Adult

In 1959, Nat Collier moves with her husband, Paul, and their two young daughters to Idaho Falls, a remote military town. An Army Specialist, Paul is stationed there to help oversee one of the country’s first nuclear reactors --- an assignment that seems full of opportunity. Then, on his rounds, Paul discovers that the reactor is compromised, placing his family and the entire community in danger. Worse, his superiors set out to cover up the problem rather than fix it. Paul can’t bring himself to tell Nat the truth, but his lies only widen a growing gulf between them.

THE DRESSMAKER'S WAR is the story of Ada Vaughan, a brilliant English seamstress, taken prisoner in Germany during World War II. Stanislaus von Lieben, a Hungarian aristocrat, sweeps Ada off her feet and brings her to Paris. But when war breaks out and Stanislaus vanishes, Ada is abandoned and alone, trapped on an increasingly dangerous continent.

The pieces in SHAME AND WONDER are born of a vast, abiding curiosity, one that has led David Searcy into some strange and beautiful territory, where old Uncle Scrooge comic books reveal profound truths and the vastness of space becomes an expression of pure love. Whether ruminating on an old El Camino pickup truck, those magical prizes lurking in the cereal boxes of our youth, or a lurid online ad for “Sexy Girls Near Dallas,” Searcy brings his unique blend of affection and suspicion to the everyday wonders that surround and seduce us.

This exquisitely imagined novel opens as astronomer William Herschel rescues his sister Caroline from a life of drudgery in Germany and brings her to England and a world of music making and stargazing. William is generous, wise and charismatic, an obsessive genius whom Caroline adores and serves with the fervency of a beloved wife. When William suddenly announces that he will be married, Lina watches her world collapse.

Scott and his wife, Elise, have come to the Hamptons to be with Elise’s terminally ill father. Every night at precisely 11, the lights in their neighbor's bedroom turn off. There's something about that light that Scott can't let go of. So one day he breaks in --- and feels a jolt of excitement he hasn't felt in a long time. Soon he enlists his wife as a partner in crime. Their one simple transgression quickly sends husband and wife down a deliriously wicked spiral of bad decisions, infidelities, escalating violence and absolutely shocking revelations.

Adrift in Cambodia and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher, 28-year-old Englishman Robert Grieve decides to go missing. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future. And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events --- involving a bag of “jinxed” money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler taxi driver, and a rich doctor’s daughter --- that changes Robert’s life forever.

At the age of 48, Cicero is in exile, his great power sacrificed on the altar of his principles. By promising to support his political enemy, Caesar, he is granted return to Rome. There, he fights his way back to prominence. DICTATOR encompasses some of the most epic events in ancient history --- the dissolution of the Roman Republic, the murder of Pompey, the assassination of Julius Caesar. But the central problem it presents is a timeless one: how to keep political freedom unsullied by personal ambition. 

Meet the women of AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE. They wear lipstick, pearls and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven. Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these 12 delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: “What do housewives do all day?”

Ginny Carter was once a rising star in TV news, married to a top anchorman, with a three-year-old son and a full and happy life in Beverly Hills --- until her whole world dissolved in a single instant on the freeway two days before Christmas. In the aftermath, she pieces her life back together and tries to find meaning in her existence as a human rights worker in the worst areas around the globe. Then, on the anniversary of the fateful accident --- and wrestling with the lure of death herself --- she meets a boy who will cause her life to change forever yet again.

In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries --- and fails --- to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend, enemy…or something else altogether?