Adult

When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert’s life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale. But it didn’t get easier. Robert carried with him the difficult dual nature of his existence, “fronting” in Yale and at home.

MY SUNSHINE AWAY unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when 15-year-old Lindy Simpson --- free spirit, track star and belle of the block --- experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear --- fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world. In ON IMMUNITY, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body.

One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. STATION ELEVEN charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a debut novel that follows three generations of family --- fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery and love.

Lakshmi Patil is lost in the sadness of her life. Dr. Maggie Bose is adrift and in danger of ruining her marriage. Brought together by Lakshmi’s suicide attempt, both women begin to see life from a new perspective, and realize their lives are more than what they perceive and can be more than what they thought. They begin their relationship as patient and doctor, and end up in a weird quasi-friendship from which neither can walk away.

For generations, the Lenore women have manufactured a perfume unlike any other, and guarded the unique and mysterious ingredients. Their perfumery, hidden in the quiet rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, creates one special elixir that secretly sells for millions of dollars to the world’s most powerful. However, Willow, the coolly elegant Lenore family matriarch, is experiencing strange spells of forgetfulness. Her daughter, Mya, is plotting a coup. A client is threatening blackmail. And most ominously, the unique flowers used in their perfume are dying.

RIDE AROUND SHININGconcerns the idle preoccupations, and later machinations, of a transplanted Portlander named Jess—a nobody from nowhere with a Master’s degree and a gig delivering takeout. He parlays the latter, along with a few lies, into a job as a chauffeur for an up-and-coming Trail Blazer named Calyph West and his young wife, Antonia. In striving to make himself indispensable to them, he causes Calyph to have a season-ending knee injury, then brings about the couple’s estrangement, before positioning himself at last as their perverse savior.

After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral 11-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face to face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.

When single father Danny Goodman suddenly finds himself unable to afford his daughter’s private school, he has no one to turn to for financial support. Until Thomas Galvin, the father of his daughter’s new best friend, offers to lend him money. However, the moment the money is wired into Danny’s account, the DEA comes knocking on his door. Danny faces an impossible choice: an indictment for accepting drug money that he can’t afford to fight in court, or an unthinkably treacherous undercover assignment helping the government get close to his new family friend.