Adult

As the 20th century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They’ve even landed a starring role in a documentary about “new people” like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her --- yet she can’t stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows.

Betrayed by her family after taking the fall for a friend, Lee finds refuge in a cooperative of runaways holed up in an abandoned building they call the Crystal Castle. But the façade of the Castle conceals a far more sinister agenda, one hatched by a society of fanatical men set on decoding a series of powerful secrets hidden in plain sight. And they believe Lee holds the key to it all. Aided by Tomi, a young hacker and artist with whom she has struck a wary alliance, Lee escapes into the unmapped corners of the city. But the deeper she goes underground, the more tightly she finds herself bound in the strange web she’s trying to elude. Desperate and out of options, Lee steps from the shadows to face who is after her --- and why.

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.

The boys are at the top of their theatrical game. Their only real competition for the hearts and gold of the public are the Shadowshapers. Nevertheless, the past years of financial struggle, since their manager proved to have been embezzling, have taken a toll on the group’s creativity. A shocking event brings all that to an end and brings Touchstone back together to create a play that will rattle the ceilings and shatter all the glass in palaces and theaters alike. An ancient conflict will come to a violent conclusion on stage, and all the gods will be watching.

Charlie Henry, co-owner of a pawnshop and Iraq war veteran, has, for the most part, settled into his somewhat quieter life in Albuquerque. He is invited to attend the dedication of a memorial in a park, where he, other local heroes and first responders are to be honored for their military accomplishments and dedication to the community. But trouble always seems to follow Charlie. When gunshots ring out, barely missing Charlie and hitting the man next to him, it’s clear that a dangerous madman is on the loose. More shots are fired, and two more veterans are injured.

The first drug overdose comes just after midnight, when a young woman dies on the dirty floor of a gas station bathroom. To the people of the small town of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, it is just another tragedy. But then there is another overdose. And another. And another. Prosecutor Bell Elkins soon realizes that her Appalachian hometown is facing its starkest challenge yet: a day of constant heroin overdoses from a batch tainted with a lethal tranquilizer. While the clock ticks and the bodies fall, Bell and her colleagues desperately track the source of the deadly drug --- and engage in fierce debates over the wisdom of expending precious resources to save the lives of self-destructive addicts.

Over a span of 20 years, four boys have been kidnapped from their bedrooms, suffocated and buried nearby in a shallow grave. Serial killer or coincidence? That’s the question investigative reporter Maxine Revere sets out to answer when an old friend begs her to help exonerate his wife, who has been charged with their son’s recent murder. But Max can do little to help because the police and D.A. won’t talk to her --- they think they have the right woman. Instead, Max turns her attention to three similar cold cases. If she can solve them, she might be able to help her friend.

In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall with an injury that almost cost him his leg. When the India Office recruits him for an expedition to fetch quinine --- essential for the treatment of malaria --- from deep within Peru, he knows it's a terrible idea; nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who's made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is eager to escape the strange events plaguing his family's crumbling estate, so he sets off, against his better judgment, for the edge of the Amazon. There he meets Raphael, a priest who turns out to be the key to a legacy left by generations of Tremayne explorers before him, one that will prove more valuable than quinine, and far more dangerous.

In THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva --- as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of ROLAND BARTHES FOR DUMMIES). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.”

Joan Ashby is a brilliant and intense literary sensation acclaimed for her explosively dark and singular stories. When she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin’s delight, his instant betrayal of their pact (“work is paramount, absolutely no children”). She then makes a fateful, selfless decision to embrace her unintentional family. Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.