Adult

Anna Łania is just seven years old when the Germans take her father, a linguistics professor, during their purge of intellectuals in Poland. Then Anna meets the Swallow Man. He is a mystery, strange and tall, a skilled deceiver with more than a little magic up his sleeve. And when the soldiers in the streets look at him, they see what he wants them to see. Over the course of their travels together, Anna and the Swallow Man will dodge bombs, tame soldiers and even, despite their better judgment, make a friend. But in a world gone mad, everything can prove dangerous. Even the Swallow Man.

Hannah Swensen and her fiance, Ross, travel to New York City for the Food Channel’s dessert chef contest. They get a taste of the Big Apple before Hannah wins the Hometown Challenge, and the producers bring all the contestants to Lake Eden to tape the remainder of the show. The contest takes a turn for the worse when celebrity chef and judge Alain Duquesne is found stabbed to death in the Lake Eden Inn’s walk-in cooler. Now Hannah not only has lost her advantage, she’ll have to solve a mystery with more layers than a five-tiered wedding cake.

The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront. Soon enough, Sultan has quit his office job to bartend full-time for Sunny Balzano, the bar’s owner. A wild-haired Tony Bennett lookalike with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, Sunny is truly one of a kind. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming city, SUNNY'S NIGHTS is a loving and singular portrait of the dream experience we’re all searching for every time we walk into a bar, and an enchanting memoir of an unlikely and abiding friendship.

When Nichole discovers that her husband, Jake, has been unfaithful, the illusion of her perfect life is shattered. Then she meets Rocco, a dedicated father and thoughtful friend. But just as their relationship begins to blossom, Jake wagers everything on winning Nichole back --- including their son Owen’s happiness. Leanne has quietly ignored her husband’s cheating for decades, but is jolted into action by the echo of Nichole’s all-too-familiar crisis. She finds it difficult to resist the overtures of Nikolai, a charming baker from Ukraine, until an unexpected tragedy tests her commitments. 

One fateful night in Baja, Caroline’s husband convinces her to leave their two young daughters, Michelle and Samantha, alone in their hotel suite while the couple enjoys an anniversary dinner in the restaurant downstairs. But when they return, they discover that two-year-old Samantha has vanished without a trace. What follows are days, weeks and years of anguish for Caroline. She’s tormented by media attention that has branded her a cold, incompetent mother, while she struggles to save her marriage. Years later, a phone call plunges back into the still-raw heartbreak of her daughter’s disappearance, and the suspicions and inconsistencies surrounding a case long gone cold, Caroline doesn’t know whom or what to believe.

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country --- a country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that Russia poses to Europe. Through the lens of one country, Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust and more.

Psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware meets actress Zelda Chase when called upon to evaluate her five-year-old son, Ovid. Years later, he is unexpectedly reunited with Zelda when she is involuntarily committed after a bizarre psychotic episode. Shortly after her release, she is discovered dead on the grounds of a palatial Bel Air estate. Alex turns to his friend, LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, for help in finding out who ended Zelda’s broken life. At the same time, he is caught up in another quest: the search for her missing son. And when other victims vanish from the same upscale neighborhood, worry turns to terror.

Rebecca Wright has found her way out of grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the Internet dating site where she first met her husband. However, she has a persistent, strange sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter. Her husband Philip's decade-long dedication to the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you do not call a "time machine") has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or imagines.

He was once the kingpin's fixer, but after betraying him, Ulf is now the one his former boss wants fixed. Hiding out at the end of the line in northern Norway, Ulf lives among the locals. A mother and son befriend him, and their companionship stirs something deep in him that he thought was long dead. As he awaits the inevitable arrival of his murderous pursuers, he questions if redemption is at all possible or if, as he's always believed, “hope is a real bastard.”

In INTERIOR DARKNESS, Peter Straub explores the deepest, shadow-filled corners of his imagination. His world is made up of damaged people --- from the righteous to the depraved, from the working class to the wealthy. No one and no place is safe from the darkness that he reveals. In “Blue Rose,” an adolescent sociopath inflicts secret violence on his younger brother; in “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a stern estate lawyer hires a pair of "Private Detectives Extraordinaire" to investigate and seek revenge on his unfaithful wife; and in “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” a man and his much younger lover explore their decadent and increasingly sinister fantasies aboard a luxurious yacht on the remotest stretch of the Amazon River.