Adult

Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Caroline Moorehead’s fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. His strength was legendary, and his power was unmatched. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, and turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat. He became the first person to simultaneously star in two major professional sports and overtook Michael Jordan as America’s most recognizable pitchman. Then, almost overnight, he was gone. He was Bo Jackson. Drawing on an astonishing 720 original interviews, Jeff Pearlman captures as never before the elusive truth about Jackson, Auburn University’s transcendent Heisman Trophy winner, superstar of both the NFL and Major League Baseball, and ubiquitous “Bo Knows” Nike pitchman.

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout INCITING JOY, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection and also, crucially, how we can expand it. Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, INCITING JOY offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?

Shelby Springfield has spent the last 10 years trying to overcome her past, sanding it away like the rough spots on the vintage furniture she makes over. But as a former child star, it’s hard to forget a widely documented meltdown and huge public breakup with her former co-star, Lyle Jessup. It’s also hard to forget her other co-star and childhood sweetheart, Cameron Riggs, the one who got away. Anytime Shelby has called, Cameron has come running. Then he runs right off again to chase stories around the world by making documentaries, too scared to admit what he really wants. But when Lyle stirs the pot, getting the two back in the spotlight with a home renovation show, Cameron can't help but get on board. There's something in it for everyone --- almost.

In THE ABYSS, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-20th century --- the 13 days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis --- American President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance.

It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a rural village with her aunt. Hà’s twin sister, Loan, was adopted by a wealthy, white American family who renamed her Isabella. Isabella grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with a nonbiological sister, Olivia, also adopted from Vietnam, and they attended a predominantly white Catholic school. But when Isabella’s adoptive mother learned of her biological twin back in Vietnam, all of their lives changed forever. Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members. She brings the girls’ experiences to life on the page, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

While preparing to sell his home in Alexandria, Virginia, retired Secret Service agent Clint Hill uncovers an old steamer trunk in the garage, triggering a floodgate of memories. As he and Lisa McCubbin, his coauthor on three previous books, pry it open for the first time in 50 years, they find forgotten photos, handwritten notes, personal gifts and treasured mementos from the trips on which Hill accompanied First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as her Secret Service agent. During these journeys, Jacqueline Kennedy became one of her husband’s --- and America’s --- greatest assets; in Hill’s words and the opinion of many others, she was “one of the best ambassadors the United States has ever had.”

Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings. For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability --- until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?

As the villagers of Three Pines prepare for a special celebration, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged and shattered. Now they’ve arrived in Three Pines. But to what end? Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?

1946. Fresh from the War in Europe, hack writer Jacob Heppleman discovers a changed world back home. The pulp magazines he used to write for are dying, replaced by a revolutionary new publishing racket: paperback novels. As “Jack Holly,” Jacob finds success as the author of scandalously bestselling crime novels. He prides himself on the authenticity of his work, which means picking the brains of some less than reputable characters. Meanwhile, as Hollywood comes calling, the entire industry also comes under fire from censorious politicians out to tame the paperback jungle in the name of public morality. Targeted by both Congress and the Mob, Jay may end up the victim of his own success --- unless he can write his way to a happier ending.