Adult

Clara Mattingly, who is serving a life sentence in a women's prison, allows herself no hope for a better future. But when a surprise visitor shows up one day, she finds that in an instant everything has changed. Now she must account for the life she has led --- its beauty as well as its brutality --- and face the truth behind the terrible secret she has kept to herself all these years.

Karom Seth should have been in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, and on the Indian shores in 2004, when the tsunami swept his entire family into the ocean. Karom can’t be sure if it’s a curse or a blessing, but his absence from these disasters has left him with crushing guilt --- and a belief that fate has singled him out for invincibility. Will he ever be able achieve the clarity he’s been looking for all these years?

Blake Bailey is a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas.

THREE BROTHERS follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world --- a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters and petty thieves.

In this riveting biography of Elizabeth Seton, critically acclaimed and bestselling author Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life featured wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth resisted male clerical control of her religious order, as nuns are doing today, and the publication of her story could not be more timely.

Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Clafli were two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics and business threatened the white male power structure of the 19th century and shocked the world. Here, award-winning author Myra MacPherson deconstructs and lays bare the manners and mores of Victorian America, remarkably illuminating the struggle for equality that women are still fighting today.

Jean Zimmerman’s follow-up to THE ORPHANMASTER tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart 18-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society.

Many of our most iconic, creative endeavors are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts. The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, it will always be both a void and the start of infinite possibility. THE RISE --- a soulful celebration of the determination and courage of the human spirit --- makes the case that many of our greatest triumphs come from understanding the importance of this mystery.

Phil Klay's REDEPLOYMENT takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

When he hears residents of a Newark neighborhood are getting sick and even dying from a strange disease, investigative reporter Carter Ross dives into the story --- so deep he comes down with the illness himself. With even more motivation to track down the source of the disease, Carter soon hits upon a nearby construction site. But when the project’s developer is found dead, and his mob ties surface, Carter knows he’s looking at a story much bigger than an environmental hazard.