Adult

Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.

Homesick and alone, a teenaged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school. So she works long days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer. THE GIRL WHO WROTE LONELINESS is set against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s, and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war.

On her second night of college, Aspen Matis was raped by a fellow student. Dealing with a problem that has sadly become all too common on college campuses around the country, she stumbled through her first semester --- a challenging time made even harder by the coldness of her college's "conflict mediation" process. Her desperation growing, she made a bold decision: She would seek healing in the freedom of the wild, on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada.

When young journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to dig up quotes for the obituary of a legendary film producer, the man's eccentric daughter offers him entrée into the exclusive upper echelons of Hollywood society. Then he meets Matilda Duplaine, a beautiful and mysterious young woman, and the two begin a secret love affair. But what starts as an enchanted romance soon unravels a web of secrets and lies that could destroy their lives --- and the lives of everyone around them --- forever.

FINALE captures the crusading ideologies, blunders and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Ronald Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. At the center of it all --- but forever out of reach --- is Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children and the citizens who elected him.

THE CONQUERING TIDE encompasses the heart of the Pacific War --- the period between mid-1942 and mid-1944 --- when parallel Allied counteroffensives north and south of the equator washed over Japan's far-flung island empire like a "conquering tide," concluding with Japan's irreversible strategic defeat in the Marianas. It was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative and logistically complicated amphibious war in history, and it fostered bitter interservice rivalries, leaving wounds that even victory could not heal.

After 20 years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron Englund at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota: a cramped town whose 400 souls form a constellation of his childhood heartbreaks and hopes. When Aaron was 17, Dolores --- his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother --- vanished one night. And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing him to rethink his place in the world.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history: the Final Solution.

Chiara Ravello is about to flee occupied Rome when she locks eyes with a woman being herded on to a truck with her family. Claiming the woman's son, Daniele, as her own nephew, she demands his return. Several decades later, Chiara lives alone in Rome, a self-contained woman working as a translator. Always in the background is the shadow of Daniele, whose absence and the havoc he wrought on Chiara's world haunt her. Then she receives a phone call from a teenager claiming to be his daughter, and Chiara knows it is time to face up to the past.

In 2002, 32-year-old Selim Osman, the last descendant of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, flees Istanbul for New York. In a twist of fate he meets Hannah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and an artist striving to understand a father she barely knows. Unaware that the connection they share goes back centuries, the two feel an immediate pull to one another. But as their story intertwines with that of their ancestors, the heroic but ultimately tragic decision that bound two families centuries ago ripples into the future, threatening to tear Hannah and Selim apart.