Adult

Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish, disappearing into the clouds. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning. Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she disappear?

The world of Dune has shaped an entire generation of science fiction. From the sand-blasted world of Arrakis, to the splendor of the imperial homeworld of Kaitain, readers have lived in a universe of treachery and wonder. Now, these stories expand on the Dune universe, telling of the lost years of Gurney Halleck as he works with smugglers on Arrakis in a deadly gambit for revenge; inside the ranks of the Sardaukar as the child of a betrayed nobleman becomes one of the Emperor’s most ruthless fighters; and a young firebrand Fremen woman, a guerrilla fighter against the ruthless Harkonnens, who one day will become Shadout Mapes.

For the first time in her adult life, former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D’arcy is unemployed. But her summer vacation on a remote West Cork peninsula takes a dangerous turn when human remains wash up below the steep cliffs of Ross Head. When construction worker Lukas Adamik disappeared months ago, everyone assumed he had gone home to Poland. Now that his body has been found, the guards seem to think he threw himself from the cliffs. But as Maggie gets to know the residents of the nearby village and learns about the history of the peninsula and its abandoned Anglo Irish manor house, once home to a famous Irish painter who died under mysterious circumstances, she starts to think there's something else going on. Something deadly.

Absorbing and evocative, these drawn-from-life stories by Hilary Mantel begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the young narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In “King Billy Is a Gentleman,” the child must come to terms with the loss of a father and the puzzle of a fading Irish heritage. “Curved Is the Line of Beauty" is a story of friendship, faith and a near-disaster in a scrap-yard. The title story sees our narrator ironing out her northern vowels with the help of an ex-actress with one lung and a Manchester accent. In “Third Floor Rising," she watches, amazed, as her mother carves out a stylish new identity.

It is 2013, and 23-year-old Brooklyn barista Molly Diamond has just locked eyes with Jake Danner, the front man of an up-and-coming Southern rock band. It’s not long before Molly and Jake fall deeply in love, inspiring each other’s writing and planning for a life together filled with creativity, passion and adventure. But nearly a decade later, Molly is teaching yoga and living in a posh Connecticut suburb with her young daughter and husband, Hunter --- who is decidedly not Jake Danner. Molly is lonely in picture-perfect Flynn Cove --- until Sabrina walks into her studio. A newcomer in town, Sabrina has her own reasons for seeking out Molly, and their blossoming friendship will set both women on a collision course of deep-rooted secrets, lies and manipulation.

Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty, is over rescuing snoring princesses. But just when she’s beginning to think she can't handle one more princess, she glances into a mirror and sees another face looking back at her: the shockingly gorgeous face of evil, asking for her help. Because there’s more than one person trapped in a story they didn’t choose. Snow White's Evil Queen has found out how her story ends, and she's desperate for a better ending. She wants Zinnia to help her before it’s too late for everyone. Will Zinnia accept the Queen's poisonous request and save them both from the hot iron shoes that wait for them, or will she try another path?

New York, 1924. Vivian Kelly's days are filled with drudgery, from the tenement lodging she shares with her sister to the dress shop where she sews for hours every day. But at night, she escapes to The Nightingale, an underground dance hall where illegal liquor flows and the band plays the Charleston with reckless excitement. With a bartender willing to slip her a free glass of champagne and friends who know the owner, Vivian can lose herself in the music. But then she discovers a body behind the club. With too many people assuming she knows more about the crime than she does, Vivian finds herself caught between the dangers of New York's underground and the world of the city's wealthy and careless.

Growing up, Keri Blakinger threw herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice. For the next nine years, Keri ricocheted from one dark place to the next. Then, on a cold day during her senior year, the police caught her walking down the street with a Tupperware full of heroin. Her arrest made the front page of the local news and landed her behind bars for nearly two years. After she walked out of her cell for the last time, Keri became a reporter dedicated to exposing our flawed prisons as only an insider could.

Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic, widowed mother, Marti, will be dying soon. Marti’s will surprises them with its provision that the family’s summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three sisters. While there’s a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he’s an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women. Before long, everyone in this cast of indelible characters will have to come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than they expected, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other --- and themselves.

Despite surviving a brutal childhood in Mississippi, Charlie Ovid doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When Alice Quicke, a jaded detective with her own troubled past, is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London and the wooden theaters of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts are forced to combat the forces that threaten their safety. There, the world of the dead and the world of the living threaten to collide.