Adult

At the end of a U.S. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter’s tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan’s secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government’s threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian’s career begins to flourish in the United States. But he is soon placed on a Chinese government blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn.

1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed. 2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.

WE WANT WHAT WE WANT is a collection of surprising, darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives. In "Money, Geography, Youth," Vanessa finds out that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. She responds by turning to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In "The Brooks Brothers Guru," Amanda rescues her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, leading her to wonder what freedoms she might willingly trade away for a life of such elegant comfort. And in "The Universal Particular," Tamar welcomes her husband's young stepcousin from Somalia into their home, only to find their cool suburban life knocked askew in ways they cannot quite understand.

The year is 1962, and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin is chasing a white elephant: the long-rumored existence of an American spy embedded at the highest echelon of Soviet power. In a wild-goose chase that has Vasin engaged in high-stakes espionage against a rival State agency, he first hears whispers of an ominous top-secret undertaking: Operation Anadyr. As tensions flare between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy over Russian missiles hidden in Cuba, four Soviet submarines are ordered to make a covert run at the American blockade in the Caribbean --- each sub carrying tactical ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads.

Detective Ulf Varg is a man of refined tastes who is quite familiar with the art scene in Malmö. So when art historian Anders Kindgren visits the Department of Sensitive Crimes to report a series of bizarre acts that have been committed against him, Ulf and his team swing into action. Fish stuffed into the vents of Kindgren’s car and a manipulated footnote in a recent publication would be cause enough for an investigation. But when a painting Kindgren had confidently appraised as genuine is later declared to be a fake, it’s clear that someone is out to tarnish his reputation. Meanwhile, Ulf is also weathering personal issues, which quickly spiral out of control. When blood belonging to his lip-reading dog, Martin, is found in the back of his classic Saab, Ulf finds himself the subject of a departmental investigation.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety.

It's 1969, and the greatest basketball player of all time --- Bill Russell --- and his juggernaut Boston Celtics squeak through one more playoff run and land in the NBA Finals again. Russell’s opponent is the fearsome seven-foot, one-inch next-generation superstar, Wilt Chamberlain, recently traded to the Los Angeles Lakers to form the league’s first dream team. Covering this epic series is a wide-eyed young sportswriter named Leigh Montville, who would go on to become an award-winning legend himself at The Boston Globe and Sports Illustrated, and who is sent to L.A. (for the first time!) to write about his luminous heroes, the biggest of big men. What follows is a raucous, colorful, joyous account of one of the greatest seven-game series in NBA history.

When Helen Ellis and her lifelong friends arrive for a reunion on the Redneck Riviera, they unpack more than their suitcases: stories of husbands and kids; lost parents and lost jobs; dirty jokes and sunscreen with SPF higher than they hair-sprayed their bangs senior year; and a bad mammogram. It's a diagnosis that scares them, but could never break their bond. Because women pushing 50 won't be pushed around. In these 12 gloriously comic and moving essays, Helen Ellis dishes on married middle-age sex, sobs with a theater full of women as a psychic exorcises their sorrows, gets 20 shots of stomach bile to the neck to get rid of her double chin, and gathers up the courage to ask, "Are you there, Menopause? It's Me, Helen."

London, 1942. Still recovering from a devastating loss, Nancy Mitford is estranged from her husband and has given up her writing career. Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war. But when a mysterious French officer insists that she has a story to tell, Nancy must decide if picking up the pen again and revealing all is worth the price she might be forced to pay. Eighty years later, Heywood Hill is abuzz with the hunt for a lost wartime manuscript written by Nancy Mitford. For one woman desperately in need of a change, the search will reveal not only a new side to Nancy, but an even more surprising link between the past and present.

Seven years ago, Mia Briscoe was at a college frat rave with her best friend, Serena, when a fire broke out. Everyone was accounted for except Serena, who was never seen or heard from again. Now an investigative journalist covering the political scene in New York City, Mia discovers old photos taken the night of Serena’s disappearance and begins to uncover a sinister string of events going all the way back to that disastrous party. Working with Sherlock, the secrets begin to unravel. But some very powerful --- and very dangerous --- people will do anything to keep them from learning the truth.