Adult

The year is 1953. As the value of oil skyrockets, global power brokers begin to take interest in the political regimes of the Middle East. British agents have controlled Iranian oil exports for a generation, but the Shah’s hold on peace is shaky as a charismatic leader enters the scene. OPERATION AJAX is the story of the CIA coup that removed the democratically elected Mossadegh and reinstated the monarchy.

Opening in Normandy on June 29, 1944, THE RACE FOR PARIS follows two American female war correspondents on their quest to document (and make) history by covering the Allied liberation of Paris. Jane is a young, single journalist for the Nashville Banner. When she’s assigned to cover a field hospital, she meets Olivia, “Liv,” an Associated Press photographer. However, due to their gender, Liv and Jane are constantly confronted by red tape. Reluctantly accompanied by Fletcher, a male British military reporter, the two women go AWOL and chase their story through gunfire, carnage and death scarring the French countryside. 

From the creators of the wildly popular "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves...no matter where we live. Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

In TWAIN'S END, Lynn Cullen reimagines the tangled relationships between Mark Twain, his private secretary Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.

THE SECRET CHORD provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David’s life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected. We see David through the eyes of those who love him or fear him --- from the prophet Natan, voice of his conscience, to his wives Mikhal, Avigail, and Batsheva, and finally to Solomon, the late-born son who redeems his Lear-like old age.

On June 19, 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. The day Ethel was first arrested in 1950, she left her two young sons with a neighbor and never came home to them again. In THE HOURS COUNT, Jillian Cantor reimagines the life of that neighbor, and the life of Ethel and Julius, an ordinary-seeming Jewish couple who became the only Americans put to death for spying during the Cold War.

It’s 1987, and the next generation of Langdons is facing economic, social and political challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered. Michael and Richie, twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes worlds of government and finance --- but their fiercest enemies may be closer to home. Charlie, the charmer, struggles to find his way; Guthrie is deployed to Iraq, leaving the Iowa family farm in the hands of his younger sister, Felicity --- who, as always, has her own ideas. Determined to help preserve the planet, she worries that her family farm’s land is imperiled, and not only by the extremes of climate change.

From Edgar Allan Poe to Kelly Link, M. R. James to Neil Gaiman, H.H. Munro to Audrey Niffenegger herself, GHOSTLY spans the whole history of the ghost story genre from gothic horror to the modern era. Each story is introduced by Niffenegger, with short original commentary and background on why she chose to include it. Also included is her own story, “A Secret Life with Cats.”

In THE GAP OF TIME, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of "The Winter's Tale" (one of Shakespeare’s “late plays”), we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time; of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.