Adult

Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a 3,000-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens --- the “smart cookies” who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street’s bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night. In SHE-WOLVES, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging '60s to 9/11 --- starting at a time when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks.

You know Jack Reacher. Now meet 20 more heroes and heavies from the brilliant mind of legendary crime author Lee Child. A drug-dealing hit man feels that he must unburden his fears and guilt to a stranger in “Ten Keys.” A rookie cop in “Normal in Every Way” is assigned to the department’s file room, where he makes connections to historic dates that could lead to solving crimes. A methodical bodyguard quits his job when he’s outsmarted. A military mission is planned to perfection. A potential worker for the Manhattan Project is carefully surveilled by an FBI agent. A killer preys on other killers. Taken together, these stories are a riotous calamity of criminals and crime fighters; individually, they are expertly crafted, piercing tales that hit hard enough to leave a mark.

After years of personal and professional turmoil, things are finally looking up for Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes. As SICK TO DEATH opens, Andy is relishing his new gig: a drama-free, family-friendly stint as a guard at the Columbus Museum of Art. However, Andy’s newfound equilibrium comes crashing down when he interrupts the theft of a painting by famed Ashcan school realist George Bellows --- and is promptly fired for breaking museum protocols. Helping him thwart the robbers is Alex Rutledge, the adult daughter he never knew he had, the result of a one-night stand during his misspent youth a quarter century earlier. Alex wants to hire her newly discovered father to find the driver who killed her mother five months earlier in a still unsolved hit-skip accident.

When Tere Sanchez’s husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university where she works, Tere hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead she spends a year consumed by grief. Until the day she levitates. Suddenly, Tere's life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she's reminded that her family is related to renowned levitating mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found.

Engineers across the world were puzzling over how to build a powered flying machine --- and Wilbur and Orville Wright wanted in on the challenge. But their younger sister, Katharine, knew they couldn't do it without her. The three siblings made a pact: the three of them would solve the problem of human flight. As her brothers obsessed over blueprints and risked life and limb testing new models, Katharine became the mastermind behind the scenes of their inventions. And in 1903, the Wright brothers made the first controlled, sustained flight of humankind. But at the height of their success, tragedy wrenched the Wright family apart…and forced Katharine to make an impossible choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Devils Island is home to abundant wildlife, making it the ideal place to reintroduce endangered Tasmanian devils. Working to rescue, rehabilitate and release devils has been Kerry’s job and passion for years, but a new opportunity to work as a naturalist guide for a tour company offers her a respite from the emotionally grueling task of trying to save an endangered species. When one of the guests disappears on the first night, the group assumes she has wandered too far in the stormy weather. Yet it turns out she has a secret connection to one of the other guests. When another hiker is found dead in camp, the group finds itself isolated by the worsening storm and wondering who among them might be responsible.

After attempting to sever all ties to her life as a hired assassin, a woman struggles to understand who she has become. She knows she doesn’t want to kill again --- but it proves to be a difficult habit to break. Adrift and disconnected, she meets an old woman: Imogen O’Brien, a world-famous artist who has spent the last three decades living a hermit-like existence on a rustic desert estate in a national forest. Imogen invites her to stay and work for her, offering mentorship in return as the woman deepens her own interest in art. What quickly becomes apparent is that elements of Imogen’s past are shrouded in danger, sorrow and darkness. Rather than growing as an artist, the former hitwoman soon finds herself enmeshed in a dangerous mystery with strands that stretch decades into the past.

In this brilliantly conceived novel, Will Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: Is this…it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries that Self’s mother kept for over 40 years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence.

In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet --- a 70-year-old man who paints his visions --- lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past --- and perhaps change her future.