Adult

When Kelley Paul arrived on the Rhodes College campus in 1981, she immediately bonded with six women. Three decades of intimate friendship later, Kelley celebrates these relationships and the women who inspired them all. She tells their stories and those of their grandmothers, mothers and sisters, providing a microcosm of women raising families and building lives in 20th- and 21st-century America. The extraordinary lives of Kelley's and her friends' role models are honored in this lovely book that offers oral history along with classic poetry, art and photography.

THE TURNER HOUSE is a domestic drama of African-American parents and the 13 children they brought up in Detroit. Angela Flournoy’s debut novel focuses on three of the adult children: Cha-Cha, the oldest, who has been plagued by visions of haints (apparitions); Lelah, the youngest, who has a gambling problem; and Troy, a cop who resorts to underhanded tactics to try to sell the family home, which is worth far less than its mortgage.

In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, 70 years ago, in the spring of 1945. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, also known as BEK, is one of the most celebrated and admired cartoonists in America. I WAS A CHILD is the story of his childhood in words and drawings, in which he recalls growing up in New Jersey with his parents and two older brothers. It would seem like a conventional childhood, although Kaplan’s anecdotes are accompanied by his signature drawings of family outings and life at home --- road trips, milk crates, hamsters, ashtrays, wigs, a platypus and much more.

Ben and Caroline Tierney and their two young boys are hoping to start over. Ben has hit a dead end with his new novel, Caroline has lost her banking job, and eight-year-old Charlie is being bullied at his Manhattan school. When Ben inherits land in the village of Swannhaven, in a remote corner of upstate New York, the Tierneys believe it’s just the break they need, and they leave behind all they know to restore a sprawling estate. But as Ben uncovers Swannhaven’s chilling secrets and Charlie ventures deeper into the surrounding forest, strange things begin to happen. The Tierneys realize that their new home isn’t the fresh start they needed...and that the village’s haunting saga is far from over.

It is 1968. Riley is 13, and her brother Mick has gone missing in Vietnam. She struggles to understand and accept, but the world she has always known has fallen apart. At 16, she meets a boy from the reservation. He becomes her first love and perhaps her deliverance, except that he, too, is sent to fight, unaware that Riley is carrying his child. Riley sets off then, in search of answers, of clues, of a way to be in the world.

Born in a brothel, Ruth doesn’t expect much for herself beyond abuse. While her sister’s beauty affords a certain degree of comfort, Ruth’s harsh looks set her on a path of drudgery. That is until she meets pugilist patron George Dryer and discovers her true calling --- fighting bare knuckles in the prize rings of Bristol. Scarred by smallpox, stifled by her social and romantic options, and trapped in twisted power games with her wastrel brother, manor-born Charlotte is desperate for an escape. After a disastrous, life-changing fight sidelines Ruth, the two women meet, and it alters the perspectives of both of them.

Seventeen-year-old Max has a terminally ill grandmother and is having trouble handling it. That, plus his OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes, makes him a high risk patient. He can't turn off the mental rituals he needs to perform every 15 minutes that keep him calm. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found, and Dr. Eric Parrish goes looking for him. Next, a member of Eric’s own staff turns on him in a trumped-up charge of sexual harassment. Is this chaos all random? Or is someone systematically trying to destroy Eric's life?

At the turn of the 19th century, Frank Leong, a fabulously wealthy shipping industrialist, moves his family from China to the island of Oahu. But when Frank is murdered, his family is thrown into a perilous downward spiral. Left to rebuild in their patriarch’s shadow, the surviving members try their hand at a new, ordinary life, vowing to bury their gilded past. Now the Leongs’ survival rests with young Theresa, Frank’s only grandchild, the heir apparent to her ancestors’ punishing knots.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Washington, D.C. found itself caught between warring sides in a four-year battle that would determine the future of the United States. With their husbands, brothers and fathers marching off to war, the women of Washington, D.C. joined the cause as well. Cokie Roberts chronicles their increasing independence, their political empowerment, their indispensable role in keeping the Union unified through the war, and in helping heal it once the fighting was done.