Adult

With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data.

Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing --- its ending.

Jane Addison arrives in New York to start a job at a prestigious talent agency. She jumps right in as an assistant to Hailey West. Hailey is dedicated to the authors she represents, but after her husband’s untimely death, she was left with three children to raise on her own. Francine Rivers is the head of the literary department. After her husband’s affair with the nanny, she has overcome financial hardships, but only with unbearable sacrifice. Drama agent Allie Moore loves working with the talented actors she represents --- until a passionate relationship with one of her clients threatens her career. As the agency's CFO, Merriwether Jones appears to have it all, but her husband’s jealousy over her career threatens to blow everything up.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St. Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out. Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where a reckoning with fate beckons them both.

After a harrowing escape from Russian agents on his last mission, Charles Jenkins thinks he’s finally done with the spy game. But then the final two of the seven sisters --- American assets who have been deep undercover in Russia for decades --- cut off all communication with their handlers. Are they in hiding after detecting surveillance? Or have they turned and become double agents? It’s Jenkins’ duty to find out, but he’s been added to a Russian kill list. It will require all of Jenkins’ knowledge of spycraft --- and an array of disguises --- to return to the country undetected. But when plans go awry his first night in Moscow, mafia henchmen, Russian agents and a particularly dogged Moscow police detective pursue him.

During the reign of Louis XV, impoverished but lovely teenage girls from all over France are sent to a discreet villa in the town of Versailles. Overseen by the King’s favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, they will be trained as potential courtesans for the King. When the time is right, each girl is smuggled into the palace of Versailles, with its legendary Hall of Mirrors. There they meet a mysterious but splendidly dressed man who they’re told is merely a Polish count, a cousin of the Queen. Living an indulgent life of silk gowns, delicious meals and soft beds, the students at this “school of mirrors” rarely ask questions, and when Louis tires of them, they are married off to minor aristocrats or allowed to retire to one of the more luxurious nunneries.

Sheriff Lily Ross and her family look forward to the opening of an amusement park created by Chalmer Fitzpatrick. When Lily is alerted to the possible drowning of a girl, she discovers schisms going back several generations, in an ongoing dispute over the land on which Fitzpatrick has built the park. Lily's family life is soon rattled with the revelation that before he died, her brother had a daughter, Esme, and arrangements have been made for Esme to immigrate to the U.S. to live with them. But Esme never makes it to Kinship, and soon Lily discovers that she has been kidnapped. A young woman is indeed found murdered in the fishing pond on Fitzpatrick's property, at the same time that a baby is left on his doorstep. As the two crimes interweave, Lily must confront the question of what makes family.

Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person's face. When she walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother Vivianne’s murder, she came face to face with the killer --- a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer --- and not knowing if they’d be back --- overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality. Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house, a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling past for over 50 years.

As an end-of-life doula, Nova Huston’s job is to help terminally ill people make peace with their impending death. Unlike her business partner, who swears by her system of checklists, free-spirited Nova doesn’t shy away from difficult clients. When Mason Shaylor shows up at her door, Nova doesn’t recognize him as the indie-favorite singer-songwriter who recently vanished from the public eye. She knows only what he’s told her: That life as he knows it is over. His deteriorating condition makes playing his guitar physically impossible. Helping him is Nova’s biggest challenge yet. It turns out that she and Mason have more in common than anyone could guess… and meeting him might turn out to be the hardest, best thing that’s ever happened to them both.