Adult

What kind of world are we building for ourselves? That’s the question Nicholas Carr tackles in this important, absorbing book. Digging behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, personalized apps and computerized medicine, Carr explores the hidden costs of allowing software to take charge of our jobs and our lives.

AN ITALIAN WIFE begins in turn-of-the-century Italy, when 14-year-old Josephine Rimaldi is forced into an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know or love who is about to depart for America, where she later joins him. Bound by tradition, Josephine gives birth to seven children. The last, Valentina, is conceived in passion, born in secret and given up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for her lost child, keeping her secret even as her other children go off to war, get married and make their own mistakes.

When a young girl with Down syndrome is sexually assaulted, human rights attorney Zoe Fleming joins Zambian police officer Joseph Kabuta in investigating the rape. Zoe and Joseph discover an unsettling connection between the girl and a powerful Zambian family who will stop at nothing to bury the truth. Opposed on all sides, they find themselves caught in a dangerous clash between the forces of justice and power.

Since Justin Campbell's disappearance four years ago, his family has been stuck in the grooves of grief. They are unable to comfort themselves, let alone one another. Then the impossible happens: Justin has been found only miles away, completely okay. Though the reunion is a miracle, Justin’s homecoming exposes the deep rifts that have diminished his family, the wounds they all carry that may never fully heal.

On a bright November day in 1963, President Kennedy is shot. That same day, Nell Benjamin receives a phone call with the news that her husband, the influential young editor of a literary magazine, has been murdered. She also receives information that threatens to turn her understanding of her marriage on its head. As the truths Nell discovers about her beloved husband upend the narrative of her life, she must question her own allegiance: to her career as a journalist, to her country, but most of all to the people she loves.

Wilbur and Orville Wright are two of the greatest innovators in history, and together they solved the centuries-old riddle of powered, heavier-than-air flight. Glenn Hammond Curtiss was the most talented machinist of his day --- tackling first the motorcycle and later turning his eyes toward the skies to become the fastest man aloft. But between the Wrights and Curtiss bloomed a poisonous rivalry and patent war so powerful that it shaped aviation in its early years and drove one of the three men to his grave.

Like all marriages, Elle and Logan Butler’s has its ups and downs. Yet they hang together, even as his political campaign escalates. But Elle has a secret that haunts her, one that she never thought would be revealed. It’s a secret that has driven her from God and kept her from sharing her whole heart with the man she loves. When the secret must be told, Elle struggles with painful memories and paralyzing fear of what will happen when she tells Logan.

When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her. So she flees India and sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth. Meanwhile, Mariama, a young girl in Africa, is forced to flee her home. She joins up with a caravan of misfits traveling across the Sahara. As one heads east and the other west, Meena and Mariama’s fates are linked in ways that are mysterious and shocking to the core.

On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, Genevra Winslow. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at her Vermont cottage, Bittersweet, where her family has held court for more than a century. However, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact. Mabel must choose to either expose the secret and be expelled from paradise, or make Ev's dark world her own.

When famed black porn queen Debbie Dare comes home to her insatiable former porn star and "film producer" husband, Theon Pinkney, she discovers he has died in a case of hot tub electrocution while "auditioning" an aspiring "starlet." Burdened with his remaining debts, Debbie must reckon with her life spent in porn, her estrangement from her family, and the child she had to give up. She is done with porn, but now must figure out what comes next.