Adult

It’s the last summer for Kit Lamb: The last summer before college. The last summer with her high school basketball team, and with Dana, her best friend. The last summer before her life begins. But the night before the big game, one of the players tells a ghost story about Daphne, a girl who went to their school many years ago and died under mysterious circumstances. Some say she was murdered, others that she died by her own hand. And some say that Daphne is a murderer herself. They also say that she is still out there and will appear to kill again anytime someone thinks about her. After Kit hears the story, her teammates vanish, one by one, and she begins to suspect that the stories about Daphne are real…and fears that her own mind is conjuring the killer.

It is the summer of 1934, and Hitler is nearing the summit of supreme power in Germany. When Britain’s MI6 gets word that a pair of German scientists have made breakthroughs in germ warfare, they send Elena Standish on a dangerous mission to get one of them out of Germany before he’s forced to share his knowledge and its devastating power with Hitler’s elite. But the new head of Germany’s germ warfare division is an old enemy of Elena’s grandfather Lucas, the former head of MI6. And he’s bent on using any means at his disposal to avenge his defeat at Lucas’ hands 20 years before. What starts as an effort to save Europe from the devastation of disease soon becomes an intensely personal fight.

Colby Mills once felt destined for a musical career until tragedy grounded his aspirations. Now the head of a small family farm in North Carolina, he spontaneously takes a gig playing at a bar in St. Pete Beach, Florida. But when he meets Morgan Lee, his world is turned upside down, making him wonder if the responsibilities he has shouldered need to dictate his life forever. Fleeing an abusive husband with her six-year-old son, Beverly is trying to piece together a life for them in a small town far off the beaten track. With money running out and danger seemingly around every corner, she makes a desperate decision that will rewrite everything she knows to be true. Fate will draw Colby, Morgan and Beverly together in a web of life-altering connections.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart --- the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Ben Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis.

A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: the Gardener Estate was a 12th-century Eden. And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home’s past: a human skull, hidden away for decades. Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate’s young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents --- monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye. Could the skull belong to one of his victims?

Nine-year-old Javier Zamora embarks on a 3,000-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He leaves behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks. But he cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him. Nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a 40-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her rejection by Circus.

It’s 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, 11-year-old Roland Baines' life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.