Adult

Cara Rutledge returns to her Southern home on the idyllic Isle of Palms. Only through reconnecting with family, friends and the rhythms of the lowcountry can Cara release the hold of the past and open herself to the possibility of a new love, career and hope for the future. Meanwhile, her niece Linnea, a recent college graduate, leaves her historic home in Charleston and heads to her aunt’s beach house. On the island, she is part of the freer, natural ocean lifestyle she loves, rejoining the turtle team, learning to surf and falling in love. Remembering the lessons of her beloved grandmother, Lovie, Linnea rediscovers a meaningful purpose to her life and finds the courage she needs to break from tradition.

On the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation’s two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express. Daring young men galloped over a vast and unforgiving landscape, etching an irresistible tale that passed into myth almost instantly. Equally an improbable success and a business disaster, the Pony Express came and went in just 18 months, but not before uniting and captivating a nation on the brink of being torn apart. WEST LIKE LIGHTNING is the first major history of the Pony Express to put its birth, life and legacy into the full context of the American story.

It is 1945, and London is still reeling from years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, seemingly abandoned by their parents, have been left in the care of an enigmatic figure they call The Moth. They suspect he may be a criminal and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect and educate (in rather unusual ways) the siblings. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And how should Nathaniel and Rachel feel when their mother returns without their father after months of silence --- explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand during that time.

Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the west coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier who has come alone to surf. Living lives that never stop moving, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other. In an effort to build his firm, Christopher leads a life full of speed and ambition with little time for Helen and even less when he suspects his business partner of illegal activity. Meanwhile, Helen searches far and wide for reporting work that will “take a bite out of her soul” --- refugees in Calais, a mountain climber in Chamonix, an orphaned circus performer in Cuba.

Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help --- Priscilla Johnson --- and begs her to come home with them as her son’s nanny. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son.

You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night. So begins SPRING, the recommencement of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one that unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.

Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in THE SOUL OF AMERICA, Jon Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history.

Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code. When Vin decides to enter one of the caskets himself, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that raises fundamental questions about reality, free will and the meaning of a human life.

Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and 1960s, so close that they shared the same nickname. Raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving but unstable mother, they were fatherless, mixed-race and utterly inseparable, devoted to one another. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent, nearly fatal betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever --- until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hana's lonely Manhattan doorstep with a secret that will change everything.

Allie is still recovering from the loss of her family’s beloved waterfront restaurant when she loses her second husband to a highway accident. Meanwhile, Joseph has been adrift for many years, unable to come to terms with the trauma of his Vietnam War experiences. When he discovers a mother and her two small children lost in the forest, he helps them get back to their home in Florida. There he will return to his own hometown --- and witness the accident that launches a bittersweet reunion with his childhood sweetheart, Allie. When Joseph offers to help Allie rebuild her restaurant, it seems the flame may reignite --- until a 45-year-old secret from the past begins to emerge, threatening to destroy all hope for their second chance at love.