Adult

Twelve years ago, Mila Jackson’s three-year-old half-sister, Coco, disappeared during their father’s 50th birthday party. Her identical twin, Ruby, was left behind as the only witness. The girls’ father, Sean, was wealthy and influential, as were the friends gathered at their seaside vacation home for the weekend’s debauchery. The case ignited a media frenzy and forever changed the lives of everyone involved. Now, Sean Jackson is dead, and the people who were present that terrible night must gather once more for a funeral that will reveal that the secrets of the past can never stay hidden.

While sitting in traffic, an unbidden thought comes to Frances Moon. “I lost a baby when I was nineteen.” She is surprised by her own voice as she speaks the thought aloud to Ian, her partner of twenty years. The next morning, Ian is gone. Numbed by abandonment, Frances sets out for the small town in western Canada where she grew up. The novel flashes back to Frances as an imaginative and well-loved little girl who begins to lose herself once forced from her family’s idyllic farm. As she withdraws, only two people offer comfort: Dooley Sullivan, an older troublemaker, and Silas Chance, a Native American and WWII vet. Silas dies violently, the victim of a hit-and-run. In such a small town with the usual racial prejudices, the case is never solved. But years later, on the evening of her marriage, Frances knows who the driver was. And possibly, so does Dooley.

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns that he’s broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him. Distraught, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil --- the polite “Gentleman” of the title --- who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party’s over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord. Newly in love with Vivian, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell. Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny.

In the ten years since her beloved, groundbreaking ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AN ORDINARY LIFE, Amy Krouse Rosenthal has been quietly at work on this modest but mighty magnum opus. She has cultivated a distinct blend of nonlinear memoir, observational humor, wistful reflections and interactive connections with readers. A timeless collection of insights, memories and moments that are at once intimate and universal, TEXTBOOK AMY KROUSE ROSENTHAL speaks to the awe, bewilderment and poignancy of being alive.

When Olivia Rawlings --- pastry chef extraordinaire for an exclusive Boston dinner club --- sets not just her flambéed dessert but the entire building alight, she escapes to the most comforting place she can think of: the idyllic town of Guthrie, Vermont. But the getaway turns into something more lasting when Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous owner of the Sugar Maple Inn, offers Livvy a job, which she accepts. Livvy soon uncovers the real reason she has been hired --- to help Margaret reclaim the inn’s blue ribbon status at the annual county fair apple pie contest. But when a new arrival takes the community by surprise, Livvy must decide whether to do what she does best and flee --- or stay and finally discover what it means to belong.

Nothing is simple when you’re 35th in line for the British crown, least of all marriage. But with love on their side and plans to elope, Lady Georgiana Rannoch and her beau, Darcy O’Mara, hope to bypass a few royal rules. Throwing their cares to the wind, nothing could deter them from their mission --- except the news that Georgie’s future father-in-law has just been arrested for the murder of a wealthy American. With the elopement postponed, they head for Ireland where Darcy’s father insists he’s innocent, and it’s up to Georgie and Darcy to prove it --- for better or worse.

Edie was the kind of girl who immediately caused a stir when she walked into your life. Now, at 33, she is working as a waitress, pregnant and alone. When she becomes overwhelmed by the needs of her new baby and sinks into a bleak despair, she thinks that there’s no one to turn to. But someone has been watching Edie, waiting for the chance to prove once again what a perfect friend she can be. It’s no coincidence that Heather shows up on Edie’s doorstep, just when Edie needs her the most. Edie is about to learn a new lesson: Those who have hurt us deeply --- or who we have hurt --- never let us go, not entirely.

Chuck Spencer and Wally Luntz, two friends scheduled to meet in person for the first time, are murdered on the same night, several miles apart. Lydia Ascher comes home to find two dead men in her basement. When homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth discover her connection to their current cases, they suspect she is a target as well. The same day, a terminally ill man is kidnapped from his home, an Alzheimer’s patient goes missing, and a baffling link among all the crimes emerges. This series of inexplicable events sends the detectives 60 years into the past to search for answers --- and straight to Grace MacBride’s Monkeewrench, a group of eccentric computer geniuses who devote their time and resources to helping the cops solve the unsolvable.

For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers --- French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly --- exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed, their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them.

When Ben, a suburban family man, takes a business trip to rural Pennsylvania, he decides to spend the afternoon before his dinner meeting on a short hike. Once he sets out into the woods behind his hotel, he quickly comes to realize that the path he has chosen cannot be given up easily. With no choice but to move forward, Ben finds himself falling deeper and deeper into a world of man-eating giants, bizarre demons and colossal insects. On a quest of epic, life-or-death proportions, Ben finds help comes in some of the most unexpected forms, including a profane crustacean and a variety of magical objects, tools, and potions. Desperate to return to his family, Ben is determined to track down the “Producer,” the creator of the world in which he is being held hostage and the only one who can free him from the path.