Adult

The year is 1982, and the people of the Hudson Valley community of Fervent have begun to move on from a homicide that upended the once quiet town. When the former neighbors who were convicted of the crime, James and Ella White, are proven innocent and return to Fervent, some people have cause for concern. Sylvia Upshaw and her best friend, Lafayette “Fate” Jolly, are uneasy about the Whites’ return. While the Whites were incarcerated, Sylvia revealed an explosive secret to their adopted son, Morgan, with devastating consequences. During the murder trial, Fate’s testimony helped seal their fate. James and Ella won’t let the betrayals go unpunished. Sylvia and Fate quickly become victims of harassment from the Whites, and when another murder is committed in Fervent, the town is left to fend for itself.

“He just had the presidency stolen from him.” Gail Godwin first heard these words in November 1960, one of a crush of reporters eagerly awaiting the first postelection meeting between Kennedy and Nixon. Hearing an uncanny echo in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Godwin embarks on a project to reflect on that long-ago moment and offset a mounting pressure of dread about the looming election ahead. In looking back at her life as a young woman --- her travels abroad, early marriage, friendships with Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving --- juxtaposed with the lead-up to the recent election, she discovers an understory that surprises her. She asks herself, “What, at this late date, did I still want to become?”

In 1942, as head of the newly formed OSS, Wild Bill Donovan deployed spies across Europe and around the world to try to thwart the Nazis. In Greece, Nazis weren’t just taking over territory; they were seizing and threatening to destroy some of the world’s most important and valuable historical monuments and artifacts. Donovan tapped a young Ivy League-trained archaeologist named Rodney Young to assemble and lead a team of spies to collect intel. Young set about recruiting the most unlikely of spies --- academics, classicists, epigraphers, and other specialists and scholars --- who would come to be known as “the Greek Desk.” These men and women, along with their Greek allies, went undercover and tried desperately to protect some of the world’s most significant treasures.

Nat Phillips leads an elite roster of special operators. They are ex-Special Forces, communications specialists and intelligence officers. Phillips is a brilliant strategist and battle-tested leader who inspires total loyalty in his team. Now these decorated veterans of international warfare are at home and on stand-by --- until a presidential campaign is interrupted by murder. Suddenly, the plan is no longer the stuff of Mission: Impossible. Emergency operations happening not overseas but in the centers of American power, from Nantucket to Washington, DC. This national crisis is real.

High on the cliffs of Morocco, far from the city lights and the souks, stands The Surf House: a sanctuary for travelers chasing sunshine and waves. But the idyll hides a dark mystery. And when Bea washes in, seeking refuge after a dangerous encounter in Marrakesh, she soon gets caught in the current. A woman her age --- who stayed in the same area, walked the same beaches, and met the same guests --- disappeared one year earlier, vanishing without a trace. Somewhere inside The Surf House lies the truth --- but there will be a price for uncovering it.

1962. An aspiring reporter in DC, Judy Greenberg is aiming for journalistic greatness --- not finding a husband. Just don’t tell her mother. Then one day, she answers her boss’s private line. The message is curiously cryptic. It’s also delivered in a Russian accent. Judy is certain she has stumbled upon a scoop. Charming reporter Jack Fields isn’t one to dismiss Judy’s instincts. Perfect. A seasoned ally she can trust, not to mention pass off as a pretend boyfriend around her relieved parents. Together, they’re following the leads. Now Judy must choose between the safe life expected of her or one hell of a dangerous story that could make her career. She might even fall in love for real. If her ambitions don’t get her killed.

Unexpected encounters confine and define the lives of strangers, while parents and partners navigate blended families and modern love. An older woman tells her waitress that she once left a newborn on church steps. A motel housekeeper makes a radical proposal to a guest. A teenager grapples with atheism and grief and eBay. A mother’s world is disrupted and recharged after a neighborhood man gives her young daughter a telescope. Strange, heartfelt, sly and wryly funny, Sarah Braunstein’s stories ask us to confront the ways we try to make sense of our lives --- and what happens when we escape from these preconceptions.

Devoted mother and party planner Katherine Valentine thought she’d finally found safety when she married Seattle’s golden boy, Shane Sutton. Charming, generous and politically untouchable, he’s the kind of man people protect. But behind the polished façade lurks a predator who collects women like trophies, and Katherine has become his latest prize. Desperate to protect her children, Katherine devises the perfect plan: use Shane's mistress against him. But Isabella Meyer is no pawn. She didn’t come to be saved. She came to settle a score. And revenge is only the beginning.

Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, Jill Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own 21st century. Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. With Orwellian overtones, this book demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government. Deliberately alarming, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call. Other heinous systems have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. 

Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres, when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother, Flora, grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.