Adult

In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was 13 years old, her father robbed 11 banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars. In her debut memoir, BANDIT, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew.

Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men break into their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the ideal plan. But once Mark and Steph arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark's past begin to emerge.

In late summer 1947, Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers’ dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak’s past suddenly appears --- one who is even more shattered by the war than he is --- Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life.

Only God knew why Jillian Slater agreed to return to New Orleans on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death. She hadn’t seen him or her grandmother in almost 20 years, and the trip would be all expenses paid by Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother’s apartment house. What Adella didn’t tell her was that the apartment house, Saint Silvanus, bore the dead weight of a long and painful history. Jillian walks into a web of spiritual and personal danger borne out of her family’s broken history, and despite Adella’s wiliest efforts, only God himself can orchestrate the undoing of all that is going on at Saint Silvanus.

Award-winning novelist Tommy Wieringa has crafted perhaps his most timely book yet, as he traces two stories doomed to collide. In one, we follow a group of starving, near-feral Eurasian refugees on a harrowing quest for survival; in the other, we follow Pontus Beg, a policeman from a small border town on the steppe, as he investigates the death of a rabbi, one of the town’s two remaining Jews. A virtual parable for our times, THESE ARE THE NAMES offers a suspenseful reading of a crisis that continues to dominate headlines, and simultaneously explores the enduring questions of faith, identity, and what it means to be “home.”

In PILGRIMAGE, Mark K. Shriver retraces Pope Francis’ personal journey, revealing the origins of his open, unpretentious style and explaining how it revitalized Shriver’s own faith and renewed his commitment to the Church. To help us understand how Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, Shriver travels to Bergoglio’s native Argentina to meet with the people who knew him as a child, as a young Jesuit priest, and as a reformist bishop. In impoverished surroundings, Bergoglio answered Christ’s call to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless, following the example set by his papal namesake, St. Francis of Assisi.

Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening at the cemetery. Still Meadows, as it’s called, is anything but still. THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING tells the story of Lordor Nordstrom, his Swedish mail-order bride, Katrina, and their neighbors and descendants as they live, love, die, and carry on in mysterious and surprising ways. Nordstrom created, in his wisdom, not only a lively town and a prosperous legacy for himself but also a beautiful final resting place for his family, friends and neighbors yet to come. “Resting place” turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, however. Odd things begin to happen, and it starts the whole town talking.

In her first work of nonfiction, the beloved star of “Gilmore Girls” and “Parenthood” recounts her experiences on “Gilmore Girls” --- the first and second time --- and shares stories about life, love, and working in Hollywood. This collection of essays is written in the intimate, hilarious and down-to earth voice that made her novel, SOMEDAY, SOMEDAY, MAYBE, a New York Times bestseller.

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of “The Daily Show” began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

The night before the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a crowd gathers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to watch the giant balloons fill with helium and rise toward the sky. Then the festive ritual takes a terrifying turn --- a gunshot rings out, police commissioner Logan Donovan falls, and panic erupts. When the chaos clears, another crime is revealed: Donovan’s daughter, Allie, has been kidnapped. Within hours, Special Agent Eve Rossi and her handpicked team of former convicts know a lot about the kidnapper. But Eve grapples with a harrowing question: Whom should she fear more --- a vengeful man threatening innocent lives, or a charming, arrogant cop fighting to save his daughter, who may be trying to cover up his crimes?