Adult

For Maggie Rayburn --- wife, mother and secretary at a munitions plant --- life is pleasant, and predictable. When she finds proof of a high-level cover-up on her boss’s desk, she takes it --- an act that turns her world upside down. Pretty soon, Maggie starts to see injustice everywhere and her bottom drawer is filled with what she calls “evidence.” For Penn Sinclair --- Army Captain home from Iraq, Ivy League graduate and reluctant heir to his family’s fortune --- a hasty decision to launch a website exposing the truth about the war, has disastrous results.

Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution --- for the violent killing of his parents 20 years earlier --- when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime. Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars' case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now? But when a member of Decker's team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger --- and more sinister --- than just one convicted criminal's life hangs in the balance.

It’s 1945, and Miklós is looking for a wife. The fact that he has six months left to live doesn’t discourage him --- he isn’t one to let small problems like that stand in the way, especially not after he’s survived a concentration camp. Currently marooned in an all-male sanatorium in Sweden, and desperate to get out, he acquires the names of the 117 Hungarian women also recovering in Sweden and writes each of them a letter in his beautiful cursive hand. Luckily for him, Lili decides to write back.

THE FATHER is inspired by the extraordinary true story of three brothers who committed 10 audacious bank robberies in Sweden over the course of just two years. None had committed a crime before, and all were under 24 years old. When their incredible spree had come to an end amid the glare of the international media, all of them would be changed forever as individuals and as a family. This intoxicating, heartbreaking thriller tells the story of how three boys are transformed over the course of their lives from innocent children to the most wanted criminals in Sweden. And of the man who made them that way: their father.

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave. Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go.

Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything. They begin secretly writing comedies together and fall in love, but their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.

From the moment Marija walks into Lara's classroom, freshly moved to Serbia from Sarajevo, Lara is enchanted by her vibrant beauty, confidence and wild energy. Closer than sisters, the girls share everything. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced to separate for the first time. In America, Lara seeks fulfillment through work and family, but when news from Marija ceases, the uncertainty torments Lara, driving her on a quest to find her friend. As Lara travels through war-torn Serbia and Bosnia, she must also wrestle with truths about her own identity.

Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships --- one with a female novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup.

For three years in the 1930s, the world watched, riveted, as the Spanish Civil War became the battleground in a fight between freedom and fascism that would soon take on global proportions. Confronting a right-wing coup led by Francisco Franco and heavily aided by Hitler and Mussolini, volunteers flooded in to support Spain’s democratic government. Among them were nearly 3,000 Americans, called by their convictions to lend a hand in a brutal conflict their government wanted no part of. In SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS, Adam Hochschild weaves together the stories of some dozen foreigners to reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.

Kate and Mannix O’Brien’s autistic son Fergus is bullied at school, and their daughter Izzy wishes she could protect him. Kate is convinced her luck is about to change when she spots a gorgeous Manhattan apartment on a home-exchange website. Hazel and Oscar Harvey and their two children live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Though they seem successful and happy, Hazel has mysterious bruises, and Oscar is hiding things about his dental practice. Hazel has always wanted her children to see her native Limerick, and the house swap offers a perfect chance to soothe two troubled marriages. But this will be anything but a perfect vacation.