Adult

A young man, Eric, drops out of college and lucks into a job with a small-town newspaper where he meets Anna --- a woman whose story will both haunt and inspire him for the rest of his life. Set in a remote North Dakota community in the last days before the Internet, THE WINTER IN ANNA unfolds around a romance that almost was, and a meditation on what constitutes a life well lived. In wistful, moving reflections, Eric looks back on his days with Anna and struggles to reconcile his memories with what he has since learned of her.

At the end of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape “sivilization” and “light out for the Territory.” In Robert Coover’s vision of their Western adventures, Tom decides he’d rather own civilization than escape it, leaving Huck “dreadful lonely” in a country of bandits, war parties and gold. In the course of his ventures, Huck reunites with old friends, facing hard truths and even harder choices.

ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR weaves tales of young women --- deeply flawed and intensely real --- who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own baggage --- whether it’s a string of horrible exes, a boyfriend with an annoying child, or an inability to be genuinely happy for a best friend --- they are united in their unrelenting suspicion that they deserve better.

What could cause a man, when all the stars of fortune are shining upon him, to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and bestselling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect. DeMarco knows --- or thinks he knows --- that Huston couldn't have been capable of murdering his family. But if Huston is innocent, why is he on the run? And does the half-finished manuscript he left behind contain clues to the mystery of his family's killer?

Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel’s beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle’s METAPHYSICS, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors --- animals, who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.

Mormon bishop’s wife Linda Wallheim couldn’t be more surprised to learn that her son, Kenneth, is engaged. Kenneth has left the Mormon church and met his fiancée, med student Naomi Carter, at a “Mormons Anonymous” meeting. Naomi was also raised Mormon, but her family belongs to a group that practices polygamy. Naomi’s father, Stephen, invites the Wallheims to visit the family compound. Though Stephen and his five wives seem to live normal, modern lives, Linda can’t shake the feeling that the family dynamics are off. When tensions on the compound escalate to murder, Linda delves into the many Carter family secrets to find the killer.

The body of a Vestal Virgin is found in the Tiber River, and then a senator is found having bled to death in his bath. As Roman authorities turn a strangely blind eye, Hortensia, the daughter of the capital’s most celebrated orator, begins investigating this trail of murders that leads straight into the dark heart of Rome. Despite her husband’s and father’s attempts to protect her, rebelling against the societal constraints to her sex, Hortensia plunges deeper into the corrupt underworld of the city. And only one man can save her from becoming the next victim: Lucrio, the ex-gladiator to whom she already owes her life. But Lucrio has secrets as well, and his past threatens to subsume both him and Hortensia.

THE RAIN IN PORTUGAL --- a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer --- sheds Billy Collins’ ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical --- “the dogs of Minneapolis… / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis” --- to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, here Collins contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head.

George Washington’s Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a “parting friend” to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. However, its message remains starkly relevant. In WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.

Stifled by a soul-crushing job, devastated by the death of her beloved brother, and lonely after the end of a 15-year marriage, Winifred Allen reluctantly agrees to join her three best friends on a high-octane getaway for their annual girls’ trip. What starts out as an invigorating hiking and rafting excursion soon becomes an all-too-real nightmare. A freak accident leaves the women stranded, separating them from their raft and everything they need to survive. A fire on the mountainside lures them to a ramshackle camp that appears to be their lifeline. But as Wini and her friends grasp the true intent of their supposed saviors, long-buried secrets emerge and lifelong allegiances are put to the test.