Adult

Kadence, a new type of implanted defibrillator, misfires in a patient visiting University Hospital for a routine medical procedure. Dr. Kate Downey, an experienced anesthesiologist, resuscitates the patient, but she grows concerned for a loved one who recently received the same device --- her beloved Great-Aunt Irm. When a second device misfires, Kate turns to Nikki Yarborough, her friend and Aunt Irm’s cardiologist. Though Nikki helps protect Kate’s aunt, she is prevented from alerting other patients by the corporate greed of her department chairman. As the inventor of the device and part owner of MDI, the company he formed to commercialize it, he claims that the device misfires are due to a soon-to-be-corrected software bug. Kate learns his claim is false.

Twelve months after her younger sister Anahita’s death, Mitra Jahani reluctantly returns to her parents’ home in suburban New Jersey to observe the Iranian custom of “The One Year.” While Ana bowed to their domineering father’s demands and married, Mitra rebelled and was banished. Caught in the middle is their mother, Shireen, torn between her fierce love for her surviving daughter and her loyalty to her husband. Yet his callousness even amid shattering loss has compelled her to rethink her own decades of submission. And when Mitra is suddenly forced to confront hard truths about her sister’s life, and the secrets each of them hid to protect others, mother and daughter reach a new understanding --- and forge an unexpected path forward.

Proxima b is a planet discovered in 2016. It revolves around our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Rose Point is an artistic name, given to the planet in this scientific novel. The narrative grows through real and imaginary events, episodes and announcements through dialogues, conversations, discussions, meditations and thoughts, occurring in some scientific centers of space research: an observatory, ESO Garching, ESO La Silla, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, NASA Ames, Boulder University, Johns Hopkins University, SETI, ESA. The characters are researchers --- invented persons and names, but with temperaments and personalities similar to several people whom author Mimoza Hafizi met in her scientific life. They share the same mission: the discovery of new planets outside the solar system.

From his early career serving theater stars like Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman at La Rousse right through to the last pre-pandemic-shutdown full houses at Le Coucou, Michel Cecchi-Azzolina has seen it all. In YOUR TABLE IS READY, he breaks down how restaurants really run (and don’t), and how the economics work for owners and overworked staff alike. The professionals who gravitate to the business are a special, tougher breed, practiced in dealing with the demanding patrons and with each other, in a very distinctive ecosystem that’s somewhere between a George Orwell “down and out in…” dungeon and a sleek showman’s smoke-and-mirrors palace.

April 1940. By terms of the Soviet Nazi Nonaggression pact, the two dictatorships divided the helpless nation of Poland. Now, the Russians are rounding up enemies of the state in their occupation zone, but one essential target slips away. Dr. Sebastian Kapsky had spent years working with Walter Riedel and Werner von Braun in the early days of rocket science, but as a man with a conscience he refused to continue when he saw the perversion of their work by the Nazis. That makes him the most knowledgeable person about German superweapons outside of Germany. The Germans want him. The Soviets are desperate to grab him, but Wild Bill Donovan knows there's only one man who can find him in the middle of a war zone and get him out --- Dick Canidy.

A queer, mixed-race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena), and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community and care can be found in the sea.

When brutish miner Hugo Mitchum is found murdered on the frozen shore of a North Country lake, the local officials and town gossips of Beau Caelais are quick to blame Marietta Abernathy, an outspoken environmental activist and angry, witchy recluse. But Marietta herself has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Living on an isolated island with her father, Marietta’s 16-year-old daughter, Lena, begins sifting through her mother’s journals and collected oddities in an attempt to find her. While her father’s grief threatens to consume him and her adoptive aunt Bea reckons with guilt and acceptance, it is the haunting town outcast Ellis Olsen who might have the most to lose if Lena fails to find her mother.

In 2018, Rob Delaney’s two-year-old son, Henry, died of a brain tumor. A HEART THAT WORKS is Delaney’s intimate, unflinching and at times fiercely funny exploration of Henry’s beautiful, bright life and the devastation of his loss --- from the harrowing illness to the vivid, bodily impact of grief and the blind, furious rage that followed through to the forceful, unstoppable love that remains. In the madness of his grief, Delaney grapples with the fragile miracle of life, the mysteries of death, and the question of purpose for those left behind. Profound, painful, full of emotion and bracingly honest, Delaney’s memoir offers solace to those who have faced devastation and shows us how grace may appear even in the darkest times.

Detective Dan Shields is rudely awakened in the middle of the night and responds to a report of two dead people at the Hartford City College radio station. Student DJ Gordon Gunderson's late Sunday evening jazz show ends abruptly. Listeners hear nothing but dead air. His death is an apparent drug overdose, but the other victim, security guard Christine Kole, appears to have been brutally murdered. The last text message on Gordon's cell phone leads Dan down a path of lies and deceptions. Adding to the detective's case load are the Halloween killings of two men, both costumed as Batman. The late-night shootings occur at different Hartford locations. Are these homicides related, or are they coincidental?

The weight of their family secrets could not have shaped Pearl and Ruby Crenshaw any differently. Ruby is a runner, living in Dallas and only reluctantly talking to their mother, Birdie, when she calls from prison. Pearl is still living in her mother's fixer-upper and finds herself facing a line in the sand: her weight is threatening to kill her. She's hundreds of pounds beyond the point where she can celebrate her curves or benefit from the body positivity movement, and unless she takes drastic action, the future looks dire. But when Ruby's buried rage explodes in a hilariously viral way, the mistake has life-altering consequences. Now the sisters are back living under the same roof and forced to put the pieces of their separate lives together again.