Adult

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward --- and finalize her divorce ASAP. There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger and more tempting than she imagined.

1940, Emilia-Romagna. Lili and Esti have been best friends since meeting at the University of Ferrara. There is a war being fought across borders, and in Italy, Mussolini’s Racial Laws have deemed Lili and Esti descendants of an “inferior” Jewish race, but life somehow goes on --- until Germany invades northern Italy, and the friends find themselves in occupied territory. Esti convinces Lili to flee first to a villa in the countryside to help hide a group of young war orphans, then to a convent in Florence, where they pose as nuns and forge false identification papers for the Underground. When disaster strikes at the convent, a critically wounded Esti asks Lili to take a much bigger step: to go on the run with Esti’s son, Theo. Terrified to travel on her own, Lili sets out on an epic journey, doing everything she can to keep Theo safe.

Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny. She’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers. Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent, a much older lesbian magician. With Margot’s mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It’s not long before Cherry must decide how much she’s willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act --- and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.

Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death, but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place. Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found. Twenty years later, Lara has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is determined to find Doris’ killer once and for all. She dumps the entire investigative file on every true-crime site in the world and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to review anything that might be a new lead. When one of the bloggers locates the murder weapon, Lucas and Virgil begin to uncover vital details about the killer’s identity. But what they don’t know is that the killer lurks in plain sight.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Gabe has been gone when Lucy finds a tiny piece of paper in a box of his old photos. An address in Rome. Why did Gabe keep it, and what was he doing in Italy? Lucy buys a last-minute plane ticket. Impulsive, but Gabe always brought that out in her. Lucy’s journey to uncover Gabe’s secret leads her to Dr. Dax Armstrong, a New Yorker in Italy working with an NGO. His broad shoulders and sad, intense eyes draw Lucy in. His touch reaches her in a forgotten place --- one that no one has neared since Gabe. But her old life awaits, along with an earth-shattering decision --- whether she and Darren should tell their son, Samuel, the truth about his father. How can Lucy move forward while she’s rooted in the past? Fate broke her heart once. Can finding new love set her free?

Twentysomething Frida Rodriguez arrives in Paris in 1991, relishing the city’s butter-soaked cuisine and seeking her future as a war correspondent. But then she writes to a bookshop in Seattle and receives more than just the book she requests. A friendship begins that will redefine the person she wants to become. Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida’s free spirit, spurred to believe in herself as a writer, kiss her handsome coworker, and find beauty even in loss. Through the most tumultuous years of their young lives --- personally and globally --- Kate and Frida sustain and nourish each other as they learn the necessity of embracing joy, especially through our darkest hours.

Florence Grimes is a 31-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her 10-year-old son, Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She has to find Alfie and clear her son’s name, or risk losing Dylan forever. The only problem? Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect that Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe.

When innkeeper Dorthe Hyllested is found murdered, the police are surprised and puzzled to discover a concealed nursery in her upstairs apartment. As far as her friends and family knew, the recently widowed Dorthe was childless. So who lived in this secret toy-strewn room? And, more importantly, where is the child now? Detective Louise Rick has just taken on a challenging new job as head of the freshly created Mobile Task Unit, which is charged with solving the most difficult cases all over Denmark. Could the mystery of Dorthe’s murder and the hidden child have something to do with the cabin in the woods behind the inn where men are often seen coming and going at all hours? Louise finds herself grasping at unlikely connections, but the twisted story she begins to uncover turns out to be darker and more dangerous than she ever imagined.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. FIRSTBORN GIRLS traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, SUGAR. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.” Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother, Louisa Vicey Wilson. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement.

Siblings Hazel and Kagan Bailey haven’t been close for a long time. But when their mother passes under mysterious circumstances, an investigation quickly follows, and the siblings are high on the list of possible suspects. As they deal with the emotional tragedy of losing their only living parent, brother and sister are forced to team up against a master con man --- someone they once called “family.” After the silver-tongued trickster disappears with the family fortune, Hazel and Kagan must put aside their differences to track him down. Along the way, they encounter a host of secrets, lies and double-crosses as they dive into the murky waters of their family’s past. With an unlikely ally by their side, the siblings race against time, unraveling a web of deceit that is more tangled than they ever imagined.