Adult

Widowed by an unspeakable tragedy, Camille Palmer has made her peace with the past and settled into the quiet safety of life with her teenage daughter, Julie, in a sleepy coastal town. Then the arrival of a mysterious package breaks open the door to her family’s secret past. In uncovering a hidden history, Camille has no idea that she’s embarking on an adventure that will utterly transform her. Camille, Julie and Camille’s father return to the French town of his youth, sparking unexpected memories --- recollections that will lead them back to the dark days of the Second World War. And it is in the stunning Provençal countryside that they will uncover their family’s surprising history.

A one-night stand produces a baby boy for 38-year-old Leia Birch Briggs. But before she can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her stepsister Rachel’s marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved 90-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind and has been hiding her dementia. Tucked in the attic of the family’s big Victorian is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family’s freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows.

Bonny Blankenship’s most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. They swam and wished for happy-ever-afters, then escaped to the local bookshop. Until the night that changed everything, the night that Lainey’s mother disappeared. Now, in her early 50s, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor. With her troubled teenage daughter in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children. They reunite with bookshop owner Mimi, who is tangled with the past and its mysteries. As the three women cling to a fragile peace, buried secrets and long-ago loves return like the tide.

From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement for black Americans. In this book, Rice explains what these epochal events teach us about democracy. At a time when people around the world are wondering whether democracy is in decline, Rice shares insights from her experiences as a policymaker, scholar and citizen, in order to put democracy's challenges into perspective.

Carmen is happily married to Tom, although she knows she'll always live in the shadow of the mistress who ended his first marriage: Zena, who drowned in the sea late one night. Zena seems ever-more present, and when Carmen unknowingly stumbles on evidence that her husband has not been telling her the whole truth, she can't shake her unease. As she uncovers documents and photographs, a very different tale than the one Tom has led her to believe begins to unfold, and she finds herself increasingly isolated and paranoid. As the twisted events of that night begin to come to light, Carmen must ask herself if it's really a truth worth knowing…even if it destroys her and the lives of the people she loves most.

Alan Alda has been on a decades-long journey to discover new ways to help people communicate and relate to one another more effectively. IF I UNDERSTOOD YOU, WOULD I HAVE THIS LOOK ON MY FACE? is the warm, witty and informative chronicle of how Alda found inspiration in everything from cutting-edge science to classic acting methods. His search began when he was host of PBS’s "Scientific American Frontiers," where he interviewed thousands of scientists and developed a knack for helping them communicate complex ideas in ways a wide audience could understand --- and Alda wondered if those techniques held a clue to better communication for the rest of us.

Fifteen-year-old Catherine Quick longs to feel once more the warm waters of her home, to strike out into the ocean off the Torres Strait Islands in Australia and swim, as she’s done since she was a child. But now, orphaned and living with her aunt Louisa in London, Catherine feels that everything she values has been stripped away from her. Louisa, a London surgeon who fought boldly for equality for women, holds strict views on the behavior of her young niece. She wants Catherine to pursue an education, just as she herself did. It takes the enigmatic American banker Manfred Lear Black to convince Louisa to bring Catherine to New York where Catherine can train to become the first woman to swim the English Channel.

At 14, Turtle Alveston roams the woods along the northern California coast. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother. Her social existence is confined to her middle school and her life with her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her.

Returning to Tokyo in 1982 after a decade of mercenary work in the Philippines, a young John Rain learns that the killing business is now controlled by Victor, a half-Russian, half-Japanese sociopath who has ruthlessly eliminated all potential challengers. Victor gives Rain a choice: kill a government minister or die a grisly death. But the best route to the minister is through his gorgeous Italian wife, Maria, a route that puts Rain on a collision course not only with Victor but with the shadowy forces behind the Russian’s rise to dominance. It’s a battle between kingpin and newcomer, master and apprentice, a zero-sum contest that can only end with one man dead and the other the world’s foremost assassin.

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early 21st century, THE WEIGHT OF INK is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered 17th-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents' scribe, the elusive "Aleph."