Adult

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life --- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth --- and it took her breath away.

SNOW HUNTERS traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life on the coast of Brazil. Throughout his years there, four people slip in and out of his life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so, he must let go of his traumatic past.

A debut novel set in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties about an innocent but ambitious girl who becomes the ultimate flapper in a whole world filled with speakeasies, wailing jazz, and vicious mobsters.

Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt’s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted --- leaving Judith free to take over Josie’s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie’s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

From catastrophe on a world scale to family tragedy... In Elizabeth Noble’s affecting novel, her seventh, a beloved son is lost to a killer tidal wave. It’s every parent’s deepest fear, yet this story also glows with love, hope, and faith in our ability to survive the worst life can throw at us.

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty" --- tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear and fantasy. These narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

In the year 2059, several major world cities are under the control of a security force called Scion. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld of Scion London, scouting for information by breaking into others’ minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare kind of clairvoyant, and in this world, the voyants commit treason simply by breathing. But when Paige is captured and arrested, she encounters a power more sinister than even Scion.

Sylvie Mason’s parents have an unusual occupation --- helping “haunted souls” find peace. After receiving a strange phone call one winter’s night, they leave the house and are later murdered in an old church in a horrifying act of violence. A year later, the inquisitive teenager pursues the mystery, moving closer to the knowledge of what occurred that night --- and to the truth about her family’s past and the secrets that have haunted them for years.

Seventeen-year-old Morgan Monetti shocks her parents and her community with one simple act: She chooses to stand by the man everyone else believes has exploited her --- popular high school teacher TJ Hill. Quietly walking across a crowded courtroom to sit behind TJ, and not beside her parents, she announces herself as the adult she believes herself to be.

Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the Mississippi River, THE TILTED WORLD --- written by Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly --- is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love.