Adult

With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium. Neither of them could know this was the first of 100 Saturdays that they would spend in each other’s company as Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians began governing as an official possession in 1923 and transformed over the next two decades until the Germans seized control and deported the entire Juderia to Auschwitz.

Divorce attorney RJ would never describe herself as romantic. But when she ends up officiating an unplanned wedding for a newly engaged couple in a park, her life is turned upside down. The video of the ceremony goes viral, and she finds herself in the unlikely position of being a sought-after local wedding officiant. Former pro-football event manager Lear is a people person, but after his longtime girlfriend betrayed him, he isn’t looking for love. He knows how to execute events and likes being in control, so working with an opinionated and inflexible officiant who can’t stand him is not high on his list. Surrounded by love at every turn, their physical attraction pulls them together despite their best efforts to stay an arm’s length apart.

An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her 20-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum's austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth.

Two decades ago, six-year-old January Jacobs was discovered in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Her killer was never brought to justice. Margot Davies, her next-door neighbor, is now a big-city journalist, but she’s always been haunted by the feeling that she could've suffered the same fate as January. When Margot returns home to help care for her uncle after he's diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she feels like she’s walked into a time capsule. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under circumstances eerily similar to January’s. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and solve January’s murder once and for all. But the police, Natalie’s family and the townspeople all seem to be hiding something.

Italy, 1943. The seeds of terror planted by Hitler have brought Allied forces to Italian soil. Young lovers separated by war --- one near a Tuscan hill town, the other a soldier on the Sicilian front --- will meet any challenge to reunite. Vittoria SanAntonio, the daughter of a prosperous vineyard owner, is caught in a web of family secrets. Defying her domineering father, she has fallen for humble vineyard keeper Carlo Conte. When Carlo is conscripted into Mussolini’s army, it sets a fire in Vittoria, and she joins the resistance. As the Nazi war machine encroaches, Vittoria is drawn into dangers as unknowable as those faced by the man she loves.

1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box and the 10th passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit --- by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car --- also borrowed --- onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, his recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.

An ancient majestic oak stands beneath the stars on Division Street. And under the tree sits Ben Wilf, a retired doctor, and 10-year-old Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant, lonely boy who is pointing out his favorite constellations. Waldo doesn’t realize it, but he and Ben have met before. And they will again, and again. Across time and space, and shared destiny. Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret --- one that will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own. Spanning 50 kaleidoscopic years, on a street --- and in a galaxy --- where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined.

Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelope that perished in Central Asia. A beloved donkey’s loyalty to a zookeeper in Gaza is put to the ultimate test. And a wounded pigeon in Delhi finds an unlikely friend.

In 1986, Paul Newman and his closest friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern, began an extraordinary project. Stuart was to compile an oral history, to have Newman’s family and friends and those who worked closely with him, talk about the actor’s life. And then Newman would work with Stewart and give his side of the story. The only stipulation was that anyone who spoke on the record had to be completely honest. That same stipulation applied to Newman himself. The project lasted five years. The result is an extraordinary memoir, culled from thousands of pages of transcripts. Newman’s voice is powerful, sometimes funny, sometimes painful, always meeting that high standard of searing honesty.