New York, 1924. Vivian Kelly's days are filled with drudgery, from the tenement lodging she shares with her sister to the dress shop where she sews for hours every day. But at night, she escapes to The Nightingale, an underground dance hall where illegal liquor flows and the band plays the Charleston with reckless excitement. With a bartender willing to slip her a free glass of champagne and friends who know the owner, Vivian can lose herself in the music. But then she discovers a body behind the club. With too many people assuming she knows more about the crime than she does, Vivian finds herself caught between the dangers of New York's underground and the world of the city's wealthy and careless.
Growing up, Keri Blakinger threw herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice. For the next nine years, Keri ricocheted from one dark place to the next. Then, on a cold day during her senior year, the police caught her walking down the street with a Tupperware full of heroin. Her arrest made the front page of the local news and landed her behind bars for nearly two years. After she walked out of her cell for the last time, Keri became a reporter dedicated to exposing our flawed prisons as only an insider could.
Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic, widowed mother, Marti, will be dying soon. Marti’s will surprises them with its provision that the family’s summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three sisters. While there’s a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he’s an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women. Before long, everyone in this cast of indelible characters will have to come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than they expected, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other --- and themselves.
Despite surviving a brutal childhood in Mississippi, Charlie Ovid doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When Alice Quicke, a jaded detective with her own troubled past, is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London and the wooden theaters of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts are forced to combat the forces that threaten their safety. There, the world of the dead and the world of the living threaten to collide.
One night in New York City's Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And…another. Soon nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger as our heroine, the recently engaged Lola, must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship but the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale?
Joey is a Reality Controller in near-future Delhi. Her job is to supervise the multimedia multi-reality livestreams of Indi, one of South Asia’s fastest rising online celebrities --- who also happens to be her college ex. Rudra is a recluse estranged from his wealthy and powerful family. When his father’s death pulls him back into his family’s orbit, an impulsive job offer from Joey becomes his only escape from the life he never wanted. But as Joey and Rudra become enmeshed in multiple conspiracies, their lives start to spin out of control. When a bigger picture begins to unfold, they each must decide how to do the right thing in a world where simply maintaining the status quo feels like an accomplishment.
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews that her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun. But the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s…and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond.
Army-CID-officer-cum-unofficial-PI Mick Hardin is home on leave, recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the center of town. It’s Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney’s mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it appears there’s more to the killing than meets the eye. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers and getting out of town --- and, most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda’s reelection as Sheriff. But he keeps on looking, and suddenly he’s getting shot at himself.
Deep in the California woods, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband, Leo, and their five-year-old son, Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world. Leo and Benjamin are gone. After the Disappearance, Jane forces herself to enter a world she barely recognizes, one where women must create new ways of living. Meanwhile, strange video footage called “The Men” is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?
In 1951, former debutante Jacqueline Bouvier is hard at work as the Inquiring Camera Girl for a Washington newspaper. Her mission in life is “not to be a housewife,” but when she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a Georgetown party, her resolution begins to falter. As Jackie is drawn deeper into the Kennedy orbit, and as Jack himself grows increasingly elusive and absent, she begins to question what life at his side would mean. For answers, she turns to his best friend and confidant, Lem Billings, a closeted gay man who has been instructed by the Kennedy family to seal the deal with Jack’s new girl. But as he gets to know her, a deep and touching friendship emerges, leaving him with painfully divided alliances and a troubling dilemma: Is this the marriage she deserves?
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Coming Soon
Curious about what books will be released in the months ahead so you can pre-order or reserve them? Then click on the months below.
June's Books on Screen roundup includes the series premieres of Prime Video's "We Were Liars" and Netflix's "The Survivors"; the season premieres of "Grantchester" on PBS "Masterpiece" and "The Buccaneers" on Apple TV+; the season finale of "The Walking Dead: Dead City" on AMC; the continuation of Hulu's "Nine Perfect Strangers" and Max's "And Just Like That..."; the films The Life of Chuck and How to Train Your Dragon in theaters and Pie to Die For: A Hannah Swensen Mystery on Hallmark Mystery; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of Snow White, The Friend, The Monkey, In the Lost Lands and A Working Man.