Adult

THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn't expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they've gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled and made things happen --- in and out of uniform. Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told --- and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned her triumphant return to Duquette University. Everyone is going to see the girl she wants them to see --- confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was when she left campus, back when Heather Shelby's murder fractured everything, including the tight bond linking the six friends she'd been closest to since freshman year. But not everyone is ready to move on. Not everyone left Duquette 10 years ago, and not everyone can let Heather's murder go unsolved. When the six friends are reunited, they will be forced to confront what happened that night --- and the years' worth of secrets each of them would do anything to keep hidden.

Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled 2,000 miles away in Chicago, where Aki’s older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family’s reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train, and officials are ruling it a suicide. Aki’s instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.

When PI and ex-con Colleen Hayes learns that a local neo-Nazi group is talking about shooting the mayor, she thinks it’s just another rumor --- until her source, a humble street newspaper vendor, winds up in SF General, beaten to a pulp. To add to her grief, she discovers that her runaway daughter, Pamela, might have joined a shadowy religious group, building a church in South America near a volcano that is about to erupt. Death is the path to perfection according to the charismatic young preacher --- and the date is fast approaching. Colleen is desperate to find a way to stop her daughter from making the ultimate mistake before she --- along with hundreds of others --- lose their lives.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention. TWO-WAY MIRROR is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet’s abundant correspondence, Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.

George March’s new novel is a smash. No one could be prouder than his dutiful wife, Mrs. March, who revels in his accolades. But one morning, the shopkeeper of her favorite patisserie suggests that her husband’s latest protagonist --- a detestable character named Johanna --- is based on Mrs. March herself. What could have merited this humiliation? That one casual remark robs Mrs. March of the belief that she knew everything about her husband --- and herself --- thus sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey. While snooping in George’s office, Mrs. March finds a newspaper clipping about a missing woman. Did George have anything to do with her disappearance?

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories --- some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories --- is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles --- a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction --- even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political and racial forces of American society.

At age 16, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. When friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised him to aim for C’s in his classes, he tried to escape the stigma by pretending he could still see. In BLIND MAN’S BLUFF, Hill discloses the tricks he employed to pass for sighted. For 15 years, Hill hid his blindness from friends, colleagues and lovers, even convincing himself that if he stared long enough, his blurry peripheral vision would bring the world into focus. At 30, faced with a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.

Over the course of his long and suspicious career, Lemony Snicket has investigated many things, including villainy, treachery, conspiracy, ennui and various suspicious fires. In this book, he is investigating his own death. POISON FOR BREAKFAST could be said to be a book of philosophy, something almost no one likes, but it is also a mystery, and many people claim to like those. Certainly Mr. Snicket didn’t relish the dreadful task of solving it, but he had no choice. It was put in front of him, right there, on his plate.

Whether seeking knowledge, riches or a better life, the characters in this debut collection are united by a quest for lasting value, as they ask how we should treat our world, our work, our selves, and each other in both past and present. A vainglorious mine owner dreams of harnessing all of nature to the machinery of commerce. Two women hunt rare butterflies in a pre-First World War landscape already experiencing the first bites of biodiversity loss. A young man tracks down the father who abandoned him inside a festival exhibit. A rural Welsh community is fascinated and angered by glimpses of its invisible, wealthy neighbors.