Adult

When Audrey and Fraser tumble into a love story for the ages, theirs is an epic, unbreakable romance --- until one tragic moment upends everything. Facing the unimaginable, wrestling with guilt, they’re left haunted by “what ifs.” Would their lives still have imploded if they'd done one little thing differently? Where would they be if events had unfolded the other way around? This powerful, emotional, sliding-doors novel about love, loss, grief, and hope asks if our stories are already written. Are we able to change fate? And is it ever too late to start again?

The latest installment in the lively and deliciously charming 44 Scotland Street series finds all our favorite residents of Scotland’s most celebrated address navigating their enchanting and eventful lives. Settle in and take a trip back to Scotland’s favorite fictitious street with Bertie, Irene, Big Lou, newcomer Galactica Macfee and all the rest. Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in 44 Scotland Street. With his singular warmth and charm, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another installment in this popular series, where anything could happen to Bertie and the gang...

In a post-pandemic future where AI has infiltrated daily life, the line between what is real and what is digital has eroded to nothing. Algorithms and robots have replaced everything from the criminal justice system to individual loved ones. As long as she can remember, ten-year-old Kate has felt like someone was watching her. She has been orphaned since the pandemic, her foster parents find her eccentric and off-putting, and her legal guardian is nowhere to be seen. Now, an algorithm has predicted the very worst --- ​within 30 days, Kate will either be killed, or become a killer. When two police officers arrive at her home in Maine, Kate is urged by her trusted AI Interactive Toy (a talking stuffed seal named Zeno) to make an immediate escape. Confused and looking for answers, the girl sets a course for New York City and begins an Orwellian journey into the unknown.

Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia --- dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings --- has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. In these pieces, and in her inimitable first-person voice, at once intimate and wide-ranging, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She traces her journey across the country in search of love and work and belonging --- her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation --- and offers insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.

Christmas, 1857. After her abolitionist husband is murdered in the lawless Kansas Territory, Lidie Newton returns, in mourning, to her hometown of Quincy, Illinois. But her sisters have little comfort to offer, and Lidie is haunted by the memories of her failures --- until she takes an interest in her niece, Annie. Beautiful, self-assured, and mischievous, Annie becomes an actress at the local theater, and when she is offered the opportunity to perform abroad, she decides to run away. But travel is dangerous for a young unmarried woman, so Lidie, armed with her pistol and her wit, goes with her. The two women embark on a perilous journey across the Atlantic, rushing toward an unknown future in England. Annie takes a stage name and finds her way to a career, while Lidie becomes her ladies' maid. But will either of them be content with her new lot in life?

Twelve years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become a marine biologist. Now she’s returned, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she’ll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger appears at her door. This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she’s under the nearby lake --- alive. To find the missing girl, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper beneath the water, confronting webs of fear, control and delusion borne of a rampant nostalgia for a purer world. Along the way, they will also push their bodies to the mortal limit. Hypnotic and arresting, UNDERLAKE brings a poet’s attention to language. McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with inheritance, property and race, asking how we stake our claim on the timeline of history --- and who we erase in the process.

Jay McInerney gives us the stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting final volume in the tetralogy charting the marriage of Russell and Corrinne Calloway. The celebration of the 35th wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway’s best friend, Washington Lee --- the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow having become over the years a model husband and father --- at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the Covid-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval --- frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact --- the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have anticipated as fatal consequences ensue.

In A HISTORY OF HEARTACHE, boys grow up fast in the blazing heat of North Texas, and men grow old before their time. A wayward son rides shotgun into a night he can't take back. A janitor at an abortion clinic can’t outrun a ghost --- or a camera. Strickland writes with clear-eyed realism and unsparing craftsmanship about common people poised on the knife-edge of hope. With taut sentences and a wicked sense of humor, these 15 stories chart the small mercies and big mistakes that make a life: the songs we inherit, the bottles we empty, the tools we fashion from whatever’s at hand. Gritty and tender in the same breath, this debut fiction collection asks what it costs to stay, what it takes to leave, and who we become when we do.

Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears --- powerful, radiant, wise and witty --- and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998.

On a brisk February morning while walking to the diner where she works, 24 year-old Ruth Foster is stopped by the local sheriff. He insists she accompany him to a health clinic, threatening to arrest her if she doesn’t undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease. Though Ruth has never shared more than a chaste kiss with a man, by day’s end she is one of dozens of women held at the State Industrial Farm Colony for Women. Superintendent Dorothy Baker, convinced that she’s transforming degenerate souls into upstanding members of society, oversees the women’s medical treatment and “training” until they’re deemed ready for parole. Sooner or later, everyone at the Colony learns to abide by Mrs. Baker’s rule book or face the consequences --- solitary confinement, grueling work assignments, and worse.