Adult

Izumi Tanaka has never really felt like she fit in --- it isn’t easy being Japanese American in her small, mostly white, northern California town. But then she discovers a clue to her previously unknown father’s identity…and he’s none other than the Crown Prince of Japan. In a whirlwind, Izumi travels to Japan to meet the father she never knew and discover the country she always dreamed of. But being a princess isn’t all ball gowns and tiaras. There are conniving cousins, a hungry press, a scowling but handsome bodyguard who just might be her soulmate, and thousands of years of tradition and customs to learn practically overnight. She soon finds herself caught between worlds, and between versions of herself. Will Izumi crumble under the weight of the crown, or will she live out her fairy tale, happily ever after?

In 2017, inspired in part by Henry James’ THE TURN OF THE SCREW, the acclaimed English novelist John Lanchester published a ghost story in The New Yorker. "Signal," an eerie story of contemporary life and the perils of technology, was a sensation among readers --- and since then Lanchester has written several more. REALITY AND OTHER STORIES gathers the best of these, taking readers to an uncanny world familiar to fans of “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror.” Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Mysterious cell phone calls from unknown numbers. Reality TV shows and the creeping suspicion that none of this is real.

Jerusalem and the Sinai desert, first century AD. In the turbulent aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus, officers of the Roman Empire acquire intelligence of a pilgrim bearing an incendiary letter from a religious fanatic to insurrectionists in Corinth. The content of this letter could bring down the empire. The Romans hire a former legionary, the solitary man-at-arms, Telamon of Arcadia, to intercept the letter and capture its courier. Telamon operates by a dark code all his own, with no room for noble causes or lofty beliefs. But once he overtakes the courier, something happens that neither he nor the empire could have predicted.

The residents of Santa Claus Lane do their best to stay out of each other’s way, but desire, fury and mischief too often propel these suburban neighbors to collide. Precocious Korean American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide, and they must fight to keep their home; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; a sardonic gay horror novelist finds that aging is more terrifying than any monster; and a white hippie mom and her adopted Vietnamese daughter realize that their anger binds them rather than pushes them apart.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin is set ablaze. It’s just a month after Hitler’s inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents. John Russell’s recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son, Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes that he has to report --- the gruesome murder of a rent boy, the hit-and-run death of a professional genealogist, the suspicious disappearance of a Nazi-supporting celebrity fortune teller --- are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany.

The 2016 bestseller LILAC GIRLS introduced readers to Caroline Ferriday. Now, in SUNFLOWER SISTERS, Martha Hall Kelly tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists. Inspired by true accounts, the novel provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience --- from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It’s a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty.

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made --- and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children without “resources or voice.” She became a fierce and defiant little girl, determined to fight for the life her mother couldn’t have. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, Allende for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote “with a knife between our teeth” about women’s issues. She has seen what the movement has accomplished in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three passionate marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one’s sexuality.

When Rose McCarthy’s staff at Mode magazine pitches a cover shoot with Hollywood’s hottest young actress, the actress’s sizzling affair with a bestselling French author is exposed. The author happens to be Rose’s son-in-law, which creates a painful dilemma for her. Her daughter Nadia, a talented interior designer, has been struggling to hold her marriage together, and conceal the truth from their young daughters, her family and the world. But Nicolas, her straying husband, is blinded by passion for a younger woman, who is pregnant with his child. Nadia’s three sisters fly to Paris to lend support and offer their widely divergent advice. In the end, though, Nadia needs to figure out what she herself thinks and what to do next.

June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention who leaves home to begin grueling astronaut training at the National Space Program. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was 12 years old, and she alone has evidence that makes her believe the crew is still alive. As June and her uncle’s former protégé, James, work to solve the fuel cell’s fatal flaw, the relationship that develops between them threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to create --- and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive.