Adult

In this revealing collection of essays written in his irreverent, hilarious and self-deprecating voice, Kunal Nayyar (Raj from “The Big Bang Theory”) traces his journey from a little boy in New Delhi who mistakes an awkward first kiss for a sacred commitment, gets nosebleeds chugging Coca-Cola to impress other students, and excels in the sport of badminton, to the confident, successful actor on the set of TV’s most-watched sitcom since “Friends.”

Oliver Otway Orme --- a man equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating --- is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never been caught…until now. Unfortunately, the purloined possession in question is the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend. Fearing the consequences, Ollie has fled --- not only from his mistress, his home and his wife, but from the very impulse to paint, and from his own demons. He sequesters himself in the house where he was born and sets about trying to uncover the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did.

For 16 years, Whitey Bulger eluded the long reach of the law. But finally, in 2011, he was arrested in southern California and returned to Boston, where he was tried and convicted of racketeering and murder. T. J. English covered the trial at close range, interviewing Bulger’s associates as well as lawyers, former federal agents, and even members of the jury in the backyards and barrooms of Whitey’s world. In WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED, English offers a startlingly revisionist account of Bulger’s story.

When Amory Clay was born, her disappointed father gave her an androgynous name and announced the birth of a son. But this daughter was not one to let others define her; Amory became a woman who accepted no limits to what that could mean, and, from the time she picked up her first camera, one who would record her own version of events. Moving freely between London and New York, between photojournalism and fashion photography, and between the men who love her on complicated terms, Amory establishes her reputation as a risk taker and a passionate life traveler.

A rare outburst from Caroline Jacobs has awakened something in her --- a realization that the roots of her tirade can be traced back to when her best friend very publicly betrayed her. So Caroline decides to go back to her home town and tell off her childhood friend. She busts her daughter out of school, and the two set off to deliver the perfect comeback…some 25 years later. But nothing goes as planned. Long-buried secrets rise to the surface, and Caroline finds that she has to face much more than one old, bad best friend.

GOD’S KINGDOM explores the Kinneson family through the coming of age of the heir, Jim, and its rich and complicated history. Earnest and innocent, Jim grows curious about the unspoken "trouble in the family" that haunts his father and grandfather. Layer by layer, tale by tale, sorting out fact from deliberately obscured legend, Jim explores the Kinnesons' long relationship with others in the Kingdom, culminating in a discovery that forever changes his life and place in that world.

In 2066, a Caltech intern notices an anomaly from a space telescope --- something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don’t decelerate. Spaceships do. A flurry of top-level government meetings produce the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built the ship is at least 100 years ahead of our technology, and whoever can get their hands on it will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. The race is on, and a remarkable adventure begins. Soon a hastily thrown-together crew finds its strength and wits tested against adversaries of this earth and beyond.

Three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. Found within feet of a man’s body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing 25 years earlier. Not only does that crime predate Jesse Stone’s arrival in Paradise, but the dead girls were close friends of Jesse’s right hand, Officer Molly Crane. And things become even more complicated when one of the dead girls’ mothers returns to Paradise to bury her daughter and is promptly murdered.

For more than 40 years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue --- from the groundbreaking THE DAY OF THE JACKAL to the prescient THE KILL LIST. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers, the shadowy Nazi underground movement, or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched. But what most people don’t know is that some of his greatest stories of intrigue have been in his own life.