Adult

Late summer, 1921: Disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean has spent the past two years on the carnival circuit performing the dangerous “hangman’s drop” and taking on all comers in nightly challenge bouts. But when he and his cardsharp wife, Moira, are marooned in the wilds of Oregon, Pepper accepts an offer to return to the world of wrestling as a trainer for Garfield Taft, a down-and-out African American heavyweight contender in search of a comeback and a shot at the world title. At the training camp in rural Montana, Pepper and Moira soon realize that nothing is what it seems: not Taft, the upcoming match or the training facility itself.

When a former high school cheerleader is found walking a back road completely engulfed in flames, the entire state of Mississippi focuses on Tibbehah county, wanting answers. The light soon shines on several people: the girl’s father, a worthless drunk; a pair of teenage thugs with grand ambitions to control north Mississippi; and a red-headed truck stop madam who has her own problems. As Quinn Colson and acting Sheriff Lillie Virgil uncover old secrets and new lies, the entire town turns against them, and they learn that the most dangerous enemies may be the ones you trust most.

Ruso and Tilla's excitement at arriving in Rome with their new baby daughter is soon dulled by their discovery that the grand facades of polished marble mask an underworld of corrupt landlords and vermin-infested tenements. Ruso thinks he has been offered a reputable medical practice only to find that his predecessor has fled, leaving a dead man in a barrel on the doorstep and the warning, “Be careful who you trust.” Distracted by the body and his efforts to help a friend win the hand of a rich young heiress, Ruso makes a grave mistake, causing him to question both his competence and his integrity.

Madeleine is trapped in an unhappy marriage and a life she never wanted. When she finds a diary detailing her grandmother Margie’s bold, romantic trip to Jazz Age Paris, she meets the grandmother she never knew. Despite her unhappiness, when Madeleine’s marriage is threatened, she stays with her critical, disapproving mother. In that unlikely place, shaken by the revelation of a long-hidden family secret and inspired by her grandmother’s bravery, Madeleine creates her own Parisian summer. Margie and Madeleine’s stories intertwine to explore the joys and risks of living life on our own terms, defying the rules that hold us back from our dreams, and becoming the people we are meant to be.

Louisa Clark takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life and is pretty sure he cannot live the way he is. Louisa refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.

The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal grew out of a sudden fit of inspiration. Proponents didn't just dream; they built a 360-mile waterway entirely by hand and largely through wilderness. As excitement crackled down its length, the canal became the scene of the most striking outburst of imagination in American history. It made New York the financial capital of America and brought the modern world crashing into the frontier. Men and women saw God face to face, gained and lost fortunes, and reveled in a period of intense spiritual creativity. HEAVEN’S DITCH illuminates the spiritual and political upheavals along this "psychic highway" from its opening in 1825 through 1844.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut captures the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, the novel focuses on the details of a young woman’s daily experience --- rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.

Thirty-year-old Barbara Weaver was content to live as the Amish have for centuries, but her husband, Eli, wanted a life beyond horses and buggies. When Barbara was found dead, shot in the chest at close range, all eyes were on Eli…and his mistress, a Conservative Mennonite named Barb Raber. The Weaver case marked only the third time an Amish man was suspected of killing his wife in more than 200 years in America. But the investigation raised almost as many questions as it answered: Was Barb Raber the one who fired the fatal shot? Or was Barbara Weaver dead before someone entered the house? What did Eli’s friends, family and church really know about him? And will life among the “Plain People” ever be the same?

After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, Louisa Clark is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started. Thanks to the members of the Moving On support group, Lou meets strong, capable Sam Fielding, a paramedic whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future.

Self-educated and brown-skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother’s laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for “colored music” and dreams of life as a big city radio star. These teenaged girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father’s inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what’s rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial strife and violence.