English writer Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. The year is 1968 and Beth Johnson, wife of gentle sheep farmer Frank, remains shattered by the death of her nine-year-old son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier. Her first love, Gabriel, a bestselling novelist who grew up wealthy on a nearby estate, returns with his young son, Leo, after separating from his American wife. Beth reconnects with Gabriel, fantasizing about rewinding her life to a simpler time, and she forges a bond with Leo, who reminds her of Bobby. An unreliable narrator, Beth provides a blinkered view of the action, mentioning early on that a farmer has been murdered and someone close to her is on trial for the crime, but neglecting to reveal the identities of these two characters until more than halfway through the narrative. As a result, readers are kept guessing about the precise consequences of Gabriel’s return and the circumstances behind Bobby’s death. Hall makes Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment, and the other characters’ motivations prove to be different than they seem at first glance. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers.

Cecily Foster knows she is a good podcast producer. She's known for juggling multiple priorities with ease and coming so prepared for any emergency that her colleagues jokingly refer to her as "mom." After a difficult break-up six years prior, she put her romantic life on hold to pursue her professional passions, which include eventually producing her own show. Her boss needs a big hit to sustain the company, so when he offers Cecily the opportunity to take the next step in her career, it comes with a catch. Cecily must agree to be the star of a podcast where Eliza, an influencer-turned-relationship-expert, sets her up on twenty blind dates. Cecily reluctantly agrees to put her dating life out for public consumption, but hits a snag when she repeatedly runs into Will, a handsome and charming photographer with whom she feels an immediate connection. Holmes once again crafts an engaging, appealing tale of a woman coming into her own and learning to leave her people-pleasing ways behind. But it is not just Cecily who readers will connect with; all of the cast members are fully realized, with their own motivations and insecurities. Blending witty humor, a tender romance, and true character growth, this is a winner.

When a hacked database known as the Files upends the intelligence community, with careers destroyed and assassinations spreading from Europe to the U.S., Treadstone sends Jason Bourne to get or destroy them before the Chinese or the Russians--and Bourne's ex-lover, treacherous spy Johanna, may be the only one who can help him.

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn't sure he's been a good cop, but believes he's got a shot at being a good man. In the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, he is visited by a woman who's always been bent on tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera. Darren must decide if he can trust his mother and what her ulterior motive may be. Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera's family and her hometown. If Darren wants answers, he'll need help from the person he swore to never trust again--his mother.

Haven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, has come to Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast. But she is secretly on a quest to locate a trove of priceless gemstones her late father spotted on his final dive. Upon Haven's arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister? As Haven searches for her father's sunken treasure, she begins to unearth a centuries-old tale of ancient sorcery and stregheria, a magical ability to harness the ocean. Could this magic be behind Positano's latest calamities? Haven must unravel the Amalfi Curse before the region is destroyed forever.

Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. When the elder calls out of the blue with a request for Nikki to visit her in North Carolina, Nikki hesitates for a moment. Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on the mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen. It sounds like a fairy tale, but the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family's secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it is stolen away.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Transitions are moments in which we step out of our familiar surroundings and into a new landscape—a space that, for many people, is shadowed by confusion, fear, and indecision. In this book, Melinda reflects, for the first time in print, on some of the most significant transitions in her own life, including becoming a parent, the death of a dear friend, and her departure from the Gates Foundation. The stories she tells illuminate universal lessons about loosening the bonds of perfectionism, helping friends navigate times of crisis, embracing uncertainty, and more.

A touching collection of linked stories about a Tokyo pet store that rents out cats for three-day terms. There are rules to follow: cats are not to be fed food other than the special kind the store supplies, and renters must never wash the cat’s blanket—though the penalties for not following these rules remain unclear. In “The Cat Who Sneezed,” Norio, 40, who’s unable to have children with his partner, Yukie, comes to realize that having a pet is hard, thankless work, after the cat they rented shows no interest in the tower they bought for it. “The Cat Who Knew How to Pretend” follows a woman named Hiromi who rents a cat to stand in for her family’s recently deceased pet tabby, a ruse for the benefit of her senile grandmother. Ryuhei, the recently unemployed protagonist of “The Cat Dreams Were Made Of,” hopes the cat he rents will keep his children happy as they prepare to move into a smaller home, but the gambit fails miserably. Shigematsu adds depth and intrigue by avoiding sentimentality, so that when a story does contain a happy ending or a moment of comfort for the characters, it feels genuine. Fans of “healing fiction” like Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles will find much to enjoy.

In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man's pen name. When these fictional worlds can no longer satisfy her sense of adventure, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan. As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, as does Eric, and while there, she meets her estranged father and delves into the violent confrontation in the country where her roots lie. As she and Eric discover love, the war escalates and Emilia finds herself in extreme danger, fearing for her life and questioning her identity and her destiny.

Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son's bully and the heir to a vast frozen food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can't quit: She's got to find Alfie and clear her son's name, or risk losing Dylan forever. The only problem? Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she'd like to believe...

Bestseller Maguire explores Elphaba Thropp’s origins in this charming prequel to Wicked. Dragged around the marshlands by her traveling minister father, Frexspar, green-skinned Elphie grows up isolated from all children other than her younger siblings. She doesn’t know much about her father’s work, only that he is propelled by a personal mission to find and apologize to the family of the prophet Turtle Heart, whose death Elphie’s parents feel responsible for. By the time Elphie is 13, Frexspar’s mission leads them to Ovvels, a small town in the south of Oz, where they stay a while, allowing Elphie to begin to carve a path for herself despite her dermatological difference. Charting Elphie’s growth from a young child to a prospective student at Shiz University, Maguire enchants with his whimsical narrative voice and the detailed wonders of the world he’s spent so many years playing in. This is a must-read for fans of both the original novel and the Broadway musical.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off to find his missing grandchildren through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.

May Hanover, always the rule-following "Little Sheriff," reunites with her childhood friends Lauren and Kelsey for a carefree trip to the Hamptons, but when a drunken prank goes disastrously wrong, May becomes the focus of a police investigation and begins questioning whether her friends are hiding dangerous secrets.

The Pulitzer-winning humorist looks back at his childhood hijinks, journalistic exploits, and notable columns in this revealing if bumpy memoir. Aiming to account for what led him to “fame and fortune,” he starts with his Presbyterian minister father and darkly comic mother. Amusing anecdotes about his parents give context to Barry ’s natural comedic impulse and bring a levity that counterbalances otherwise harrowing recollections of his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide. Barry also offers a riotous chronicle of his rise in journalism, from chasing two-bit local stories about “an unusually large zucchini” to writing an anything-goes weekly humor column at the Miami Herald.

Mae Townsend has always dreamed of connecting with her estranged Black family in the South. Relatives who looked like her, crowded dinner tables, and the Townsend family barbecue, a tradition that kept her late father flying to North Carolina year after year. But as her wedding draws closer, promising a future of always standing out among her white in-laws, when her paternal grandmother dies she decides it's time to head South. She finds a family in turmoil, a long-standing grudge, a lost mac & cheese recipe causing grief, and a family barbecue on the brink of disaster. Not willing to let her dreams of family slip away, Mae steps up to throw a barbecue everyone will remember.

At the secretive Dollhouse Academy, a famed performer's diary reveals sinister truths as two aspiring stars navigate intense rivalries, unsettling threats, and the dark underpinnings of their dream institution, forcing them to uncover the academy's hidden cost before it's too late.

Eddie Winston is 90 years old. He has lived and he has loved, but he has never been kissed. A true gentleman and incurable romantic, Eddie spends his days volunteering at a charity shop, where he sorts through the donations, preserving letters and tokens of love along the way. And it is here that he meets Bella, a troubled young woman who, at 24 years old, has just lost the love of her life. When Bella learns that Eddie is yet to have his first kiss, she resolves to help Eddie Winston finally find love, sparking an adventure that will take them to unexpected places and, they hope, bring Eddie Winston to the moment he has waited for all his life.

This riveting group biography recounts how Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen, who were among the first female physicists in Germany, survived WWII. After a 1933 Nazi law effectively banned women from university positions and pushed the four physicists out of their academic appointments, Sponer and Stücklen coordinated with sympathetic acquaintances abroad to secure teaching positions in the U.S. Kohn and Meitner, who were Jewish, faced greater obstacles, and Campbell offers nail-biting accounts of their escapes. Campbell’s skillful storytelling transforms her subjects’ escapes into pulse-pounding races against the clock while also shining a light on the overlooked heroism of the networks of professors who helped German academics flee to safety.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

In June 1975, the Taylor family is shattered when two teenage siblings are found dead, leaving Vincent as the only survivor and prime suspect. Decades later, Vincent becomes a famous horror writer, while his daughter, Olivia Dumont, hides her identity. Facing financial ruin, Olivia is offered a job to ghostwrite her father's last book, only to discover it's not a horror novel but the true story of what happened that night in 1975.

When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest route in the country, goes missing, the Wyoming postal inspector tells Sheriff Longmire to investigate her disappearance; posing as a letter-carrier, the sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in an otherworldly cult.

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn’t want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—within a year. But if the first-born (and only) son, Jude, gets married first, everything will go to him.

Tildy Barrows, Head Curator at a San Francisco archival library, is dedicated to the century’s worth of inventory housed there. But her life changes when she discovers two never-before-seen dollhouses, just as the library approaches bankruptcy. After finding clues hidden within these dollhouses, Tildy decides to decipher their secret history, and salvage her library in the process. Her journey introduces her to gifted women in Belle Epoque Paris, a group of scarred World War I English veterans, and Walt Disney’s Burbank studio in the 1950s. As Tildy unravels the mystery, she finds not only hidden history, but also a future for herself - and an astonishing familial revelation.