Adult

Writing can feel like an endless series of decisions. How does one face the blank page? Move a character around a room? Deal with time? Undertake revision? The good and bad news is that in fiction writing, there are no definitive answers to such questions: writers must come up with their own. Elizabeth McCracken has been teaching for more than 35 years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A LONG GAME, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. Writing “is a long game,” she notes. “What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.”

After Libération, spring 1945: Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything from her --- both her parents and her sense of safety. Now, pregnant and on the lam, she cannot return to her childhood home in Paris. Forced to reinvent herself, she must outrun her father’s enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time --- thanks to the help of a kindhearted police officer named Claude Leduc --- Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.

It’s New Year’s Day in Australia, and the life Lexi Villiers has carefully built is working out nicely. She’s in the second year of her medical residency, she lives on a beautiful farm with her two best friends, Finn and Jack, and she’s about to finally become more than friendly with Jack --- when a helicopter abruptly lands. Out steps her grandmother’s right-hand man, with the tragic news that her father and older brother have been killed in a skiing accident. Lexi’s grandmother happens to be the Queen of England, and Lexi must now accept the reality that she is suddenly next in line for the throne --- a role she has publicly disavowed. Returning to London as the heir apparent Princess Alexandrina, Lexi is greeted by a skeptical public not ready to forgive her defection, a grieving sister-in-law harboring an explosive secret, and a scheming uncle determined to claim the throne himself.

Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure? How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in EVERY DAY I READ, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.

Aleys is 16 years old and prone to religious visions. She and her only friend, Finn, have been learning Latin together in secret. But just as she thinks their connection might become something more, everything unravels. When her father promises her in marriage to a merchant she doesn’t love, she runs away from home, finding shelter among the beguines, a fiercely independent community of religious women who refuse to answer to the Church. Among these hardworking and strong-willed women, Aleys glimpses for the first time the joys of belonging. But forces both mystical and political are at work. Illegal translations of scripture, the women’s independence, and a sudden rash of miracles all draw the attention of an ambitious bishop --- and bring Aleys and those around her into ever-increasing danger.

Following the car accident that ended his football career and left his body scarred, 22-year-old Luke Griffin joins the cast of “Endeavor,” a new competition-based reality show that pits the tabloids’ darlings against one another in tasks of endurance and problem solving. But Luke has aspirations far bigger than the show's million-dollar prize, and soon a series of betrayals leads to irreversible tragedy. Ten years later, Luke is a father of two and the stay-at-home husband to America’s only openly gay senator. When his husband's serial cheating is exposed, Luke impulsively joins the cast of the latest season of “Endeavor” in a desperate bid to earn some fast cash. Back on set, he is confronted with everything he tried to leave in the past: bitter rivalries, shattered friendships and crushing guilt, all of which threaten to tear down the walls he’s spent a decade building.

In life, Marilyn Monroe’s superstardom defies classification. In death, she remains shrouded in mystery. In the months before her death, Marilyn polishes the script for her ultimately unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give. In the weeks before her death, she drinks champagne on Santa Monica Beach with the last photographer to take her picture. In the days before her death, she’s a guest of Frank Sinatra in the Celebrity Room at the Cal Neva Lodge. In the hours before her death, she argues with US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and his brother-in-law, Peter Lawford. In an emergency session with her psychiatrist, she confesses: “Here I am, the most beautiful woman in the world, and I do not have a date for Saturday night.” On June 1, 2026, the world celebrates Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday. Without her.

Ropa Moyo is dead, banished to the Other Place by the reanimated spirit of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville of Scotland. It turns out that being on the losing side sucks worse than being skint. Now, the Cult of Dundas intends to ascend to godhood, spreading their corrupting reach from Edinburgh to all of Scotland’s schools of magic. Ropa must find some way to escape the Other Place, save her sister and gather allies across the country before Edinburgh falls. A royal plot, a family secret and a stolen body. As Scotland descends into petty in-fighting, Ropa’s only hope lies in her grandmother’s final secret: the first school of magic. An ancient power is returning…and is hungry for revenge.

1434: The unified kingdoms of northern Europe are cracking at their seams as a peasant rebellion, led by the charismatic figure Engelbrekt Engelbrekts, erupts in the north. Sent by his family to find a foothold in this rising revolutionary movement is young Magnus Bengtsson, who must win Engelbrekt’s trust and favor no matter the cost. Back at Magnus’ family castle, his mother, father and sister wait for news of his success. One is lost in longing, another is forging his own plan for the throne and crown, and one is looking for the opportunity to rise from her brother’s shadow.

When Marlowe Fisher, an illustrator living in New York City, returns to her family’s bewitching Hudson Valley home for the holidays, she discovers a body in the woods --- a murder that draws her back into the haunting case of her teenage best friend’s disappearance two decades earlier. What happened to Nora? As police descend on the sprawling Fisher property, Marlowe is pulled into an investigation that threatens to unravel the town’s fragile loyalties and expose the shadowed legacy of a weekend home steeped in secrets. Marlowe must confront the fallibility of her own memory and the feeling that everyone --- including her brothers --- is hiding something if she’s to uncover the shocking truth about her lost friend.