Coming Soon

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater --- an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.

Natalka and Edwin are perfect, if improbable, partners in a detective agency. Eighty-four-year-old Edwin is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, more than 50 years his junior, is a math whiz who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. She loves a murder, but none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies. Melody’s daughters are convinced that their mother was murdered. Edwin thinks that Melody’s death is linked to that of an obituary writer who predeceased many of his subjects. Edwin and Benedict go undercover to investigate and are on a creative writing weekend at isolated Battle House when another murder occurs. Are the cases linked, and what is the role of a distinctly sinister book group attended by many of writers involved?

The relics of St. Nicholas are among the most divine and prized possessions in the Christian world, said to hold the power to heal the most incurable diseases. Biblical archaeologist Maggie Shepherd has a chance to extract and study one of these priceless artifacts buried in the tomb of the man who is now known as Santa Claus. In just a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, the Pope will present the venerated relic of St. Nicholas to the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Moscow in the hope of reuniting East and West after a 1,000-year schism. Driven by rumors of the relic’s legendary power, many people want to control it, including a Russian mob boss who coerces Malachi Popov into stealing it for him before the ceremony. Once in possession of the miraculous relic, Popov witnesses its awesome power and regrets his action. But before he can set things right, it vanishes.

When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading “Go to Paris.” When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes. Alone in a foreign city, Stella falls into old habits, living cautiously and frugally. Then she stumbles across a vintage store, where she tries on a fabulous Dior dress. The shopkeeper insists that this dress was meant for Stella, and for the first time in her life Stella does something impulsive. She buys the dress --- and embarks on an adventure. As weeks --- and many decadent meals --- go by, Stella ends up living as a “tumbleweed” at the famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company, uncovers a hundred-year-old mystery in a Manet painting, and discovers a passion for food that may be connected to her past.

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. In THE RULEBREAKER, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.

Eddie Grant is happy with her life and her work as a personal assistant to renowned romance author Dinah Lavender. But being a spectator to notoriety and glamour isn’t as fulfilling as she once thought. Thankfully, Eddie has the perfect excuse for a vacation: Her hardworking younger sister, Barrett, is opening her gift shop on Memorial Day weekend and could use all the help she can get. But going home to the beautiful island of Nantucket means facing the family’s difficult past. Shortly after the death of Eddie and Barrett’s brother, their mother left them, and their father made the spontaneous decision to buy a small farm. Eddie stayed there for only a year before her family’s grief threatened to consume her as well and had been living in Manhattan ever since. Now that she is back, Eddie must face all she left behind.

Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman --- husband, grandfather and war veteran --- was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended. In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined --- and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family. YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY traces the effect that Yefim's cover-up had on the lives of Nina, their two children and their grandchildren.

Retired romance novelist Sara Medlar has been comfortably sharing her large home with her niece, Kate, and her “honorary grandson,” Jack. It’s a convenient arrangement given that the Medlar Three are often working closely together to solve mysteries. But when real estate agent Kate announces she’s been given the listing for the town’s storied Lachlan House, it sets off alarm bells for Sara and Jack. With little memory of her childhood, Kate doesn’t understand what the fuss is about --- until the trio visits the house and makes a grim discovery. Flooded by memories of the past, Kate realizes she spent time there as a child. But stumbling upon a skeleton dressed in a rotting tuxedo --- a murder victim with connections to her father --- causes Kate to wonder if the childhood she can’t remember might be one she’d rather forget.

Colton Gentry’s first hit in nearly a decade has caught fire, he’s opening for country megastar Brant Lucas, and he’s married to one of the hottest acts in the country. But he’s hurting. Only a few weeks earlier, his best friend, Duane, was murdered onstage by a mass shooter at a country music festival. One night, Colton stands before a sold-out arena crowd of country music fans and offers his unfiltered opinion on guns. It goes over poorly. Immediately, his career and marriage implode. Left with few choices or funds, he retreats to his rural Kentucky hometown. He’s resigned himself to has-been-dom, until a chance encounter at his town’s new farm-to-table restaurant gives him a second shot at life: a job working in the kitchen with Luann, his first love, who has undergone her own reinvention.

Frankie O’Neill is a lonely ornithologist struggling to salvage her dissertation on the spotted owl following a rift with her advisor. Anne Ryan is an Irish musician far from home and family, raising her five-year-old son, Aiden, who refuses to speak. At Beauty Bay, a community of summer homes nestled on the shores of June Lake, most houses are shuttered for the fall. But Frankie returns to the rundown caretaker’s cottage that has been in the hardworking O'Neill family for generations. And Anne, in the wake of a tragedy, has fled to the neighboring house, which is owned by her husband's wealthy family. When Frankie finds an injured baby crow in the forest, little does she realize that the charming bird will bring all three lost souls together on a journey toward hope, healing and rediscovering joy.

All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next installment of her Vacation Mysteries series. Is that too much to ask? Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life --- the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with 10 years ago and now can't get out of her life --- Eleanor is enlisted to help solve the case. Contending with literary competitors, rabid fans, a stalker --- and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly --- theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?

