Adult

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in WE’RE ALONE include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood and the complexities of resilience. From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American health care system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value --- art, memory, poetry, music, care --- are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. SMALL RAIN surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

Still reeling from a recent tragedy, Erin Connolly knows she needs to start living, but she has no idea how. When she accidentally donates her favorite book --- a heavily annotated copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD containing a memento she can’t be without --- to a local community library, she’s devastated. But then the book turns up a week later, back in the library with fresh notes in the margins, along with an invitation in a copy of GREAT EXPECTATIONS to meet her newfound pen pal. A life-changing conversation, written only in the margins of beloved classic books, begins between Erin and her Mystery Man. Following each other through the pages of their favorite novels as the book exchange continues, they both begin to open up, falling into a friendship…and maybe something more. But Erin and her pen pal have a shared history that neither of them has guessed.

Newly qualified London vet Charlotte Walker has taken up a fellowship on the tiny South Atlantic island of Tuga de Oro to study the endangered gold coin tortoises in the jungle interior. The reality is that she has secretly come to believe that she has her own connection to this remote and eccentric community, and she is finally determined to solve the mystery that has dominated her life. But she will have little time for any of her declared or covert investigations. She is inconveniently attracted to the new island doctor. And not only do Tuga’s tortoises need attention, so too do the island’s dogs, goats and donkeys --- not to mention the islanders themselves, determined to win Charlotte over with cake and homemade jam until she relents and becomes vet to all their animals.

Jessica Jones is a retired superhero turned private investigator. One morning, a distraught Amber Randall comes into her office. She is adamant that something happened to her teenage twins while they were visiting their father in the UK. The twins don’t act like themselves, and they now have flawless skin, have lost their distinctive tics and habits, and keep talking about a girl named Belle. Traveling to a small village in the British countryside, Jessica meets the mysterious Belle, who lives a curiously isolated life in an old farmhouse with a strange woman who claims to be her guardian. Can this unworldly teenager really be responsible for the Randall twins’ new personas? Why does the strange little village of Barton Wallop seem to harbor dark energies and mysteries in its tight-knit community?

Lola Milholland grew up in the ’90s, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open their rambling house in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation. GROUP LIVING AND OTHER RECIPES tells the story of the residents of the Holman House --- of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding and, just maybe, utopian --- with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life.

The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men. The Lady knows that she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed. The Lady knows that his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. But the Lady does not know that her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world. She does not know this yet. But she will.

When Destina Rosethorn and her companions were transported to a time centuries before their birth --- to the days of the Third Dragon War --- the Graygem of Gargath brought chaos to the battlefield and changed the course of history. Upon returning to the Inn of the Last Home, where their journey began, Destina’s party discovered a world completely changed. The forces of evil now hold sway over their land. The River of Time is rising, flowing inexorably toward the present day. Destina and her friends must make one last, desperate attempt to restore time’s river to its proper channel. If they do not succeed, the altered past will sweep over the present until no trace of their old world remains.

1950s Hollywood: Every actress wants to play Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary woman whose story has inspired artists since ancient times. So when the film’s mercurial director casts Vera Larios, an unknown Mexican ingenue, in the lead role, she quickly becomes the talk of the town. Vera also becomes an object of envy for Nancy Hartley, a bit player who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves. Two actresses, both determined to make it to the top in Golden Age Hollywood, make for a sizzling combination. But this is the tale of three women, for it is also the story of the princess Salome herself, consumed with desire for the fiery prophet who foretells the doom of her stepfather, Herod: a woman torn between the decree of duty and the yearning of her heart.

Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast. Good luck getting there, though. Clay’s reward for surviving the journey is a trigger-happy welcoming committee, ready to guard their secrets with lethal force. The price of truth will turn out to be higher --- and deadlier --- than he could have imagined.