She’ll be saving him instead. Unfortunately for Darcy, there’s a complication in her plan. Guardian Angel Gabriel Aetos doesn’t tolerate threats to his little corner of the world, and a Grim Reaper showing up at his bar is as deadly as it gets. But when he realizes Darcy is not as she seems, Gabriel must decide if he can trust his growing feelings or hold on to his long-standing grudge. But magic doesn’t come without consequences. And the Department of Hauntings & Spirits eventually will come calling for their missing Reaper.

Summer, 1989: Ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills’ wild ride to glory. But as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning. The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next 29 years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband, Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers.

College student Arthur Oakes' idyll --- and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot --- is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library. Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which they must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year --- or become his next meal.

Innsbruck, 1485. Helena Scheuberin should be doing what every other young wife is doing: keeping house, supporting her husband, and bearing his children. But as an outspoken, strong woman, she sometimes has difficulty fitting in. Then she draws the unwanted attention of a malign priest who is just starting his campaign to root out “witches” from among the women of her town. And when her husband’s footman dies, she finds herself accused not only of murder but of witchcraft. Helena must find the courage to risk her life and the lives of others by standing up to a man determined to paint her as the most wicked of all.

Richard Russo’s masterful new essays consider how life and art inform each other and how the stories we tell shape our understanding of the world around us. In “The Lives of Others,” Russo reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. In “Stiff Neck,” he writes of the exasperating fault lines exposed within his own family as his wife’s sister and her husband --- proudly unvaccinated --- develop COVID. In “Triage,” he details the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition. And in “Ghosts,” he revisits Gloversville, the town that gave rise to the now-legendary fictional town of North Bath, and confronts the specter of its richly populated past and its ghostly present.

Back in senior year, Audrey, Micah, Jasmine and Beck were the Core Four: the lucky one, the beautiful one, the smart one, the sporty one. They had color-coded dreams, inside jokes, and a lifelong friendship they thought would last forever. But graduation night ended in a tragic accident, followed by the kind of silence that stretches for decades. Now, they’ve returned for their reunion, each carrying a life that looks nothing like the glossy future they imagined. There are stalled careers, complicated marriages, outspoken adult children, and secrets that never fit into holiday cards. For one of them, a diagnosis of early-onset dementia turns the weekend into a ticking clock.

“Heart-smashed” by the death of the mother she ran from at age 18 and shaken by the intensity of her response, Arundhati Roy began this remarkable memoir --- a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is: shaped by circumstance but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” With the scale, sweep and depth of her novels, and the passion, political clarity and warmth of her essays, MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace.

Detective Tracy Crosswhite is assigned to defend an old friend. Sheriff Jenny Almond has been charged with first-degree murder for shooting an unarmed veteran on a stormy night of confusion, paranoia and split-second choices. Tracy is certain there’s more to the story of Anthony Alvarez’s killing --- and her investigation draws her back to a cold case that still haunts the community. More than 40 years ago, Alvarez was the prime suspect in the unsolved disappearance of a teenage babysitter. The lead investigator, Jenny’s late father Buzz Almond, always believed Alvarez had been framed. Decades later, his suspicions of a conspiracy are driving Tracy to find answers.

1963, Guatemala. The country is in turmoil, with a presidential election looming and a charismatic, left-wing ex-priest and trade union leader predicted to win. United Fruits, a giant American corporation responsible for a large percentage of the country’s GNP, is not pleased by this prospect. Neither is the CIA. Amid the uncertainty, Gabriel Dax arrives on orders from his MI6 handler, Faith Green, who has tasked him with assessing the fallout from the election. Upon arrival, Gabriel meets Frank Sartorius, the local CIA agent. Despite Sartorius’ genial manner, Gabriel suspects something untrustworthy brewing under the surface. Soon, a political assassination with suspicions of Mafia involvement leads to riots. But when Green compels Gabriel to investigate some shady characters in West Berlin, it becomes clear that an even greater danger is afoot.

By the end of 1943, nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population had fled, been deported, captured or killed by Hitler. Only Hungary, and its almost 900,000 Jews, remained free from Hitler’s subjugation. That changed in March 1944, after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, as an avaricious Hitler conquered Hungary and declared his plan for mass extermination of the Jewish people. In THE RIGHTEOUS, Theresa Weissbach, a professor at the University of Michigan, hasn’t heard from her parents in Budapest for over a year. Her best friend, Julia Powers, who recently was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for her OSS service in occupied Holland, joins her to locate and rescue Theresa’s family. Julia, Theresa and their colleagues take enormous risks in an effort to save thousands of innocent lives.

Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography. He knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible --- as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing. Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian’s world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it?

Mariana Enriquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.” But when the body of a friend’s mother who disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest. In this rich book of essays, Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, investigating the history and architecture of various cemeteries, their saints and ghosts, their caretakers and visitors, and, of course, their dead.

Growing up, Marnie Stephens believed that destiny was real and the universe had a plan. But at 30, real life has become more difficult than divine. Especially when Marnie wakes up at a hospital in Boston with no memory of how she got there...or the last year of her life. Her doctor tells her she suffered a head injury; her boyfriend, Matt, insists they broke up months ago; and her hair is somehow eight inches shorter. Before she knows it, she finds herself in an apartment she doesn’t remember with a new neighbor, Ben Morgan, she’s sure she won’t forget. As Marnie sets out to retrace the last year of her life, the last thing she needs is to start falling for Ben, the grumpy (and incredibly attractive) neighbor helping her. But the universe has other plans.

In the wake of a killer hurricane, Doc Ford heads to Honduras, where his best friend, Tomlinson, crashed his beloved sailboat into a reef off the Mosquito Coast. Tomlinson swears he died in the shipwreck and was brought back to life by a runaway orphan --- the direct descendant of the last king of the ancient Mayan people. Corrupt politicians want the child out of the picture before he catalyzes a revolution among the Indigenous population. But the boy has gone underground with the help of Tomlinson and a network of street urchins. They're all on the run and in the crosshairs when Ford arrives and picks up his friend’s trail. What no one is prepared for, however, is a cataclysmic earthquake that hits the area with the impact of a meteor that nearly destroyed all life on earth more than 60 million years ago.

In WINSTON AND THE WINDSORS, Andrew Morton, one of the world’s best-known biographers and a leading authority on celebrity, presents a meticulously researched joint biography of Winston Churchill and the House of Windsor. Throughout the course of his career and life, Churchill’s connection to the Windsors fluctuated wildly. At times, he was the royal family’s trusted confidant. At others, he was their leading antagonist. In exploring the complex dynamic between the two, Morton argues that, regardless of whether the attitudes of the royal family were warm or icy toward Churchill, their relationship was central to the 20th-century history of the British monarchy.

Women can be heroes. When 20-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. But the real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

NYPD Detective Declan Shaw gets a call: How fast can you get to the Beresford building on Central Park West? In the tower apartment, Shaw finds two people. One of them is famous. One of them is dead. And only one of them knows the ending to this story. Is it the victim or the killer?