Adult

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbank to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before. The truth is that, though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls, they’ve always had plenty to say about them. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: Something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.

Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department: renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan sleeps with the department administrative assistant, Abigail, the couple’s faith in their flawless relationship is rattled. While Ethan is away for the summer, she grows inordinately close with her advisee, graduate student Roberta “Robbie” Green. But behind Simone’s back, Robbie fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis. Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie paints a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail and even herself, scratching at the very surface of what may --- or may not --- be the truth.

You don’t have to eat food to know the way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. So when a group of deactivated robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen, they decide to make their own way doing what they know: making food --- the tastiest hand-pulled noodles around --- for the humans of San Francisco, who are recovering from a devastating war. But when their robot-run business starts causing a stir, a targeted wave of one-star reviews threatens to boil over into a crisis. To keep their doors open, they’ll have to call on their customers, their community and each other --- and find a way to survive and thrive in a world that wasn’t built for them.

Virginia, 1954. When a woman wakes on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life before that moment. Doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed for her violent delusions. She’s certain they’re wrong --- until disturbing visions of a dystopian future in which frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission” and save mankind begin to invade her reality. Believing it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one and focuses only on escaping --- until there’s a visitor. A man whose loving face --- and touch --- she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions, because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier. Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. 

Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will Somerset: a prominent 46-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter, and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship. But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him. Going back and forth between Nora and Will’s romance and the search in the wake of Will’s mysterious disappearance, Nora must answer the question from all angles: Where. Is. Will?

Lily --- a bored, beautiful twentysomething --- wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside 19 other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave. Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur.

Rosie, Daniel and Serge met at Oxford in the early 2000s. Fifteen years later, they are guests at a lavish three-day wedding in Provence. They are also no longer on speaking terms. Rosie is dreading a weekend around her ex, Serge, and his fiancé, Isla. Serge is hiding a crippling debt --- and a secret separation. Daniel, now a successful actor, is drinking to cope with life in the limelight. And Isla is wondering why motherhood looks so much easier for everyone else. As the champagne flows, historic rivalries and infatuations surface, and old and new secrets emerge. This is a wedding to be remembered, for all the wrong reasons.

One calm night in Twickenham, a businessman named Tom Treadnor is shot off his barstool at The Queen pub. Superintendent Richard Jury is called in to investigate and quickly realizes that everyone in Treadnor’s life --- from his widow, Alice, to the staff at his manor, to his business partner --- had differing opinions of him. And to complicate things further, Jury has just happened upon a photo in a newspaper of a man in the United States who is a dead ringer for Treadnor. Meanwhile, Wiggins, Jury’s partner at New Scotland Yard, becomes sidetracked by an investigation of his own: His sister, missing for years and presumed dead, has just sent a postcard to their mother. When Wiggins takes off in search of his sister, the two investigations begin to converge.

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. Minden’s “book club” secretly sent 10 million banned titles into the East. Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom.

In poetry that is at once bold and lyrical, affecting and devastatingly frank, Miranda Cowley Heller --- the #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE PAPER PALACE --- takes us through childhood, marriage, motherhood and beyond. Suffused with the natural world and the landscape of Cape Cod, where many of the poems are set, WHAT THE DEEP WATER KNOWS contemplates love in all the seasons.