Adult

An elderly couple are worried about their granddaughter. They know she's been smuggling drugs, and now she's gone missing. Looking for help, they turn to Konrad, a former policeman whose reputation precedes him. Always absent-minded, he constantly ruminates on the fate of his father, who was stabbed to death decades ago. But digging into the past reveals much more than anyone set out to discover, and a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavik city pond unexpectedly captures everyone's attention.

Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open, and she creates a stunning debut novel. Her words find their way to readers, from a teenager hiding her homelessness, to a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. Each one is drawn into Alice’s novel; each one discovers something different that alters their perspective, and presents new pathways forward for their lives. Together, their stories reveal how books can affect us in the most beautiful and unexpected of ways.

You may think you know how the fairy tale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes. On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood and the three “saints” who control them. The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruelest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.

In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes recreating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with --- from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people.

Fans know her as the spoiled, rich cheerleader Lyla Garrity on “Friday Night Lights” or as the affluent, mysterious Samantha on the HBO megahit “Euphoria.” But as revealed for the first time in these pages, Minka Kelly’s life has been anything but easy. Raised by a single mother who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, Minka spent years waking up in strange apartments as she and her mom bounced around the country, relying on friends and relatives to take them in. She reconnected with her father, Aerosmith’s Rick Dufay, and eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she landed the role of a lifetime on “Friday Night Lights.” Now an established actress and philanthropist, Minka takes this next step in her career as a writer.

Tasha Jenkins has finally found the courage to leave her abusive husband. Taking her teenage son with her, Tasha checks into a hotel the night before their flight out of D.C. But escaping isn’t so easy, and Tasha soon finds herself driving back to her own personal hell. As she is leaving, a white woman pounds on her car window, begging to be let in. Behind the woman, an angry man is in pursuit. Tasha makes a split-second decision that will alter the course of her life: she lets her in and takes off. She and Madison Gingell may have very different everyday realities, but what they have in common is marriages they need out of. The two women want to help each other, but they have very different ideas of what that means. They are on a collision course that will end in the case files of the D.C. MPD homicide unit.

After a tragic chain of events led to the deaths of their spouses two years ago, D.C. philanthropist Sloane Chase and Senator Whit Montgomery are finally starting to move on --- with each other. They decide that hiring a home health aide will give Sloane the support and independence she needs after her upcoming hip replacement surgery. And they find the perfect fit in Athena Karras. Athena tends to Sloane and even helps her run her charitable foundation. But Sloane slowly begins to deteriorate, and her uncertainty quickly turns to paranoia as she begins to suspect the worst. Why is Athena asking her so many probing questions about her foundation --- as well as about her past? And could Sloane be imagining the sultry looks between Athena and her new husband?

Two young women are missing, their only connection a party they both attended, hosted by a notorious real-estate magnate. When one of the women is found murdered, the police discover an unusual signature left by the killer, giving them reason to suspect he will strike again. They’re facing a killer unlike any other. And exposing him calls for a detective like no other. But the legendary Harry Hole is gone --- fired from the force, drinking himself to oblivion in Los Angeles. It seems that nothing can entice him back to Oslo. Until the woman who saved Harry's life is put in grave danger, and he has no choice but to return to the city that haunts him and track down the murderer. However, as the evidence mounts, it becomes clear that there is more to this case than meets the eye.

Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is approached at a legal conference by Preston Davies, a fellow law clerk to a federal judge in Idaho. Davies believes that his boss, Judge Francesca Whitner, was being blackmailed in the days before she died. Another shocking murder leads Avery to a list of names --- all federal judges --- and, alarmingly, all judges on the FISA Court (the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), also known as America’s "secret court." It is this body that grants permission to the government to wiretap Americans or spy on corporations suspected of terrorism. As Avery digs deeper, she begins to see a frightening pattern --- and she worries that something far more sinister may be unfolding inside the nation’s third branch of government.

Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history --- one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In THE WORLD, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama.