Adult

Rob Spillman --- the award-winning, charismatic co-founding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine --- has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. After an unsettled youth moving between divorced parents in disparate cities, Spillman would eventually find his way into the literary world of New York City, only to abandon it to return to Berlin just months after the Wall came down. Twenty-five and newly married, Spillman and his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, moved to the anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman soon discovered he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.

In a collection of essays, Harrison captures moments and impulses that shape a family. In “Keeping Virgil,” Harrison reflects on the loss of her father-in-law and how he managed to repair something her own father had broken. In “Holiday Lies,” she describes the uneasy but necessary task of lying to her children about Santa Claus and the Tooth fairy. In “Mini-Me,” she writes about the birth of her youngest daughter. In “True Crime,” she writes for the first time in almost two decades since THE KISS, about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was.

After spending the war years in a Canadian internment camp, 13-year-old Aya Shimamura and her father are barred from returning home to the west coast. Grieving the loss of Aya’s mother, they move back to Tokyo, where Aya’s father struggles to find work. Meanwhile, Aya is alienated and bullied at school for being foreign. When a rumor surfaces that General MacArthur might help citizens in need, Aya's classmate, Fumi, asks her to write a letter asking him to find her beloved sister. With no response, the girls take matters into their own hands, venturing into the dark and dangerous underside of Tokyo’s Ginza district.

Beth Swahn, a young lawyer, makes a rookie mistake when she believes her client. Because of her naïveté, Leonard Sloane, president of a U.S. division of C. K. Leung’s Chinese conglomerate, has absconded to the Caribbean with his banker girlfriend and 70 million dollars of the judgment money. While attempting to retrieve Leung’s money and save her firm from bankruptcy, she falls for Sloane’s handsome son, and his torn between her attraction for him and fear that he may be involved in the theft.

Mary Russell is used to dark secrets --- her own, and those of her famous partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes. Trust is a thing slowly given, but over the course of a decade together, the two have forged an indissoluble bond. And what of the other person to whom Russell has opened her heart: the couple’s longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson? Russell’s faith and affection are suddenly shattered when a man arrives on the doorstep claiming to be Mrs. Hudson’s son. What Samuel Hudson tells Russell cannot possibly be true, yet she believes him --- as surely as she believes the threat of the gun in his hand. In a devastating instant, everything changes.

On an unseasonably warm spring day in 1924, 22-year-old Jane Fairchild, a maid at an English country house, meets with her secret lover, the young heir of a neighboring estate. He is about to be married to a woman more befitting his social status, and the time has come to end the affair --- but events unfold in ways Jane could never have predicted. As the narrative moves back and forth across the 20th century, what we know and understand about Jane --- about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees and remembers --- expands with every page.

When Woodrow Cain leaves North Carolina for New York City, he also leaves behind a wife who had left him, a daughter in the care of his sister, and a career as a police officer marred by questions surrounding his partner’s murder. He gets a job with the NYPD --- hoping to start anew --- but comes into contact with a man who calls himself Danzinger. He speaks five languages and has the appearance of a “crackpot,” yet he is the only person who can help Cain identity a body just found floating in the Hudson. Who is this mysterious man, and how does he know so much about Cain? The more Cain and Danzinger investigate, the nearer they come to the center of a citywide web of traitorous corruption from which neither of them may get out alive.

LAB GIRL is a collection of stories detailing acclaimed scientist, Hope Jahren’s childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and father, how she found sanctuary in science and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”, the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries of scientific work. At the core of the book is her relationship with Bill, a brilliant and wounded man who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the US and back again, over the Atlantic to the North Pole and tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.

The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack Dana takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin. But events beyond Jack's control intervene: Kerry loses her life in circumstances that contradict everything Jack thinks he knew about her. Soon death begins to stalk Jack himself. It is impossible not to recognize in its drumbeat the machinations of Abner Brown, the man who orchestrated Harry's demise.