Adult

Nola McCollum is the most desirable girl in Arthur’s class, and he is thrilled when they become friends. But Arthur wants far more than friendship. Unfortunately, Nola has a crush on the wrong Moses --- Arthur’s older brother, Frank, who is busy pursuing his own love interest and avoiding the boys’ father, a war veteran with a drinking problem and a penchant for starting fights. When a sudden tragedy rocks the family’s world, Arthur struggles to come to terms with his grief. In the end, it is nature that helps him to understand how to go on, beyond loss, and create a life of forgiveness and empathy. But what can he do about Nola, who seems confused about what she wants in life, and only half aware of the one who loves her most?

Charlie Garner’s ex-wife, Meg, has been missing for over a week. Neighbors claim she’s running from bill collectors, but Charlie suspects something more sinister is afoot. Meg was last seen working at the local donut shop, a business run by a shadow group most refer to as “The Saucer People” --- a space-age, evangelist cult who believe their compound to be the site of an extraterrestrial Second Coming. Along with his brother, Felix, and journalist Amelia “Scrappy” Moon, Charlie uncovers strange and frightening details about the compound (read: a massive, doomsday storehouse of weapons, a leashed chimpanzee!) When the body of their key informer is found dead with his arms ripped out of their sockets, Charlie knows he’s in danger but remains dogged in his quest to rescue Meg.

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive. Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know firsthand in their own families or in those of their neighbors.

Two days after a blizzard hits Field’s Crossing, Indiana, Sheriff Jhonni Laurent discovers the frozen body of a high school senior under a 15-foot pile of snow and ice. Just as the investigation gets underway, Jhonni’s opponent for sheriff from four years ago wages a bitter reelection battle to oust her. Then Jhonni finds another body, and further complications arise when a century-old feud between two families reaches its breaking point. Soon, a slew of newspaper articles causes the Indiana State Election Board to doubt her credibility. Jhonni must fight to maintain her reputation, keep the small farming community together, and find the murderer at large --- all while demons from her own past threaten to crush her.

When X --- an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter --- falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born. In her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their 11-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. Bea arrives in Boston to meet the Gregorys. Mr. and Mrs. G, and their sons William and Gerald, fold Bea seamlessly into their world. As Bea comes into herself and relaxes into her new life, the girl she had been begins to fade away…until she is called home to London when the war ends. Desperate as she is not to leave this life behind, Bea dutifully retraces her trip across the Atlantic back to her new, old world. As she returns to post-war London, the memory of her American family stays with her, always pulling on her heart as she tries to move on and pursue love and a life of her own.

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a bestseller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be? AMERICAN MERMAID follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a winner-take-all society and discovering a beating heart in her own fiction: a new kind of mermaid who will fight to keep her voice and choose her place.

New York City, 1956: When 19-year-old Marion Brooks comes across an opportunity to audition for the Radio City Rockettes, she jumps at the chance to exchange her predictable future for the dazzling life of a performer. Meanwhile, the city is reeling from a string of bombings orchestrated by a person the press has nicknamed the “Big Apple Bomber." With the public in an uproar, the police turn to Peter Griggs, a young doctor who espouses a radical new technique: psychological profiling. As both Marion and Peter find themselves unexpectedly pulled into the police search for the bomber, Marion realizes that if she hopes to catch the culprit, she’ll need to stand out and take a terrifying risk. In doing so, she may be forced to sacrifice everything she’s worked for, as well as the people she loves the most.

A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine, which claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night. But by the 10th anniversary, Cassidy has worked to distance herself from the tragedy. This year, she is determined to finally break ties once and for all. But on the day of the reunion, she receives a text with an obituary attached: another survivor is gone. Now they are seven, and Cassidy finds herself hurling back toward the group, wild with grief --- and suspicion.

THE HOUSE OF LINCOLN tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young immigrant who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield, Illinois, from Madeira, Portugal. Showing intelligence beyond society's expectations, 14-year-old Ana Ferreira is offered a job in the Lincoln household assisting Mary Lincoln with their boys and with the hosting duties borne by the wife of a rising political star. Ana bears witness to the evolution of Lincoln's views on equality and the Union, and observes in full complexity the psyche and pain of his bold, polarizing wife. Yet, alongside her dearest friend in the Black community, she also directly experiences how slavery contradicts the promise of freedom in her adopted country.