Adult

At 24, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She is sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet --- a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds --- introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she has preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it. Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife --- and she has no idea Hera exists.

How do we live without the ones we love? After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Sloane Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief. For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane's apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his death propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic.

Reporter Anne Lemire writes the Rumor Clinic, a newspaper column that disproves the many harmful rumors floating around town, some of them spread by Axis spies and others just gossip mixed with fear and ignorance. Tired of chasing silly rumors about Rosie Riveters' safety on the job, she wants to write about something bigger. Special Agent Devon Mulvey, one of the few Catholics at the FBI, spends his weekdays preventing industrial sabotage and his Sundays spying on clerics with suspect loyalties --- and he spends his evenings wooing the many lonely women whose husbands are off at war. When Anne’s story about Nazi propaganda intersects with Devon’s investigation into the death of a factory worker, the two are led down a dangerous trail of espionage, organized crime and domestic fascism.

Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money and those who want to find it. When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dorothy Thom joins the Women’s Army Corps. Women from all levels of society work together to navigate a military segregated by race and gender. In early 1945, Dorothy and 800 African American WACs cross the turbulent North Atlantic to their post in England. Their orders are to process the mail sent to GIs from their loved ones back home. They arrive to find mail stockpiled for over two years in warehouses and airplane hangars. Many pieces are in poor condition, and the names are illegible. In England and France, the WACs traverse a landscape of unimagined possibilities. With their outlooks changed forever, they return to the United States as the catalysts for change in America and build lives that transcend anything their ancestors ever dreamed of.

There’s something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it’s not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives. When they realize that they can’t trust anyone but each other, they begin to investigate what happened on their own. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. But 20 years later, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls. Maddy has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.

“I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.” So writes reclusive mystery novelist Sebastian Trapp to his longtime correspondent, Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction. With mere months to live, Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion to help draft his life story…while living alongside his beautiful second wife, Diana; his wayward nephew, Freddy; and his protective daughter, Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught in an irresistible case of real-life “detective fever.” Twenty years earlier --- on New Year’s Eve 1999 --- Sebastian’s first wife and teenage son vanished from different locations, never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion, two decades later, to allow a stranger to dig into his past?

Yeongju is burned out. She did everything she was supposed to: go to school, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. In a leap of faith, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighborhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster --- and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju --- they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.

Haven’s Rock is a well-hidden town surrounded by forest that serves as a refuge for those who need to disappear. Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, already feel at home in their new town, which reminds them of where they first met in Rockton. And while they know how to navigate the woods and its various dangers, other residents don’t. Which is why people aren't allowed to wander off alone. When Max, the town’s youngest resident --- taught to track animals by Eric --- fears a bear is stalking a hiking party, alarms are raised. Even stranger, the 10-year-old swears the bear had human eyes. Casey and Eric know the dangers a bear can present, so they’re taking it seriously. But odd occurrences are happening all around them, and when a dead body turns up, they’re not sure what they’re up against.

In 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s mother reluctantly drops her off at an orphanage in Chicago. Three years later, Cecily is sold to a traveling circus to perform as the “little sister” to glamorous bareback rider Isabelle DuMonde. But as the years go by, the cracks in her little world begin to show. And when teenage Cecily meets and falls in love with a young roustabout named Lucky, she finds her life thrown onto an entirely unexpected --- and dangerous --- course. In 2015, Cecily is now 94 and living a quiet life in Minnesota. But when her family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test, the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she has raised and claimed as her own for nearly 70 years.