Adult

A genius hacker who has always been an outsider. A journalist with a penchant for danger. She is Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. He is Mikael Blomkvist, crusading editor of Millennium. One night, Blomkvist receives a call from a source who claims to have been given information vital to the United States by a young female hacker. Blomkvist, always on the lookout for a story, reaches out to Salander for help. She, as usual, has plans of her own. Together they are drawn into a ruthless underworld of spies, cybercriminals and government operatives --- some of whom are willing to kill to protect their secrets.

Christian Thydell’s dream has come true. His debut novel, The Mermaid, has been published to rave reviews. So why is he as distant and unhappy as ever? When crime writer Erica Falk, who helped Christian discover and develop his talents, learns he has been receiving anonymous threats, she investigates not just the messages but also the young author’s mysterious past. Then, one of Christian’s closet friends, Magnus, goes missing. Erica’s husband, Detective Patrik Hedström, has his worst suspicions confirmed as the mind games aimed at Christian become a disturbing reality.

The monomaniacal Rand brothers are ruthless in their pursuit of a cure for what was then known as the fatal “white-blood disease.” In London’s Royal Naval Hospital annex, nurse Hester Monk is tending one of the brothers’ dying patients when she stumbles upon three terrified young children and learns that they’ve been secretly purchased and imprisoned by the Rands for experimental purposes. Before Hester can reveal the truth, she too becomes a prisoner; the brothers are too close to a miracle cure to allow their experiments to be exposed.

Paul Theroux has spent 50 years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his 10th travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America --- the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye.

In 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a 20-year-old Jewish Berliner, made the extraordinary decision to do everything in her power to avoid the concentration camps. She removed her yellow star, took on an assumed identity and disappeared into the city. In the years that followed, Marie took shelter wherever it was offered, living with the strangest of bedfellows, from circus performers and committed communists to convinced Nazis. As Marie quickly learned, however, compassion and cruelty are very often two sides of the same coin. Fifty years later, she agreed to tell her story for the first time.

In THE LOST LANDSCAPE, Joyce Carol Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading ALICE IN WONDERLAND changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a series of endless adventures, growing up on a farm taught her harsh lessons about sacrifice, hard work and loss. Oates transports us to a forgotten place and time while reminding us of the forgotten landscapes of our own earliest lives.

What drove a painfully shy outcast in elite Washington society --- a man so self-conscious he refused to make eye contact during meetings --- to pursue power and public office? How did a president so attuned to the American political id that he won reelection in a historic landslide lack the self-awareness to recognize the gaping character flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his legacy? In BEING NIXON, Evan Thomas peels away the layers of the complex, confounding figure who became America’s 37th president.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents --- an odd brother and sister --- extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late.

Anthony Marra’s collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape that is unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.

Colum McCann’s latest consists of a novella and three short stories. In the title piece, mystery surrounds the death of a retired 82-year-old New York Supreme Court justice. The other stories involve a writer struggling to compose a story for a New Year’s edition of a magazine, a mother in Galway whose 13-year-old adopted son has disappeared, and an elderly nun who discovers that the man who kidnapped her 37 years earlier is now a diplomat.