Adult

Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighborhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She’s decided to put down roots with Blue, the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with. But little doubts about her perfect new life start to grow, and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn’t, Frankie’s concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: help me. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused “cat cam” collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbors and the secrets they’re hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep.

Louise is a woman in her early 30s with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki, who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and recently has started seeing a much younger woman named Inès. One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. Tension builds as she finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths.

Investigative journalist Erin Sloane was shot to true-crime fame after her reporting on a decades-old case was adapted into a bestselling book. The book also spawned several spin-offs, including a successful podcast called “Eerie Island.” When Erin's newspaper is tipped off to a crime that is strikingly similar to the kidnappings and killings that occurred decades ago, her editor urges Erin to investigate. However, the reporting Erin did for that cold case resulted in post-traumatic stress that she's only recently gotten under control. Not only did those crimes happen in her hometown, her sister was one of the victims. Reluctant to relive the past, Erin ignores her editor's pleas until she has a run-in with Justin Holden, the creator of “Eerie Island,” who purports to have information on one of the missing victims from decades ago --- the body they never found.

Rory McIlroy contains multitudes. He can overwhelm a golf course with his transcendent talent and then, at the next tournament, look utterly lost. McIlroy is golf’s most eloquent ambassador and a trash-talking troll, sometimes in the same press conference. The child of a working-class family from a small town in a war-torn homeland now commutes to work in his own private jet and counts billionaires as confidants. A dozen years ago, McIlroy asked Alan Shipnuck a question about the player he had modeled himself after, Tiger Woods: “What’s he really like?” As McIlroy enters the last act of his highly eventful career, this book is a chance to redirect that old question and try to understand a man of deep complexity and contradictions.

Charlie couldn’t be happier to take the job of farm-shop manager on the remote, wild Isle of Ormer. She’s grieving, a little lost, and in desperate need of a fresh start. Jones has come out of a difficult breakup and is looking forward to some peace away from the noise of his city life. Moving to Ormer couldn’t have come at a better time. But when Charlie Jones and, ahem, Charlie Jones both turn up at Ormer’s one and only farm shop, claiming to have been offered the role of manager, everyone is baffled. How could this have happened? And just who is the real Charlie Jones?

On the night of Easter Eve 1989, 12-year-old Hanna’s older brother, Erik, and some friends go to the infamous Mount Verity, where there is a cave that, according to legend, was used in the witch trials in Östergötland during the 17th century. Rumor has it that whoever does not tell the truth and goes down into the cave will disappear into the mountain. Erik never comes home that night. Over the years, Hanna and her childhood friend, Marcus, develop an increasingly symbiotic relationship, until life takes them in different directions. When Hanna finally becomes a successful artist, she cannot let go of what it has cost her. What justice decided that she was allowed to live while Erik vanished? What is there left to believe in when the worst has happened? And can the story of Mount Verity be more than a fable?

TV writer Caroline Neumann is mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant. When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it --- and unbeknownst to Harry --- Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher. And when she forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up her understanding of what it means to be the “likable female protagonist” of her own life.

When a widowed Lucy Cooper returns to the Cooper estate to grieve her estranged father, she discovers catastrophe: The property is mired in debt she canʼt repay, and Ben Ressler has unexpectedly turned up on her doorstep. As a teenager, Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing nearby at the Peabody estate. Now, after a fatal accident ended his NFL career, Ben has returned to live quietly in the Peabodys’ caretaker lodge. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive. As Lucy reconstructs her father’s troubling final days, she uncovers his research on pirate treasure and the winter of 1717. This history offers Lucy a way to heal from the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn reveals someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.

As teens, Annie, Lola, Vicky and Dylan stole the show in a legendary gender-swapped version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Two couples, one unforgettable summer --- until the closing-night party tore them apart, and not all of them knew why. Now, with lives that look nothing like they imagined, the foursome is called home by their beloved director for a one-night-only revival to save the theater and the town. Returning to Rhodes means facing everything they left behind: long-buried secrets, undeniable chemistry, and the chance to write a brand-new ending --- together.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument --- should he intervene? Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates’s short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her characters’ deepest fears. These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.