A local teenager is found brutally murdered in the Settlement, Granite Harbor’s historic archaeological site. Alex Brangwen is the town’s sole detective, and this is his first murder case. Isabel, a single mother attempting to support her family while healing from her own demons, finds herself in the middle of the case when she begins working at the Settlement. Her son, Ethan, and Alex’s daughter, Sophie, were best friends with the victim. When a second teenager is found murdered, the body left in the same manner as the first victim, both parents are terrified that their child may be next. As Alex and Isabel race to find the killer in their midst, the town’s secrets --- past and present --- begin bubbling to the surface, threatening to unravel the tight-knit community.

After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. While going through their parents’ belongings, they stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends. Beth, Nicole and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. This group of international women help rebuild destroyed French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen --- children’s libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears. 1987: When NYPL librarian and aspiring writer Wendy Peterson stumbles across a passing reference to Jessie Carson in the archives, she becomes consumed with learning her fate. Eventually she discovers that they have more in common than their work at New York’s famed library, but she has no idea their paths will converge in surprising ways across time.

It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City. Breanna’s new boyfriend, Ty, took care of everything. But when Bree comes downstairs their final morning, she’s shocked. There’s a stranger laying dead in the foyer, and Ty is nowhere to be found. A Black woman alone in a new city, Bree is stranded and out of her depth --- especially when it becomes clear the dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire internet has become obsessed with. There’s only one person Bree can turn to: her ex-best friend, a lawyer with whom she shares a very complicated past. As the police and a social media mob close in, all looking for #JusticeForJanelle, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty --- or herself --- is to figure out what really happened that last night.

Sophia Alexander has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister, Theresa, and look after her father while also volunteering at his hospital after school. Meanwhile, Hitler’s rise to power and the violence in her very own town have Sophia concerned. After her mother dies, Sophia becomes increasingly involved in the resistance, attending meetings of dissidents and helping however she can. Circumstances become increasingly dangerous and personal when Sophia assists her sister’s daring escape from Germany. Her father also begins to resist the regime, secretly healing those hiding from persecution, only to have his hospital burned to the ground. When he is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, Sophia is truly on her own but is more determined than ever to help.

On a foggy winter morning, high school kids Luca and Emma discover the impossible: the wreck of an 18th-century ship stranded in a flower field. Emma enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn’t the last to disappear. Soon a government agency begins to investigate, determined to uncover the ship’s secrets before a media storm erupts. They enlist Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult, to unravel the mystery, and he soon realizes the ship could be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened under the sea. In a maelstrom of international intrigue and pure terror, Grim and Luca must race against time as they come face-to-face with an open doorway to the apocalypse.

REAL AMERICANS begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when 22-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, 15-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter --- a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

Summer Sullivan, the youngest founding member of Elm Creek Quilts, has spent the last two years pursuing a master’s degree in history at the University of Chicago. Her unexpected return home to the celebrated quilter’s retreat is met with delight but also concern from her mother, Gwen; her best friend, Sarah; master quilter Sylvia; and her other colleagues. Stymied by writer’s block, Summer hasn’t finished her thesis, and she can’t graduate until she does. She finds welcome distraction in organizing an exhibit of antique quilts as a fundraiser to renovate Union Hall, the 1863 Greek Revival headquarters of the Waterford Historical Society. But Summer’s research uncovers startling facts about Waterford’s past, prompting unsettling questions about racism, economic injustice and political corruption within their community, past and present.

For more than a year, Emil Winge has dedicated himself to capturing the diabolical Tycho Ceton, with the invaluable assistance of one-armed army veteran and watchman Jean Michael Cardell. Their mission is made more difficult by the ever-increasing paranoia gripping Sweden’s royal family, who fear that a bloody revolution is brewing. A letter with the names of the revolutionary conspirators is said to be in the possession of Anna Stina Knapp, a good friend to Cardell. Now, Anna is missing and Cardell is determined to find her before the secret police take her into custody. While Winge and Cardell fight for justice and for life, they find themselves caught between powerful enemies --- those who will do anything to maintain the status quo, and those who will only be satisfied with its total destruction.

After her mother dies, Hannah doesn’t know how to exist without her. In fact, Hannah isn’t even certain that she does exist. No one seems to see or hear her, and she finds herself utterly alone. Grief-stricken and confused, Hannah sets out to find new purpose in life --- and answers about who (and what) she really is. Hannah’s only remaining family is her older sister, Leah. Yet even Leah doesn’t seem to notice her. And while Hannah can see and hear her sister, she also sees beautiful and terrible things that don’t --- or shouldn’t --- exist. She learns there’s much more to this world than meets the eye and struggles to make sense of it all. When Hannah sees Leah taking the same dangerous path that consumed their own mother --- where lies supplant reality --- she’s desperate to get through to her.

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another --- from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.

As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn’t learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we’re going to fail! Maybe it’s time for a new textbook. ALEXANDRA PETRI’S US HISTORY contains a lost (invented!) history of America (a history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding). Petri’s “historical fan fiction” draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.

Cara moves to Martha’s Vineyard after graduating from college, determined to make sense of her mother’s death and decide what direction she wants to take her life as an artist. There she meets Brendan, who sweeps her away with his humor, charisma and an intoxicating secret. When Cara gets pregnant with their son, she’s sure their happy ending is underway. But she’s thrown by Brendan’s dramatic moods, unexplained disappearances and the weight of his secrets. When he vanishes with their child, she is left desolate and questioning everything she thought was true. Five years later, Cara is married to another man and trying to rebuild her life, when she hears rumors of two people who sound a lot like her lost love and child.