Adult

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.

When Britain began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule and any words that disparaged the government were a punishable crime. So when a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, it was the paper’s publisher, John Peter Zenger, who took the fall. Although Zenger was merely a front man for Cosby’s true adversaries, he was jailed for the better part of a year and faced a jury in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials.

Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy, Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav’s family, tracing the roots of his mother’s anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men --- one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist --- THE GUSTAV SONATA explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed and regained over a lifetime.

Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the 20th century was home to a large African American community. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms. But then in September 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror. National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia.

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. In AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS, Alan Taylor gives us a different creation story. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor’s Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s mainland colonies. Conflict ignited on the frontier, where settlers clamored to push west into Indian lands against British restrictions, and in the seaboard cities, where commercial elites mobilized riots and boycotts to resist British tax policies.

1956 was one of the most remarkable years of the 20th century. All across the globe, ordinary people spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, and took up arms in an attempt to win their freedom. Simon Hall takes the long view of the year's events --- putting them in their post-war context and looking toward their influence on the counterculture movements of the 1960s --- to tell the story of the year's epic, global struggles from the point of view of the freedom fighters, dissidents, and countless ordinary people who worked to overturn oppressive and authoritarian systems in order to build a brave new world.

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood --- where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon, and people call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But behind that cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when a chatty young couple with two daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unexpected friendship which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

Maribeth Klein is a harried working mother who’s so busy taking care of her husband and twins that she doesn’t even realize she’s had a heart attack. Surprised to discover that her recuperation seems to be an imposition on those who rely on her, Maribeth does the unthinkable: she packs a bag and leaves. But, as is often the case, once we get where we’re going, we see our lives from a different perspective. Far from the demands of family and career, and with the help of liberating new friendships, Maribeth is able to own up to secrets she has been keeping from herself and those she loves.

New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history --- and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country? As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.