Adult

In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, her parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal,” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

At the Scholomance, El, Orion and the other students are faced with their final year…and the looming specter of graduation: a deadly ritual that barely half the students survive. El is determined that her group will make it out alive, but their prospects are dimming by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules.

On her first trip to Washington, D.C., Elena Standish finally gets to visit her American mother’s wealthy parents and their magnificent home. Elena’s grandparents are marking a milestone anniversary by throwing an elaborate party with the influential friends of her grandfather, a prominent political industrialist. But the festivities come to a sudden and tragic end when one of the guests, Lila Worth, is run over by a car in the driveway outside. Soon an arrest is made in Lila’s murder, and to Elena’s horror, the accused is none other than her own grandfather, who claims his political enemies are trying to frame him. Who are these enemies, and how can Elena defend this man she barely knows?

A raging wildfire. A massive blackout. A wealthy man shot to death in his palatial hilltop home. For Clay Edison, it’s all in a day’s work. As a deputy coroner, caring for the dead, he speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. He prides himself on an unflinching commitment to the truth. Even when it gets him into trouble. Then, while working the murder scene, Clay is horrified to discover a link to his brother, Luke, who is fresh out of prison and struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. And now he’s gone AWOL. The race is on for Clay to find him before anyone else can. Confronted with Luke’s legacy of violence, he is forced to reckon with his own suspicions, resentments and loyalties.

It’s 1997, and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. She plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border. Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in 10 years --- on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is 83 and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.

Robert E. Lee is one of the most confounding figures in American history. Lee betrayed his nation in order to defend his home state and uphold the slave system he claimed to oppose. He was a traitor to the country he swore to serve as an Army officer, and yet he was admired even by his enemies for his composure and leadership. He considered slavery immoral, but benefited from inherited slaves and fought to defend the institution. And behind his genteel demeanor and perfectionism lurked the insecurities of a man haunted by the legacy of a father who stained the family name by declaring bankruptcy and who disappeared when Lee was just six years old. Award-winning historian Allen Guelzo captures Robert E. Lee in all his complexity.

Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the FedEx man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg's house, a starved and half-dead creature, 76 pounds of wet hair and poor decisions. Speck arrived in Rick's life at a moment of looming uncertainty. A cancer diagnosis, chemo, kidney failure and recurring pneumonia had left Rick lethargic and melancholy. Speck helped, and he is helping, still, when he is not peeing on the rose of Sharon.

To his customers and neighbors on 125th Street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can he avoid getting killed; save his cousin, Freddie, who falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa (the “Waldorf of Harlem”); and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in eastern India. Traveling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government --- the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her Jewish family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach. But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel is determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy: Jacob Greenberg. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah --- and Jacob --- in a way she never expected.