Adult

Harry Dresden has been through a lot, and so has his city. After Harry and his allies narrowly managed to save Chicago from being razed to the ground, everything is different --- and it’s not just the current lack of electricity. In the battle, Harry lost people he cared about. And that's the kind of loss that takes a toll. Harry being Harry, he’s doing his level best to help the city and his friends recover and rebuild. But it’s a heavy load, and he needs time. But time is one thing Harry doesn’t have. Ghouls are prowling Chicago and taking out innocent civilians. Harry’s brother is dying, and Harry doesn’t know how to help him. And last but certainly not least, the Winter Queen of the Fae has allied with the White Court of vampires --- and Harry has been betrothed to the seductive, deadly vampire Lara Raith to seal the deal.

Mina is 30 and living in London. She fled there at 20 to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar --- it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina’s sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive. In searching for traces of her father, Mina begins to piece together her own fractured sense of identity. As she reconnects with the memories embedded in the land, she must confront what it means to belong --- not just to a place, but to a lineage, a language, a self.

KING AND PAWNS is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America, and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred on July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone and actor --- himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of his iconic reputation in the eyes of America. The second occurred on June 12, 1956, when a battered, defiant Robeson --- prohibited from leaving the United States --- faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting that Robinson appeared in seven years earlier.

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin --- newly arrived from India --- into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life.

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn’t? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.

After a botched high-profile murder investigation, Corporal Elderick Cole is exiled to the remote, rugged landscape of Nunavut, a vast territory in the Arctic Circle known for its untamed beauty, frigid temperatures and endless winter nights. With his family having severed all ties, Cole waits out the result of a civil lawsuit alone --- the wrong verdict could end what’s left of his flailing career. His bleak existence takes a sinister turn when he discovers the hanging body of Pitseolala, a troubled Inuit girl whom he had sworn to protect. Her death dredges up demons he thought he’d buried along with the scars of a fractured marriage and the aching divide between him and his estranged daughter. As Cole’s life unravels, he turns to Pitseolala’s younger brother, Maliktu, a fellow outsider. It’s then that Cole uncovers what binds them --- a singular mission to find her killer.

Chuck Klosterman did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of football. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past. Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects --- phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is engrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it.

Alone and adrift in Barcelona, an unnamed narrator is haunted by the death of her teenage brother, Diego. Diego, the little boy she helped raise in Mexico while their mother struggled to make a living in Spain. Diego, who loved Vampire Weekend and dreamed of becoming a pilot. Diego, who hated Madrid as much as she did. Now, his ashes in hand, she must return to Mexico. Plagued by memories, she recounts their young lives leading up to tragedy in blistering detail: the acute loneliness that accompanied their emigration; the siblings’ first separation, when she left for Barcelona to make her own way in the world; her activism against labor abuses, which is threatened by her tumultuous relationship with an entitled lover; and the final, heavyhearted confrontation with her brother.

Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor 10 years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers --- about how to live a good life and what it means to make art --- through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel --- her old painting professor --- reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it.

Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid-off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by Henry Ford in thrall, he recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as “strike insurance.” The Model T mogul also has bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.