Adult

Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for 25 years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. Maintaining this diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.

Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her --- running her detective agency and fighting off sleep deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bébé. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée concerning Aimée’s father’s unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no? The dying woman’s secret is even more dangerous than her son realized.

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY followed its unassuming hero on an incredible journey as he traveled the length of England on foot --- a journey spurred by a simple letter from his old friend, Queenie Hennessy, writing from a hospice to say goodbye. Setting pen to paper, Queenie makes a journey of her own, a journey that is even bigger than Harold’s. One word after another, she promises to confess long-buried truths, including the devastating secret she has kept from Harold for all these years.

As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas. Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, the remaining rooms of which he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives.

In the winter of 1966, Katherine Reid moves to an isolated cabin deep in Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains, where she plans to spend her time in peaceful solitude. Twenty-year-old Vietnam veteran Danny lives not far from Katherine’s cabin. Haunted by war and enclosed by walls of moldering books, he becomes fixated on Katherine. What starts as cautious observation grows to obsession. When these two souls collide, the passion that ignites between them is all-consuming --- and increasingly dangerous.

A 10-member wedding party is kidnapped in front of the groom’s family mansion in Mexico City. The perpetrator is a small-time gangster who wants nothing more than to make his crew part of a major cartel and hopes that this crime will be his big break. Jessica Juliet Wolfe is a bridesmaid and close friend of the bride who hails from a family of notorious outlaws that has branches on both sides of the border. When the Wolfes learn of Jessie’s abduction, they fear that the kidnappers will kill the captives after receiving the ransom --- unless they rescue Jessie first.

On October 26, 1881, Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest. Thirty seconds and 30 bullets later, three officers were wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt. Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral would soon become central to American beliefs about the Old West.

Molly Murphy Sullivan’s husband, Daniel, a captain in the New York City police force, is chasing a murderer whose victims have nothing in common --- except for the taunting notes that are delivered to him after each murder. And when Daniel receives a note immediately after Molly and her young son, Liam, are in a terrible train crash, Daniel and Molly both begin to fear that maybe Molly herself was the target.

Death sets the plot of DARK ROOMS in motion: the murder of 16-year-old Nica Baker. The crime is quickly solved --- a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confession --- but memory and instinct won’t allow Nica’s older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.

The ties of family make for uncomfortable binds in Thomas McGuane’s first short story collection in nine years. A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother’s antics before she slipped into dementia. A father’s outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger’s offer of easy money.