Adult

Aidan Marlowe has been playing the same lottery numbers for 15 years, never hitting the jackpot. Until now. On the day of his wife's funeral. Aidan struggles to cope with these two sudden extremes. But the money gives him and his kids options they didn't have before. They can leave everything behind and start a new life in a new town. So they do. But a huge new house and all the money in the world can't replace what they've lost, and it's not long before Aidan realizes he's merely trading old demons for new ones. Because someone is watching him and his family very closely. Someone who knows exactly who they are, where they've come from and what they're trying to hide. Someone who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a prominent Silicon Valley tech firm. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move to Los Angeles. When Bertie’s attempts to make Kate stay fail, she suggests the next best thing: a trip to Paris that will hopefully distract the duo from their upcoming separation. One night in Paris, they meet a strange man in a bar who offers them a private tour of the Louvre. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated, and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything.

Los Angeles, 1963. African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks becoming a victim at every crime scene he photographs. When Ingram hears about a deadly automobile accident on his police scanner, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, a white jazz trumpeter. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos, he sees signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line.

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent. The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded? As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth. And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages.

At age 11, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now 25 years later, and after more than two decades of estrangement, Helen and Benjamin reconnect at his home in Portland, Oregon, to try to understand what happened during the days she was gone. Meanwhile, Benjamin meets an odd pair, a woman and boy who seem driven to help him learn more about Helen’s disappearance and send him on a journey that will lead to a murder house, uncanny possession and a bone-filled body of water known as Sad Clown Lake, a lake “that could only be found by getting lost, that was never in the same place twice.”

Tasha Morton is a force of nature: a brilliant educator who’s left her mark on generations of students --- and also a whirlwind of a mother, intrusive, chaotic, oppressively devoted and irrepressible. For decades, her son Brian has kept her at a self-protective distance, but when her health begins to fail, he knows it’s time to assume responsibility for her care. Even so, he’s not prepared for what awaits him, as her refusal to accept her own fragility leads to a series of epic outbursts and altercations that are sometimes frightening, sometimes wildly comic, and sometimes both.

For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner. In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write THE COLOR PURPLE; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother.

Vacuum repairman and self-appointed mayor of Prometto, Italy, Signor Speranza has a problem. Unless he can come up with 70,000 euros to fix the town’s pipes, the water commission will shut off the water to the village and all its residents will be forced to disperse. So in a bid to boost tourism --- and revenue --- he spreads a harmless rumor that movie star Dante Rinaldi will be filming his next project nearby. Unfortunately, the plan works a little too well, and soon everyone in town wants to be a part of the fictional film. To his surprise, Speranza realizes that the only way to keep up the ruse is to make the movie for real. But what happens when Dante Rinaldi doesn’t show up? Or worse, what if he does?

As a daughter, mother and friend, Mary Laura Philpott considered herself an “anxious optimist” --- a natural worrier with a stubborn sense of good cheer. And while she didn’t really think she had any sort of magical protective powers, she believed in her heart that as long as she loved her people enough, she could keep them safe. Then, in the early hours of one dark morning at home, her belief was upended. In the months that followed, she turned to poignant memories, priceless stories and a medley of coping mechanisms (with comically mixed success) to regain her equilibrium and find meaning in everyday wonders.

“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’ bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother, something in her shifts. Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied --- and denied herself.