Adult

When Nora takes the train from London to visit her sister in the countryside, she expects to find her waiting at the station, or at home cooking dinner. But when she walks into Rachel’s familiar house, what she finds is entirely different: Her sister has been the victim of a brutal murder. Stunned and adrift, Nora finds she can’t return to her former life. An unsolved assault in the past has shaken her faith in the police, and she can’t trust them to find her sister’s killer. Haunted by the murder and the secrets that surround it, Nora is under the harrow: distressed and in danger. As Nora’s fear turns to obsession, she becomes as unrecognizable as the sister her investigation uncovers.

Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in her memoir, she explores the toll that sexism takes on women’s lives, from the everyday to the existential. From subway gropings and imposter syndrome to sexual awakenings and motherhood, SEX OBJECT reveals the painful, embarrassing and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti’s adolescence and young adulthood in New York City.

In her 20s, Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing. Just like that, Jesse is gone forever. Emma quits her job and moves home in an effort to put her life back together. Years later, now in her 30s, she runs into an old friend, Sam, and finds herself falling in love again. When Emma and Sam get engaged, it feels like Emma’s second chance at happiness. That is, until Jesse is found. He is alive and has been trying all these years to come home to her. With a husband and a fiancé, Emma has to figure out who she is and what she wants, while trying to protect the ones she loves.

The first closing of the floodgates of the mammoth Dalles Dam on the Columbia River inundated the sacred falls and the Native American village at Celilo, which depended on the river’s magnificent fish. Nelson Queah --- Wasco Indian, war hero and passionate opponent of the dam --- watched helplessly as 10,000 years of tribal history and fishing tradition disappeared. That 1957 night, he vanished without a trace. Fifty years later, attorney Cal Claxton attends a commemoration of the flooding of the falls where he meets Winona Cloud, Queah’s granddaughter who has found a cache of letters at her grandmother’s home, letters Queah wrote to his wife before he vanished. They suggest foul play, not an accidental drowning.

David Hepworth, an ardent music fan and well-regarded critic, was 21 in 1971, the same age as many of the legendary artists who arrived on the scene. Taking us on a tour of the major moments, the events and songs of this remarkable year, Hepworth shows how musicians came together to form the perfect storm of rock and roll greatness, starting a musical era that would last longer than anyone predicted. Those who joined bands to escape things that lasted found themselves in a new age, its colossal start being part of the genre's staying power.

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan digs into his family’s past and finds within each generation the same abandonment, loss and silence in which he was raised. He shows his family members as both a part and a product of their time.

On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them 10 dark, challenging classics that don’t flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may “only” be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake.

When a high-ranking head of the migration board is found shot to death in his living room, there is no shortage of suspects. But no one expects to find mysterious, child-size fingerprints in this childless home. A few days later, the body of a derelict preteen is discovered, and with him, the murder weapon that killed the official. As she attends his autopsy, public prosecutor Jana Berzelius recognizes something familiar on his body. Cut deep into his flesh are initials that scream child trafficking and trigger in her a flash of memory from her own dark childhood. Now, to protect her own horrific but hidden past, she must find the real suspect behind these murders before the police do.

Arrested, charged and convicted of a brutal race-based killing, Henry Hays, a member of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America, was sentenced to death --- the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of the victim’s grieving mother, legendary civil rights lawyer Morris Dees filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.

Nearing 40, photographer Violet Hart is keenly aware that the time for artistic recognition is running out. When her lover, Bill, a Detroit mortician, needs a photograph of a body, she agrees to takes the picture. It’s an artistic success, and she persuades Bill to allow her to take pictures of some of his other “clients.” When Violet’s new portfolio is launched, she quickly strikes a deal, agreeing to produce a dozen pictures with a short deadline. These demands soon place Violet in the position of having to strain to meet her quota. As time runs out, how will she come up with enough subjects to photograph without losing her soul or her life in the process?