Adult

Lauren Gabriel spent many years of her childhood in foster homes, wishing her mother would come back for her. Now 20 years old, she still longs for a place that she can truly call home. When Lauren, a cashier, ends her shift one night, she finds herself driving aimlessly in order to avoid returning to her lonely apartment. And when she witnesses a car accident, she is suddenly pulled into the small town of Grandon to serve as a volunteer for the annual fundraiser for Glory’s Place, a center for single mothers and families who need assistance. Could this town and its people be the home she has always longed for?

The night a riot breaks out at the Capitol Theater movie house, you can bet that the Hunsenmeir sisters, Louise and Julia, are nearby. Known locally as Wheezie and Juts, the inimitable, irrepressible, distinctly freethinking sisters and their delightful circle of friends are coming of age in a shifting world --- and are determined to understand their place in it. Across town, the well-to-do Chalfonte siblings are preparing for the upcoming wedding of brother Curtis. But for youngest sister Celeste, the celebration brings about a change she never expected and a lesson about love she’ll not soon forget.

Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by Chinese all over the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers --- and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom. In outing Haili, Danlin is also provoking her powerful political allies, and he will need to draw on all of his journalistic cunning to come out of this investigation with his career --- and his life --- still intact.

In his time, Ulysses S. Grant was routinely grouped with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the “Trinity of Great American Leaders.” But the battlefield commander–turned–commander-in-chief fell out of favor in the 20th century. In AMERICAN ULYSSES, Ronald C. White argues that we need to once more revise our estimates of him in the 21st. He shows Grant to be a generous, curious, introspective man and leader --- a willing delegator with a natural gift for managing the rampaging egos of his fellow officers. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, long marginalized in the historic record, emerges in her own right as a spirited and influential partner.

Alfred Hitchcock rigorously controlled his public image, drawing certain carefully selected childhood anecdotes into full focus and blurring out all others. In this gripping short biography, Peter Ackroyd wrests the director’s chair back from the master of control to reveal a lugubriously jolly man fond of practical jokes, who smashed a once-used tea cup every morning to remind himself of the frailty of life. Iconic film stars make cameo appearances throughout Hitchcock’s story, just as the director did in his own films: Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart and, perhaps most famously of all, Tippi Hedren, who endures cuts and bruises from a fearsome flock of real birds.

At the height of Prohibition, Al Capone loomed large as Public Enemy Number One: his multimillion-dollar Chicago Outfit dominated organized crime, and law enforcement was powerless to stop him. But then came the fall: a legal noose tightened by the FBI, a conviction on tax evasion, a stint in Alcatraz. After his release, he returned to his family in Miami a much diminished man, living quietly until the ravages of his neurosyphilis took their final toll. Now, through rigorous research and exclusive access to Capone’s family, National Book Award–winning biographer Deirdre Bair cuts through the mythology, uncovering a complex character who was flawed and cruel but also capable of nobility.

Covert operative Mitch Rapp is used to winning. But thanks to several scheming and unscrupulous members of the Pakistani secret service, he finds himself chasing false leads from continent to continent in an effort to prevent Pakistani nukes from falling into the hands of terrorists. Together with friend and colleague Scott Coleman, Rapp struggles to prevent the loss of these lethal weapons. Soon it becomes alarmingly clear that the forces in Moscow are bent on fomenting even more chaos and turmoil in the Middle East, and Rapp must go deep into Iraqi territory, posing as an American ISIS recruit. There, he uncovers a plan much more dangerous and insidious than he ever expected --- one that could have far-reaching and catastrophic consequences.

In October 1815, after losing the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was banished to the island of Saint Helena. There, in one of the most remote places on earth, he lived out the final six years of his life. On this lonely island with no chance of escape, he found an unexpected ally: a spirited British girl named Betsy Balcombe, who lived on the island with her family. While Napoleon waited for his own accommodations to be built, the Balcombe family played host to the infamous exile, a decision that would have devastating consequences for them all.

Charlie Matheson died two years ago in a car accident. So how is a woman bearing a startling resemblance to her claiming to be back from the dead? Detective Mark Nelson is called in to investigate. Meanwhile, every year, Detective David Groves receives a birthday card for his murdered son. This year, though, the card bears a different message: I know who did it. Uncovering the facts will lead them all on a dark journey where they must face their own wrongs as well as those inflicted on the ones they love.

In JERUSALEM, Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them.