Adult

Almost four years after the end of World War II, the city of Berlin is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. However, almost from the start, things go fatally wrong.

The year is 1855. The Crimean War is raging. The incompetence of British commanders causes the fall of the English government. The Empire teeters. Amid this crisis comes opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, one of the most notorious and brilliant personalities of Victorian England. Along with his irrepressible daughter, Emily, and their Scotland Yard companions, Ryan and Becker, De Quincey finds himself confronted by an adversary who threatens the heart of the nation.

Nina MacLaughlin spent her 20s working at a Boston newspaper, sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen. Yearning for more tangible work, she applied for a job she saw on Craigslist --- Carpenter’s Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply --- despite being a Classics major who couldn't tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She got the job, and in HAMMER HEAD she tells the rich and entertaining story of becoming a carpenter.

Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to 11-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive.

Ali Reynolds’ longtime friend and Taser-carrying nun, Sister Anselm, rushes to the bedside of a young pregnant woman hospitalized for severe injuries after she was hit by a car on a deserted Arizona highway. The girl had been running away from The Family, a polygamous cult with no patience for those who try to leave its ranks. Something about her strikes a chord in Sister Anselm, reminding her of a case she worked years before when another young girl wasn’t so lucky.

Nearly 25 years ago, Nicholson Baker published U AND I, the groundbreaking tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U AND I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is a writer out there in the world who you must read. B & ME is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker --- and discovering himself in the process.

Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor; his American wife, Wallis Simpson; and the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower and King George VI of the duke's relations with Hitler. From the alleged affair between Simpson and the German foreign minister to the discovery of top secret correspondence about the man dubbed "the traitor king" and the Nazi high command, 17 CARNATIONS is a saga of intrigue, betrayal and deception.

Famed detective and mystery writer Lawrence Block takes the helm as guest editor for DARK CITY LIGHTS, the fourth edition of the Have a NYC series. Here are 23 thrilling, hilarious and poignant short stories --- all based in New York City --- written by new and acclaimed fiction masters, including Robert Silverberg, Ed Park, Jim Fusilli, Parnell Hall, SJ Rozan, Brian Koppelman, Elaine Kagan and more. Additional authors include Thomas Pluck, Warren Moore, Erin Mitchell and Tom Callahan.

A powerful historical novel by the late Ariana Franklin and her daughter, Samantha Norman, THE SIEGE WINTER is a tour de force mystery and murder, adventure and intrigue, a battle for a crown, told by two courageous young women whose fates are intertwined in 12th-century England’s devastating civil war.

Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law’s farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian anarchist at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband’s treatment. What she doesn’t anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will expand her outlook and self-knowledge.