Adult

As soon as she learns that MGM is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece, THE WIZARD OF OZ, for the screen, Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book. But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of “Over the Rainbow,” Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story. Judy reminds Maud of a young girl she cared for and tried to help in South Dakota, a dreamer who never got her happy ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her --- the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy.

A century apart, two women seek their mothers in Pleasant Valley, Wisconsin. In 1908, Thea’s search leads her to an insane asylum with dark secrets. In modern-day Wisconsin, Heidi Lane answers the call of a mother battling dementia. Both confront the legendary curse of Misty Wayfair --- and are entangled in a web of danger that entwines them across time.

Previously published as YOU KNOW YOU WANT THIS, “CAT PERSON” AND OTHER STORIES explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a 10-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire --- a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, on which she discovers an enrichening passion for music. Yet after she marries, her husband insists the family emigrate to America --- and loses her piano in the process. In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, 26-year-old Clara Lundy is burdened by the last gift her father gave her before he and her mother died in a terrible house fire: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Now a talented and independent auto mechanic, Clara’s career is put on hold when she breaks her hand trying to move the piano, and in sudden frustration she decides to sell it. Only in discovering the identity of the buyer --- and the secret history of her piano --- will Clara be set free to live the life of her choosing.

Wealthy, privileged and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the 20th century: her son Winston. But Jennie --- reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire --- lived an outrageously modern life all her own, filled with controversy, passion, tragedy and triumph. Breathing new life into Jennie’s legacy and the glittering world over which she reigned, Stephanie Barron's novel paints a portrait of the difficult --- and sometimes impossible --- balance among love, freedom and obligation, while capturing the spirit of an unforgettable woman, one who altered the course of history.

Young policeman Ari Thór tries to solve a 50-year-old murder when new evidence surfaces. But the case proves difficult in a town where no one wants to know the truth, where secrets are a way of life. He's assisted by Ísrún, a news reporter in Reykjavik who is investigating an increasingly chilling case of her own. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight. With a stalker on the loose, and the town in quarantine, the past just might come back to haunt them.

Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year-old girl, vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. On April 3, 1990, Jack and Molly Went’s daughter, Sammy, disappeared from their Kentucky home. Jack did his best to raise and protect his other daughter and son while Molly found solace in her faith. The Church of the Light Within, a Pentecostal fundamentalist group, provided that faith. Now, with proof that she and Sammy are in fact the same person, Kim travels to America to reunite with a family she never knew she had.