Adult

“There are two keys to unlocking the secrets of American politics and American political history.” So begins THE POLITICIANS AND THE EGALITARIANS, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s bold new work of history. First, America is built on an egalitarian tradition. At the nation’s founding, Americans believed that extremes of wealth and want would destroy their revolutionary experiment in republican government. Second, partisanship is a permanent fixture in America, and America is the better for it. With these two insights, Wilentz offers a crystal-clear portrait of American history, told through politicians and egalitarians --- a portrait that runs counter to current political and historical thinking.

The night that Jane and Bonnie meet on a college campus sets them on paths forever entwined. Bonnie, the wild and experimental one, has spent the past two decades bouncing between ill-fated relationships, while Jane’s seemingly perfect life and family have all but materialized out of a fantasy. But these appearances contradict the quiet, inescapable doubt Jane feels about her life. One night, in the middle of her own Christmas party, she steps outside into the snow, removes her clothing and shoes, and lies down in the backyard. As Jane begins to have visions and retreat into a private inner world, Bonnie finds herself drawn inevitably into an affair with Jane’s husband.

The tales in THE PIER FALLS take many forms: Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism. The characters are often isolated physically or estranged from their families, yet they yearn for connection. In aggregate, the stories become a meditation on the essential aloneness of the human condition but also on the connections, however tenuous and imperfect, that link people to one another. In the title story, an unnamed narrator describes with cool precision a catastrophe that strikes a seaside town, both tearing lives apart and bringing them together.

This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas --- some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance. It features a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets --- from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin, to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Lenin.

Emily Porter is the descendant of a serial killer. Now she’s become the hunted. She’s on a quest that will take her to the secret underground of Europe and the inner circles of three ancient orders --- one determined to kill her, one devoted to keeping her alive, and one she ultimately must save. THE PROGENY is the present-day saga of a 400-year-old war between the uncanny descendants of “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory, the most prolific female serial killer of all time, and a secret society dedicated to erasing every one of her descendants.

During a long winter and short, chilly spring, a series of disturbing incidents rock the small resort island of Nantucket. A Land Bank executive dies in a suspicious hunting accident, a prominent local family's historic summer cottage burns down in an arson fire, and a teenage girl lies comatose from a drug overdose. When spring turns to summer and the tourists flood the island, the mysterious cycle of violence spins faster. A young Jamaican boy is found dead in the harbor, a sex-for-drugs pornography ring is exposed and a beloved local hero is murdered in cold blood. Could all of these events be part of the same sinister conspiracy?

Brendan McDonough was on the verge of becoming a hopeless, inveterate heroin addict when he, for the sake of his young daughter, decided to turn his life around. He enlisted in the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a team of elite firefighters based in Prescott, Arizona. On June 30, 2013, a freak, 3,000-degree inferno ultimately trapped his hotshot brothers, tragically killing all 19 of them. GRANITE MOUNTAIN traces McDonough's story of finding his way out of the dead end of drugs and the minute-by-minute account of the fateful day he lost the very men who had saved him.

The narrator of VILLA TRISTE, an anxious, roving, stateless young man of 18, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. However, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to run at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. The young man hides among the other summer visitors until he meets a beautiful young actress named Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, René Meinthe. These two invite him into their world of soirees and late-night debauchery. But when real life beckons once again, he finds no sympathy from his new companions.

Friends and former college bandmates Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe have watched one another marry, buy real estate, and start businesses and families, all while trying to hold on to the identities of their youth. But nothing ages them like having to suddenly pass the torch to their own offspring. Now nearing 50, they all live within shouting distance in the same neighborhood deep in gentrified Brooklyn. The summer that their children reach maturity (and start sleeping together), the fabric of the adult lives suddenly begins to unravel, and the secrets and revelations that are finally let loose can never be reclaimed.

In the 16th century, the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. The Venetian mirrors were state-of-the-art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose, has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict. Meanwhile, in two other Venices --- Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today --- two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret.