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Adult

by Souvankham Thammavongsa - Fiction

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange. As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities --- as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances --- will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

by Ken Follett - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Joia, Neen’s sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain. Joia’s vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life’s work. But as drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers, and woodlanders --- and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare.

by Walter Mosley - Fiction, Mystery

Easy Rawlins' success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems, and more threat to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides. A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman --- Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.

by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham - Fiction, Women's Fiction

It’s move-in day at Tiffin Academy and amidst the happy chaos, shocking news arrives: America Today just ranked Tiffin the number two boarding school in the country. It’s a seventeen-spot jump --- was there a typo? But just as the rarefied air of Tiffin is suffused with self-congratulation, the wheels begin to turn --- and then they fall off the bus. One by one, scandalous blind items begin to appear on phones across Tiffin’s campus, thanks to a new app called ZipZap, and nobody is safe --- everyone has something to hide. As if high school wasn’t dramatic enough...As the year unfolds, bonds are forged and broken, secrets are shared and exposed, and the lives of Tiffin’s students and staff are changed forever.

by Jane Hamilton - Coming of Age, Fiction

Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family. But on the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. With the help of her best friend Luna, Phoebe runs away. Patrick’s older brothers can’t help but notice the striking, Peter Pan–like stranger who has suddenly appeared in their midst. What starts as an adolescent rebellion soon spirals into a whirlwind of self-discovery and unexpected connections. As she grapples with her shifting identity and strained relationships, Phoebe must navigate the tumultuous road out of girlhood and chart a new and unknown course.

by Robert Galbraith - Fiction, Mystery

A dismembered corpse is discovered in the vault of a silver shop. The police initially believe it to be that of a convicted armed robber --- but not everyone agrees with that theory. One of them is Decima Mullins, who calls on the help of private detective Cormoran Strike as she's certain the body in the silver vault was that of her boyfriend, who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott discover the silver shop is no ordinary one: it's located beside Freemasons' Hall and specializes in Masonic silverware. And in addition to the armed robber and Decima's boyfriend, it becomes clear that there are other missing men who could fit the profile of the body in the vault. Strike faces another quandary: Robin seems increasingly committed to her boyfriend, policeman Ryan Murphy, but the impulse to declare his own feelings for her is becoming stronger than ever.

by Grady Chambers - Coming of Age, Fiction

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year―as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country --- the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

by Nathan Harris - Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return. When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June’s tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman’s journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper's daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who'll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they're owed. 

by David McCloskey - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Kamran Esfahani, a dentist living in Stockholm, agrees to spy for the Mossad after he’s recruited by the chief of a unit tasked with running assassinations inside Iran. At Glitzman’s direction, Kam returns Tehran and opens a dental practice there, using it as a cover for the Israeli intelligence agency. But when Kam tries to recruit an Iranian widow seeking to avenge the death of her husband at the hands of the Mossad, the operation goes terribly wrong, landing him in prison under a sadistic officer called “General.” After enduring three years of torture in captivity, Kamran Esfahani sits in an interrogation room across from the General, preparing to write his final confession. Kam knows it is too late to save himself. But he has managed to keep one secret and he just might be able to save that.