Adult

Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Clafli were two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics and business threatened the white male power structure of the 19th century and shocked the world. Here, award-winning author Myra MacPherson deconstructs and lays bare the manners and mores of Victorian America, remarkably illuminating the struggle for equality that women are still fighting today.

Jean Zimmerman’s follow-up to THE ORPHANMASTER tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart 18-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society.

Many of our most iconic, creative endeavors are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts. The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, it will always be both a void and the start of infinite possibility. THE RISE --- a soulful celebration of the determination and courage of the human spirit --- makes the case that many of our greatest triumphs come from understanding the importance of this mystery.

Phil Klay's REDEPLOYMENT takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

When he hears residents of a Newark neighborhood are getting sick and even dying from a strange disease, investigative reporter Carter Ross dives into the story --- so deep he comes down with the illness himself. With even more motivation to track down the source of the disease, Carter soon hits upon a nearby construction site. But when the project’s developer is found dead, and his mob ties surface, Carter knows he’s looking at a story much bigger than an environmental hazard.

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas’s beautiful Smoky Valley. Part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family pumps over 200 million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family’s role in its depletion haunts her.

A serial rapist has been terrorizing Paris's Pigalle neighborhood, following teenage girls home and attacking them in their own houses. It is sad and frightening but has nothing to do with Private Investigator Aimée Leduc --- until Zazie, the 13-year-old daughter of the proprietor of Aimée's favorite café, disappears. The police aren't mobilizing quickly enough, and when Zazie's desperate parents approach Aimée for help, she knows she can’t say no even if she wanted to.

After their mother's probable suicide, sisters Olivia and Jazz take steps to move on with their lives. Jazz, logical and forward-thinking, decides to get a new job, but spirited, strong-willed Olivia --- who can see sounds, taste words and smell sights --- is determined to travel to the remote setting of their mother's unfinished novel to lay her spirit properly to rest.

One day, Carol Wall, a white woman living in a lily-white neighborhood in Middle America, notices a dark-skinned African man tending her neighbor’s yard. Before long, Giles Owita is transforming not only Carol’s yard, but her life. Though they are seemingly quite different, a caring bond grows between them. But they both hold long-buried secrets that, when revealed, will cement their friendship forever.

This work of fiction is based on an actual mental patient in the late 19th century, Albert Dadas, who was a compulsive walker, and the doctor who treated him. THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY is an interesting look at the human mind, especially when it does not function properly. What still remains in the 21st century is probably medicine's greatest mystery --- the workings of the human nervous system and the three pounds of gray matter that control it.