Adult

Lionel Shriver's new novel teases out the intimate relationship between terrorism and cults of personality, explores what makes certain people so magnetic, and reveals the deep frustrations of feeling overshadowed by a life-of-the-party who may not even be present.

MUDWOMAN explores the high price of success in the life of one woman --- the first female president of a lauded Ivy League institution --- and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons.

Adam and Sophie Dean's good-enough marriage could easily have lasted forever. But Adam succumbs to pressure from his mistress to leave Sophie, and Sophie has a revelation: unless she leaves him in the family home in the role of primary caregiver, he'll have a severely diminished role in the lives of their two sons.

Geiger has a gift: he knows a lie the instant he hears it. And in his business---called "information retrieval" by its practitioners---that gift is invaluable, because truth is the hottest thing on the market. When his partner, former journalist Harry Boddicker, unwittingly brings in a client who demands that Geiger interrogate a twelve-year-old boy, he rescues the boy from his captor, removes him to the safety of his New York City loft, and promises to protect him from.

Molly Murphy, now Molly Sullivan, and her husband have been invited to spend their honeymoon on the Newport, RI, estate of Alderman Brian Hanna in the spring of 1904, but Molly doesn’t entirely trust the offer. Hanna---an ambitious man---has his eye on a senate seat and intentions of taking Tammany Hall to get it, and when when Hanna is found dead at the base of the cliffs that overlook the Atlantic, Molly’s suspicions are quickly justified.

In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, which was seized by revolution. When he was freed, Shadid returned to his great-grandfather’s estate, a house he had begun to rebuild over three years earlier.

After recovering from brain surgery, Inspector Kari Vaara, who has been handpicked to run a rogue black-ops unit, gets to work. Soon the unit is cleaning house, robbing Helsinki's mobsters blind of their cash, dope and illegal firearms. But Kari's team is too good, and their actions have unintended consequences.

Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. Before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed --- but not unchanged --- the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them.

In the autumn of 1941, Amelia J. McGee, a young woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and an outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP, hastily sends her daughter, Ella, alone on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night-a desperate action that is met with dire consequences when the child encounters two drifters and is left for dead on the side of the road.

Reading his own newspaper’s obituaries, veteran reporter Carter Ross comes across that of a woman who was the victim of a hit-and-run while she was on the job delivering copies of that very paper. Struck by the opportunity to write a heroic piece about an everyday woman killed too young, he heads to her wake to gather tributes and anecdotes. Will his nose for trouble finally take him too far?