Adult

After her husband’s unexpected death 18 months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking --- until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she's been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly 20 years. Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved. With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth.

In school, Milly Beckett and Nicole Raven were as close as sisters. Now, years later, a gulf separates them. Nicole is a global superstar, but when scandal breaks, she turns to the only person she trusts. Fresh from a painful divorce, Milly is tempted to refuse her friend’s plea for help. Nicole wasn’t there for her when she needed her most, and that’s hard to forgive. But Nicole is desperate, and Milly agrees to give her the sanctuary she needs. Against a stunning Lake District backdrop, stilted small talk gradually gives way to soul-deep revelations as the two women slowly find their way back to one another. But Nicole can’t stay hidden forever --- and neither can the secret she’s been keeping from Milly, a secret that threatens both her future happiness and the fragile bond between them.

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle --- how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful --- the very people Vanity Fair venerated. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors and readers, as well as many of the faces that would come to appear in Vanity Fair’s pages. WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD is Carter’s lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of the most talented editors in the business.

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano. THE BIRD HOTEL tells the story of this young American who, after suffering tragedy, restores and runs La Llorona. Along the way, we meet a rich assortment of characters who live in the village or come to stay at the hotel. While the world that Joyce Maynard brings to life on the page is rendered from her imagination, it’s one informed by the more than 20 years of which she has spent a significant amount of her time in a small Mayan indigenous village in Guatemala.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living. As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.

Derrymore Academy circa 2007 is home to teenagers who have their eyebrows shaped and their sweet sixteens tented. It is here that Emery Hooper, adopted at birth into the country club set, thrives. The one blight on her otherwise perfect life? Lilah Chang. The Chinese American student is the embarrassing epitome of every Asian stereotype Emery despises --- and is inexplicably determined to become Emery’s friend. Lilah is both astounded and hopelessly self-conscious around the casual wealth at Derrymore. Desperate to fit in, she’s fascinated by Emery: an Asian girl who is somehow wholly comfortable in a white world. When Emery’s wealth isn’t enough to protect her from increasing microaggressions, Lilah and Emery develop a complicated friendship that tentatively unites them against the undercurrent of white privilege at their school.

April 1941: Belfast has escaped the worst of the Second World War --- so far. Over the next two months, it will be so destroyed from above that people will say, in horror, “My God, Belfast is finished.” Many won’t make it through, and those who do will be forever changed. Living amid the rubble are sisters Emma and Audrey. One is engaged to be married; the other is in a secret relationship with another woman. As the bombs fall, and tomorrow feels further and further away, these young women must grapple with the cultural expectations standing firm around them and try to seize control of their destinies. After all, Emma thinks, if one is to survive, one must survive for something.

When Nathan Carman, a young man with a complicated past, is miraculously rescued from a lifeboat bobbing in the unforgiving North Atlantic, questions swirl about the fate of his mother, who is presumed to have drowned when their fishing boat sank. Nathan is in remarkably good shape for being lost at sea for a week, and his account of what exactly happened out there on the waves raises questions from family members and law enforcement. Nathan's story of a fishing trip gone awry doesn't quite add up, and suspicion mounts. The mysterious murder of Nathan's multi-millionaire grandfather a few years before had made Nathan's mother an extremely wealthy woman. With a seven-million-dollar fortune at stake, did Nathan commit the ultimate betrayal? Or is there more to this tragic tale than meets the eye?

For nearly 30 years, Nell has kept a childhood promise never to reveal what she and Evie found tucked inside a copy of JANE EYRE in their mother's bookcase --- a record of Evie's birth naming a stranger as her mother. But lately, Nell has been haunted by hazy memories of their early life in Mississippi, which their reclusive mother, Hazel, has kept shrouded in secrecy. Evie recalls nothing before their house on Clay Mountain in North Carolina, but Nell remembers abrupt moves, odd accommodations, and the rainy night a man in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbed their porch steps with a very little girl --- Evie --- and then left without her. In dual storylines, Nell, who is 42 in 1971, reaches into the past to uncover dangerous, long-buried secrets, and Becca, a young mother in the early 1930s, presses ahead --- each moving toward 1934, the catastrophic year that would forever link them.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-20th century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult, Amane and her husband, Saku, decide to live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.” Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?