Adult

T. C. Boyle returns to the Channel Islands for his latest work of historical fiction, which is comprised of two short novels. In the first, set in 1888, Marantha Waters moves to the island with her husband and daughter to run a sheep farm, with the hope that the climate will cure Marantha’s consumption. In the second, set in the 1930s, Elise Lester and her husband, the latter shell-shocked during World War I, take over the land.

All over the world, brutal attacks are crippling entire cities. Jackson Oz, a young biologist, watches the escalating events with an increasing sense of dread. When he witnesses a coordinated lion ambush in Africa, the enormity of the violence to come becomes terrifyingly clear. With the help of ecologist Chloe Tousignant, Oz races to warn world leaders before it's too late.

Alex and Leslie Twisden want a child so badly that they will do anything, no matter the cost, to make it happen. When their parental dreams come true, what they end up living is a nightmare with no escape and greater ramifications than anyone ever thought possible. As the Twisden children grow, so do a few parental urges that are absolutely horrifying and very difficult to ignore.

Three years after the disappearance of two teenage girls, a husband and wife are brutally killed in the farmhouse where one of the teens once lived. A troubled young man who can hear voices claims that he saw a girl that night being chased by a snowman. Convinced that at least one of the girls might still be alive, Joe O'Loughlin and Vincent Ruiz race against time to save the girls from someone with an evil, calculating and twisted mind.

A Hollywood movie company has come to Paradise, Massachusetts, and brought with it a huge cast, crew, and a troubled star. Marisol Hinton is scared out of her wits that her estranged husband's jealousy might take a dangerous turn. When she becomes the subject of a death threat, Jesse and the rest of the Paradise police department go on high alert.

Reporter Adam Jordan comes across the biggest story of his life when he is first on the scene of the murder of a beauty pageant contestant on the beach near Atlantic City. The story, set in the pulp world of the early 1950s, is the first published book by mystery writer Joseph Koenig in 20 years.

An airborne virus is unleashed on the patrons of a bar, killing 80 people. Surviving witnesses talk about seeing things, and they describe sudden, overwhelming feelings of fear, rage and paranoia. It appears the bar patrons were exposed to a cocktail of chemicals and illegal drugs that could drive anyone to temporary insanity, if not kill them outright. But that doesn’t explain who would unleash such horror --- or why.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

Elsa Emerson relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child's game of pretend. While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who refashions her as a serious, exotic brunette and renames her Laura Lamont.

Tom Harry and his son, Rusty, make an odd kind of family, with Tom’s venerable bar their true home, but they manage just fine. That is, until the summer of 1960, when Rusty turns 12. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom previously knew, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past?