Adult

In THE FAMILY OF JESUS, Karen Kingsbury will make you laugh, cry, and ultimately care more deeply about the Bible by helping you grasp the truths in Scripture not just with your mind, but with your heart. The characters in these short stories were among those closest to Jesus --- Mary, Joseph, Jesus’ brother James, John the Baptist, Zechariah and Elizabeth. Kingsbury intersperses fictional details anchored in Scripture with historical and theological insights and questions that will guide soul-searching and reflection.

Grace. We want to domesticate it, calm it down, and stuff it into a blue blazer and a pair of khakis. But biblical grace --- or charis --- doesn’t like to settle down. Grace is a dangerous topic because the Bible is a dangerous book. Charis flows from the Preston Sprinkle’s half dozen years teaching the Old Testament to college students. He shows how every character, every event, every single page from the Old Testament bleeds with grace.

Dad, you love your kids to pieces. But how to talk to them --- and about what --- can be one of the big mysteries in raising children. Bestselling author and veteran dad Jay Payleitner comes to the rescue with a carload of great ideas about communicating those all-important life values to your kids to help them thrive. Jay's straightforward, man-friendly advice and stories form a terrific, confidence-boosting resource for building lifelong positives into your family.

Joan of Kent, renowned beauty and cousin to King Edward III, is destined for a politically strategic marriage. As the king begins a long dynastic struggle to claim the crown of France, plunging England into the Hundred Years’ War, he negotiates her betrothal to a potential ally and heir of a powerful lordship. But Joan, haunted by nightmares of her father’s execution at the hands of her treacherous royal kin, fears the king’s selection and is not resigned to her fate.

A decade has passed since the city of Pittsburgh was reduced to ash. While the rest of the world has moved on, survivor John Dominic Blaxton remains obsessed with the past. Grieving for his wife and unborn child who perished in the blast, Dominic relives his lost life by immersing in the Archive --- a fully interactive digital reconstruction of Pittsburgh, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the places they remember and the people they loved.

August Shroeder, a burned-out teacher, has been sober since his 19-year-old son died. Every year he’s spent the summer on the road, but making it to Yellowstone this year means everything. The plan had been to travel there with his son, but now August is making the trip with Philip’s ashes instead. An unexpected twist of fate lands August with two extra passengers for his journey, two half-orphans with nowhere else to go.

Hannah frantically drives through the night --- her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?

1985. A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets. In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer --- invaluable details of his government’s espionage plans in return for asylum. It’s an offer they can’t pass up…if it’s genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It’s a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man --- Jack Ryan.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is one of the best loved novels of the 20th century. But for the last 50 years, the book’s celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation --- and a great friendship.