Adult

Ina is a 41-year-old literary scholar on the cusp of professional success. With a coveted university job, a kind husband, and a book on Eugene O’Neill due in months, her life appears enviably stable. But when an impulsive kiss with a stranger shatters her self-control, Ina finds herself plunged into an erotic and emotional freefall. She tells herself it’s research --- a brief detour before returning to real life. But what begins as a flirtation becomes a reckoning with everything Ina thought she wanted: marriage, intellect, control. As she navigates the ecstatic confusion of newfound desire, she risks upending her work, her relationship, and her understanding of who she is. 

Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris, his reputation in tatters, exhausted by scandal and prison life. While the details of his life in the limelight are well known, often ignored are the reverberations of the Wilde scandal over the decades following his trial and death. With pathos, humor and his grandfather’s signature wit, Merlin Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer and thinker, tracing the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde’s posthumous reputation.

It’s the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he’s ever known and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David's diocese. Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret’s unlikely union play out across generations.

Lukas Moore has returned to his hometown and left his burgeoning acting career behind to care for his father. Dr. Richard Moore is a psychiatrist known for being nearly as misanthropic as he is brilliant, but a recent traumatic brain injury has changed his worldview in unexpected ways. He now sees mysteries where other people see settled facts --- nowhere more so than in the disappearance of his former colleague and neighbor, Dr. Jason Grant, one year ago. The obvious conclusion was suicide. But Jason’s younger sister and Lukas’ high school girlfriend, Misty, has questioned his fate, so she asks for the Moores’ help in finding out what really happened to him. As Lukas, Richard and Misty are drawn into the puzzle, they are forced to confront the secrets behind both Jason’s disappearance and Richard’s injury.

Journalist Danielle “Dani” Moreau has spent a lifetime trying to outrun the privilege she was born into. Fresh off a personal tragedy, she lands in Ghana to uncover corruption in the local oil industry. But when she crosses paths with James Aidoo, an idealistic young Ghanaian whose father is a local populist politician, Dani remembers what drew her to journalism in the first place: you go looking for a story, but when the real story appears, it’s never the one you expected. She soon finds herself chasing a scoop that involves an American operative with a violent past, a Ghanaian double agent, and a fight between the United States and China over one of the world’s most dangerous and least-known technologies: fiber optic cables. Dani and her new associates will be forced to make deadly choices that impact each other and their own lives in ways nobody expects.

In this stand-alone and companion novel to the Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the ages, legendary book woman Cussy Lovett, returns home. A powerful testament of strength, survival and the magic of the printed word, THE MOUNTAINS WE CALL HOME is wrapped into a vivid portrait of Kentucky life: examining incarceration and criminalization, exploring the effects on the poor and powerless, and tracing the societal consequences of fractured family bonds, along with nostalgic glimpses of a bustling, multifaceted Louisville, and heartwarming portraits of reading efforts in every facet of life.

As a new resident of Golden Grove, an independent living community for active seniors, Sally wants to do everything in her power to start off on the right foot. But between navigating unspoken social rules of the community and leaving two struggling adult children back at home, fitting in becomes harder than she expected. So when she sees flyers advertising the Scrabble Club, she thinks she might as well give it a try. She quickly realizes her faux pas when she walks into the library to find just one man, Walter Kretzer. Walter has taken his Scrabble club a pinch too seriously in the past, but when he meets Sally and discovers she is something of a prodigy at the game, he can't help but feel that his fate is about to change. As he draws Sally into the world of high-stakes Scrabble tournaments, his feelings for her grow and inspire him to take a hard look at his life.

At just four years old, Reza Farahan left Iran for what was supposed to be a quick family trip to Los Angeles. But while he was soaking up the California sun, revolution erupted back home, and Reza's short stay turned into permanent exile. Caught between cultures, identities and expectations, Reza was an outsider in every sense of the word. He was a half-Muslim, half-Jewish, gay Persian kid just trying to survive 1980s America --- a place that saw him as a threat, even when all he wanted was to belong. Reza eventually became the larger-than-life, fan-favorite star of Bravo's “Shahs of Sunset,” where he served looks, shade and cultural pride in equal measure. And now Reza is opening up about the journey that took him from closeted teen to reality TV royalty, from hiding his truth to owning every inch of his spotlight.

During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland: brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; her fiery fiancé, Percy Shelley; the famously promiscuous Lord Byron; and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group’s center was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever and dangerously loyal stepsister. Those months of desire, betrayal and creative passion gave the world the works of FRANKENSTEIN, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive tale of love, lust, art and betrayal, Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history.

Terrence Tully is at work when he receives news that his mother has died. A third-year medical resident in a gritty community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, he sees death daily, but the news that his mother has passed away jolts him like no other. Turn the page, and he’s heading north on I-15 through a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother had retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.