Adult

A sweeping and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, THE BRAZEN AGE opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity, a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the 20th century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation and burgeoning bohemia.

It begins with two girls: Neva, from the Caucasus, sold into the sex trade; and Poppy, the adopted daughter of a wealthy New York real estate family, the Zanes. As their paths cross and their fates intertwine in an exquisite high drama that blurs the lines between realism and myth, we travel with them from lavish weddings to the transglobal underworld; from London and New York to Laos and Istanbul; and we watch as the mighty Zane dynasty slips from greatness. Jane Mendelsohn captures the emotional worlds of these characters with visceral immediacy, and transforms their private narratives into a larger story about the forces of globalization, human trafficking and sexual violence.

In the fall of 1984, the Grand Hotel in the seaside town of Brighton, England, became ground zero for the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Nimbly weaving together fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, Jonathan Lee vividly reimagines those fateful days from the perspectives of three unforgettable characters --- a young IRA bomb maker, the deputy hotel manager, and his teenage daughter --- whose lives will be changed forever by the Prime Minister’s visit.

Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and with siblings whose astonishing creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing intensity. Brontë’s blazingly intelligent female characters brimming with hidden passions transformed English literature, even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed the author’s literary success.

A FEW OF THE GIRLS brings together, for the first time, 36 of Maeve Binchy’s very best stories --- some published in magazines, others written for friends as gifts, many for charity benefits, all of them filled with her trademark warmth, wisdom and humor. Written over a period of decades, these stories show that while times change, people often remain the same: they fall in love, sometimes unsuitably; they experience heartbreak, compassion and redemption; they hold to hopes and dreams; and they have friendships --- some that fall apart, and a few special ones that endure.

Relief pitcher/private investigator Johnny Adcock doesn't have an office; he has the bullpen. That's where he meets Tiff Tate, the femme-fatale stylist responsible for half the looks in Major League Baseball, from Brian Wilson's beard to Big Papi's gold ropes. Tiff has a problem. Her new client, the rookie phenom Yonel Ruiz, has been threatened by a cartel of smugglers. Adcock is her last best hope. As he embarks on this potentially deadly mission, Adcock tangoes with a mysterious, sexy assassin known only as La Loba. And he still has the playoffs to worry about.

Frieda Klein learns from her former classmate, Maddie Capel, that Maddie’s teenage daughter, Becky, claims she was raped in her own bed one night while her mother was downstairs. Becky’s story awakens dark memories of an eerily similar incident in Frieda’s own past that she’s been avoiding for decades. When Becky is found hanging from a beam in her bedroom, Frieda seeks out her old high school friends to ask what they remember about the night that prompted Frieda to leave town for good. But confronting the ghosts of the past turns out to be more dangerous than she ever expected.

A fixture in the literary canon, Charlotte Brontë is revered by readers all over the world. Her novels featuring unforgettable, strong heroines still resonate with millions today. Part of a remarkable family that produced three acclaimed female writers at a time in 19th-century Britain when few women wrote, and fewer were published, Brontë has become a great source of inspiration to writers, especially women, ever since. Now in READER, I MARRIED HIM, 20 of today’s most celebrated female authors have spun original stories, using the opening line from JANE EYRE as a springboard for their own flights of imagination.

Twenty years working undercover in the netherworld of drugs has left Jeff Buck burned out and grateful to assume the quiet job of police chief in the small town of Reminderville, Ohio. That is, until a simple domestic assault case turns out to have links to the murder of a drug runner in upstate New York and a syndicate smuggling billions of dollars in drugs across the US-Canada border. As Buck reluctantly plunges back into his old world of death and deceit, he uncovers a complex chain linking the Hells Angels to the Russian Mafia in a plot to use Native American tribal land to smuggle their deadly wares into the United States.

The 1911 New York Giants stole an astonishing 347 bases, a record that still stands more than a century later. That alone makes them special in baseball history, but as Maury Klein relates in STEALING GAMES, they also embodied a rapidly changing America on the cusp of a faster, more frenetic pace of life dominated by machines, technology and urban culture. Baseball, too, was evolving from the dead-ball to the live-ball era --- the cork-centered ball was introduced in 1910 and structurally changed not only the outcome of individual games but the way the game itself was played, requiring upgraded equipment, new rules and new ways of adjudicating.