Adult

For many kids, a mistake made at age 13 or 14 --- often resulting from external factors coupled with a biologically immature brain --- can resonate through the rest of their lives, making high school difficult, college nearly impossible, and a middle-class life a mere fantasy. In CHILDREN OF THE STATE, Jeff Hobbs challenges any preconceived perceptions about how the juvenile justice system works --- and demonstrates in brilliant, piercing prose that no one so young should ever be considered irredeemable. He presents three different true stories that show the day-to-day life and the challenges faced by those living and working in juvenile programs: educators, counselors and --- most importantly --- children.

You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offense against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly you plot. But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice. Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So you bide your time and force the gods' hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did. If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some, it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst --- or just across the ocean --- if only we can find eyes to see it. Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into war zones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld --- or can it be found in the here and now?

“It all started with my balls.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” The second essay in this collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and ’60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, the setting for many of Tóibín’s novels and stories, including BROOKLYN, THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP and NORA WEBSTER. Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality.

Expert therapist Dr. Carder Stout believes that the soul's authentic voice has the ability to heal addictive cycles and completely remove them from the psyche. The soul is pure consciousness untethered from human experience, and Dr. Stout has maintained sobriety for 17 years by utilizing this untapped resource. In turn, he has successfully treated numerous clients for addiction and other mental health conditions using the same technique. It is with this expertise that he breaks down his theory of "We Are All Addicts" in this compellingly readable guide, which presents a spiritual approach to ridding the mind of the complex problems created by addiction. These solutions to obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors are unconventional, and previously have been shared exclusively with his patients in therapy...until now.

When an unexpected upheaval sends longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, she must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page. But then she comes across a forgotten artifact --- a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary’s simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline --- a guidebook for getting started on a new path. Her plans hit a snag, though, when she comes face to face with an unexpected roommate --- Levi Fanning, one-time town troublemaker and current town hermit. But this quiet, grouchy man is more than just his reputation, and he offers to help Georgie with her quest.

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them. In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s REEF ROAD probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy, and like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.

Paige Lancaster has returned to the East Coast from her prestigious, well-paid job in Los Angeles, writing for the smartest detective series on television. Something terrible happened to her, leaving her broke, homeless, and living with her widowed mother and eight-year-old daughter, Izzy. Paige meets the movers and shakers of Izzy’s school’s Parent Booster Association, run by the intimidatingly gorgeous Ainsley Anderson, who just happens to be married to Paige’s old high school flame, John. Then she shows up at the annual Parents and Pinot fundraiser, held at Ainsley and John’s dazzling mansion, where she’s caught in a compromising position with John. Later that night, Ainsley turns up dead at the bottom of her own driveway. Did she fall? Or was she pushed?

Berlin, 1931: Ally Keller, a talented young poet, gives birth to a mixed-race daughter she names Lilith. As the Nazis rise to power, she sets in motion a dangerous plan to send her daughter across the ocean to safety. Havana, 1958: Now an adult, Lilith has few memories of her mother or her childhood in Germany. But as the flames of revolution ignite, Lilith and her newborn daughter, Nadine, find themselves at a terrifying crossroads. Berlin, 1988: Nadine’s daughter, Luna, encourages her to uncover the truth about the choices her mother and grandmother made to ensure the survival of their children. And it will fall to Luna to come to terms with a shocking betrayal that changes everything she thought she knew about her family’s past.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters --- a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.