Adult

Unexpected encounters confine and define the lives of strangers, while parents and partners navigate blended families and modern love. An older woman tells her waitress that she once left a newborn on church steps. A motel housekeeper makes a radical proposal to a guest. A teenager grapples with atheism and grief and eBay. A mother’s world is disrupted and recharged after a neighborhood man gives her young daughter a telescope. Strange, heartfelt, sly and wryly funny, Sarah Braunstein’s stories ask us to confront the ways we try to make sense of our lives --- and what happens when we escape from these preconceptions.

Devoted mother and party planner Katherine Valentine thought she’d finally found safety when she married Seattle’s golden boy, Shane Sutton. Charming, generous and politically untouchable, he’s the kind of man people protect. But behind the polished façade lurks a predator who collects women like trophies, and Katherine has become his latest prize. Desperate to protect her children, Katherine devises the perfect plan: use Shane's mistress against him. But Isabella Meyer is no pawn. She didn’t come to be saved. She came to settle a score. And revenge is only the beginning.

Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, Jill Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own 21st century. Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. With Orwellian overtones, this book demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government. Deliberately alarming, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call. Other heinous systems have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. 

Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres, when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother, Flora, grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.

Unnur has secrets. A single mother to a beloved daughter, she lives a quiet life working at a bakery. She has spent years pushing away haunting half-remembrances of the last summer of her childhood, when her otherworldly friend, Freyja, disappeared from a black-sand beach in the remote Dark Valley. Unnur’s safety --- and her daughter’s --- now hinges on discretion. Yet when her ex-husband returns to Iceland and brings with him a new girlfriend who seems to know more about Unnur than she’s letting on, Unnur may finally have to face the chilling possibility that she is responsible for her friend’s presumed death. As a cold case investigation reopens and the intricate threads of past and present begin to tangle, Unnur must race to recover the broken memory of what happened all those years ago or risk losing her daughter. 

Once a powerful, cold-blooded politician in Costa Rica, Seth Oreamundo is now living in exile in DC and his younger brother, Osario, is to blame. Born into a corrupt political dynasty, the Oreamundo brothers were destined for greatness. But a dark family secret and a scandalous double crossing sent their lives into a tailspin. Osario must pay and Seth decides the only way to do so is to return home to Costa Rica and feed his brother to the infamous river of crocodiles. What follows is a spellbinding story of revenge alternating between Seth's murderous plans and memories of the brothers' upbringing.

Anna never imagined herself living in a place like Harper’s Creek. It’s supposed to be a new start for her and her family, but Anna feels stuck in place: watching her little sister grow up and taking care of her grandmother with dementia, whose paranoid episodes have started to unnerve her. The only interesting thing about her new town is the string of grisly murders attributed to a killer called the Farmhandman. Along with Melissa and Todd, Anna fills her hours with the town’s darkest curiosity. Tension is building and house is becoming more claustrophobic by the day and her grandmother is growing stranger. Anna begins to wonder if her delusional moments are somehow the key to discovering the truth about the murders.

Twenty-five years ago in Washington, Sam met three inseparable teenage girls at the local amusement park. Days later, one of them was found dead. Barb and Nicolette were shocked to learn that the man they all met at Wonderland was the Carnival Killer. After he's arrested for the murders of five young women --- one of whom was their best friend, Lorelei --- Nicolette moved to the city to pursue her dreams of being famous. Barb stayed behind, eventually becoming a reporter for the local paper. Their past safely behind them, they’ve both moved on with their lives. But when the Carnival Killer recants his confession and a new body washes ashore on the eve of Wonderland’s grand reopening, the secrets that Barb and Nicolette have worked so hard to bury begin to resurface, threatening to destroy everything.

The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away. Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths --- about the very experience of living --- might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?

Jesuit priest Avelyn was born into a mining family in Hreodwater. At age 16, he fled, abandoning his faith in the god that killed his whole family. When a fellow priest is miraculously healed only to then be turned to salt after a visit to Hreodwater, Avelyn is sent by the Vatican to investigate. But Jericho tells him that the priest is not the only one experiencing strange cures. Avelyn and Jericho team up to protect the world from the salt light --- but they may already be too late: strange happenings are occurring at mines all around the world. As salt light spreads, devastating cities around the world, Avelyn must decide what and who to believe-and whether his faith is strong enough to withstand an apocalypse.