Adult

Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. They became wildly successful writing partners and co-wrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well-known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction. Tracy Daugherty takes readers on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento, through to her adult life as a writer interviewing those who know and knew her personally, while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great.

Mia "Rabbit" Hayes has plans for the world. But the world, it turns out, has other plans for Rabbit: a devastating diagnosis. Rabbit is feisty. And with every ounce of love and strength in her, she promises that she will overcome. She will be with those who love her for as long as she can, and she will live as long as she can with music, love and so much life. And as her friends and family rally around to celebrate Rabbit's last days, they look to her for strength, support and her unyielding zest for life.

Once the thriving attraction of rural Vermont, the Tower Motel now stands in disrepair, alive only in the memories of Amy, Piper, and Piper's kid sister, Margot. The three played there as girls until the day their games uncovered something dark and twisted in the motel's past, something that ruined their friendship forever. Now adults, Piper and Margot have tried to forget what they found that fateful summer, but their lives are upended when Piper receives a panicked midnight call from Margot, with news of a horrific crime for which Amy stands accused.

Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an 11-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Aunt Kate is bossy, opinionated, argumentative and tyrannical, prompting Donal to leave. He is joined by Herman the German, and the pair have rollicking misadventures along the way.

Naomi J. Williams reimagines the historical Lapérouse expedition, a voyage of exploration that left Brest in 1785 with two frigates, more than 200 men, and overblown Enlightenment ideals and expectations, in a brave attempt to circumnavigate the globe for science and the glory of France. LANDFALLS follows the exploits and heartbreaks not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the voyage --- indigenous people and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition later.

Examining Henry Kissinger's own writings, as well as a wealth of newly declassified documents, Greg Grandin reveals how Richard Nixon's top foreign policy advisor, even as he was presiding over defeat in Vietnam and a disastrous, secret and illegal war in Cambodia, was helping to revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism centered on an imperial presidency. Believing that reality could be bent to his will, Kissinger anticipated, even enabled, the ascendance of the neoconservative idealists who took America into crippling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

More than 10 years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana --- on August 29, 2005 --- journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects not just on the city’s geography and infrastructure, but on the psychic, racial and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities.

Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis’s memoir, A GRIEF OBSERVED. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the page in the fullness and depth she deserves.

INTO THE VALLEY opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. Caught between generations and unmarried at 30, B. doesn’t understand the new counterculture youths. She likes the dresses and kid gloves of her mother’s generation, but doesn’t fit into that world either. B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” and the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley.

Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways --- in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart --- the renters struggle to navigate daily existence. They come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.