Adult

Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members. In the 1960s, a father focuses on his daughter’s wedding even as the Cuban Missile Crisis approaches the brink of global disaster. On September 11th, a maid working for U.S. Embassy staff in London wonders if her birth on the day of the Kennedy assassination determined the course of her life. And at the height of the pandemic lockdown, a respiratory disease specialist comes out of retirement and is faced with a formative childhood memory.

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city, and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge, and Bo has been alone ever since. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape --- but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, but they forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who has brought her back to it.

In 2018, Zoe Rosenzweig is reeling after the loss of her beloved grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. She becomes obsessed with finding out what really happened to her family during the war. Vienna, 1946: Chana Rosenzweig has endured the horrors of war to find herself, her mother and her younger brother finally free in Vienna. But freedom doesn’t look like they’d imagined it would, as they struggle to make a living and stay safe. Despite the danger, Chana sneaks out most nights to return to the hotel kitchen where she works as a dishwasher, using the quiet nighttime hours to bake her late father’s recipes. Soon, Chana finds herself caught in a dangerous love triangle, torn between the black-market dealer who has offered marriage and protection, and the apprentice baker who shares her passions. How will Chana balance her love of baking against her family’s need for security?

Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve Yang is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future. When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is.

After serving three years in prison for armed robbery, Nick Marshall wondered what kind of life he could lead as an ex-con. As he soon came to find, life on parole had its limits, but he was fortunate enough to have a salaried job, a roof over his head, and a car. Yet something still tugged at him: his yearning to be an artist. Aware of the immense time and effort it would take to fulfill such a dream, he gave up his safety net and took his place at the bottom of the totem pole in the hospitality industry. What Nick did not expect was for a series of jobs in bars and restaurants to catapult him into the exciting yet treacherous world of New York City nightlife. By connecting with all of the right movers, shakers, gatekeepers and the like, he began to blaze a new trail. Before he knew it, he was a power player who had it all. Or so he thought.

One afternoon in the autumn of 1972, a lonely widow in Mt. Gilead, Illinois, makes the impromptu decision to rent out a room in her house to a stranger who has come to town. It is risky; she doesn’t know anything about him. But Edith Green can no longer bear a life lived alone. And Henry Dees is haunted by the past he carries with him from another small town, particularly by the death of a little girl that some people think was his fault. And slowly, Henry and Edith's suspenseful dance between secrets and trust leads them to start revealing things to each other --- and themselves.

In DANCING ON COALS, Cynthia Moore describes a multi-decade, harebrained search for love in all the wrong places, starting when her narcissistic mother abandons her to a Swiss finishing school. Desperately seeking belonging, she leapfrogs from a polyamorous commune into a high-octane all-male performance group, dancing as if her life depends on it. When she finally quits the theater, earns a masters degree in psychology and develops her own therapeutic approach, she is able to heal herself and find the true belonging and peace she longs for. At times humorous and self-deprecating, at times poignant and heartbreaking, this is the story of one woman's path from abandonment to wholeness and authenticity.

At 21, Brenda Coffee surrendered herself to her marriage and became a woman who would do almost anything her charismatic and powerful older husband, Philip Ray, wanted. Regardless of whether it was dangerous, adventurous, sexual or illegal, she wanted to be the one woman he couldn’t live without. Brenda and Philip’s life together was a fairy tale until it wasn’t. Until Philip, the founder of two high-profile, groundbreaking public companies, began making real cocaine in their basement and became addicted. Until the Big Six tobacco companies threatened their lives for creating the first smokeless cigarette --- Brenda coined the terms vape and vaping --- and brutal Guatemalan military commandos forced her into the jungle at gunpoint.

Everyone in Foss Butcher’s village knows what happens when the magic-workers come. They harvest human hearts to use in their spells. But Foss never expected that anyone would want hers. So when a sorcerer snags a piece of Foss’ heart without meaning to, she is furious. She stomps toward the grand City to keep his enchanted House and demands that he fixes her before she keels over and dies. But the sorcerer, Sylvester, is not what she expected. Petulant, idle and new to his powers, Sylvester has no clue how to undo the heart-taking, or how to do much of anything. Foss’ only friend is a talking cat, and even the House’s walls themselves have moods. As Foss searches for a cure, she accidentally uncovers that there is much more to the heart-taking --- and to the magic-workers themselves --- than she ever could have imagined.

Joan Didion opened THE WHITE ALBUM (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood. In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking.