Adult

When Eileen Tumulty meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with in Woolside, Queens, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers that Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream. She encourages him to want more, but as years pass, it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift.

On her 19th birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Around her neck hangs the Tearling sapphire, a jewel of immense magical power; and accompanying her is the Queen’s Guard, a cadre of brave knights led by the enigmatic and dedicated Lazarus. Kelsea will need them all to survive a cabal of enemies who will use every weapon to prevent her from wearing the crown.

In 1989, three teenage friends are among the residents of a Beijing quadrangle in which all the neighbors know one another. It’s four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Twenty-two-year-old Shaoai, one of the residents, was among the Tiananmen protesters. One day, the friends discover that someone has poisoned Shaoai. This mystery is the backdrop of a novel about jealousy and the ways in which the traumas of adolescence can devastate one’s adulthood.

In her new collection of stories, her first in 15 years, Lorrie Moore explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls. Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad but having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection.

Clara Mattingly, who is serving a life sentence in a women's prison, allows herself no hope for a better future. But when a surprise visitor shows up one day, she finds that in an instant everything has changed. Now she must account for the life she has led --- its beauty as well as its brutality --- and face the truth behind the terrible secret she has kept to herself all these years.

Karom Seth should have been in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, and on the Indian shores in 2004, when the tsunami swept his entire family into the ocean. Karom can’t be sure if it’s a curse or a blessing, but his absence from these disasters has left him with crushing guilt --- and a belief that fate has singled him out for invincibility. Will he ever be able achieve the clarity he’s been looking for all these years?

Blake Bailey is a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas.

THREE BROTHERS follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world --- a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters and petty thieves.

In this riveting biography of Elizabeth Seton, critically acclaimed and bestselling author Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life featured wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth resisted male clerical control of her religious order, as nuns are doing today, and the publication of her story could not be more timely.