Adult

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost, beloved brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this contentious, inseparable foursome makes their way into the 21st century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family. The passing years are marked by the business of everyday existence and the inevitable surprises of erupting passions, of great and small waves of joy and despair, from the beginning of life to its end. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Anne leaves her husband for his sister, and Anne’s restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own and to join a throuple, becoming who she wants to be. 

On the occasion of her daughter Valerie’s wedding and her upcoming 50th birthday, bestselling author Halley Holbrook finds herself reflecting. Raising twins Valerie and Olivia is her proudest accomplishment. Halley has been able to give them the loving and safe home she never had, having survived a traumatic childhood. After Valerie moves to Los Angeles with her producer husband, and Olivia follows to remain close to her sister, Halley is empty-nesting in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Facing her first holiday alone in years, she books a trip to Paris. On the flight over, she meets charming Bart Warner, and the two become fast friends. But when a cunning thief makes off with her handbag and then begins to harass her, it reawakens old ghosts from her past. Vowing not to be a victim, and with Bart’s help, she chooses a bold course of action.

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community --- including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy --- begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

Annabelle Reynolds has everything she’s ever wanted. So why is she suddenly plagued by disturbing dreams of a future where she hates her husband and her daughters’ lives are at risk? When details from her dreams begin to materialize, she realizes these aren’t just dreams but rather premonitions of a terrifying future. They all point to a singular choice, an unknown moment that holds Annabelle’s life in the balance. Then Annabelle has a dream that her daughter, Scarlett, is in immediate danger. Someone wants Scarlett dead, and Annabelle has no idea who or why. Suddenly, every choice she makes is fraught with peril. As Annabelle’s present life starts to collide with the future in her dreams, she wrestles with how much control she really has over her destiny and whether she can change what is meant to be.

Talent agent Charlie Francisco has three problems: a divorce that ended his screenwriting career, a business he never planned to inherit, and a take-your-breath-away romance novel whose author wants nothing to do with its publication. The book is a surefire hit, if only his agency can find someone to “play” author on its summer book tour. Enter Kate Elliott, a former soap actress who’s miraculously right for the part at the very moment her life seems to be going all wrong. But she can’t know who really wrote the remarkable story --- the one so beautiful it’s made her believe in love again. When Kate and Charlie meet, they’re all friction and sparks. As the summer heat ups and the lies get bigger and bigger, can they stick to their lines…or will they go off-script?

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years --- until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first place: He was involved --- somehow --- in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from an impregnable safe in Dublin Castle. It was a theft that baffled not only the Dublin police and Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes himself. And now, Jake expects Russell to step into the middle of it all? Conflicting loyalties and international secrets, blatant lies and blithe deceptions: sounds like another case for Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of 19th-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to him has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is here where she will come to question everything she values.

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, LILAC GIRLS. Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80 percent of its inmates were political prisoners, among them a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance. Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, these women joined forces to defy their German captors and keep one another alive.

In 1951, with the publication of GOD AND MAN AT YALE, a scathing attack on his alma mater, 25-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage --- and commanded it for the next half-century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence. Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution.

Joan Goodwin is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates. As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe. Then, in December 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.