Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. At 33 years old, she finds herself pregnant with the child of a 17-year-old Traveller boy, Martin Toppy, and not by her husband Pat. Melody was teaching Martin to read, but now he’s gone, and Pat also leaves, full of rage. She’s trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming, while the past won’t let her go. It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a bold young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life.

With a sensibility that recalls her beloved screen characters, including Yvette, Queenie, Shug, and the iconic Cookie from “Empire,” Taraji P. Henson writes of her family, the one she was born into and the one she created. She shares stories of her father, a Vietnam vet who was bowed but never broken by life's challenges, and of her mother, who survived violence both in the home and on DC's volatile streets. Here, too, she opens up about her experiences as a single mother, a journey some saw as a burden but she saw as a gift.

Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black Rabbit Hall, her London family’s country estate, where no two clocks read the same. More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black Rabbit Hall among the locals. But as she’s drawn deeper into the overgrown grounds, half-buried memories of her mother begin to surface. Lorna soon finds herself ensnared within the manor’s labyrinthine history, overcome with an insatiable need for answers about her own past and that of the once-happy family whose memory still haunts the estate.

No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money and material for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It was a city of patriots, war heroes and abolitionists, but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance and sedition. CITY OF SEDITION follows the fortunes of such fascinating figures as Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Thomas Nast and Herman Melville. The book chronicles how many New Yorkers seized the opportunities the conflict presented to amass capital, create new industries and expand their markets, laying the foundation for the city's --- and the nation's --- growth.

In the early summer of 2014, Farida Khalaf was a typical Yazidi teenager living with her parents and three brothers in her village in the mountains of Northern Iraq. In one horrific day, she lost everything: ISIS invaded her village, destroyed her family and sold her into sexual slavery. THE GIRL WHO ESCAPED ISIS is her incredible account of captivity and describes how she defied the odds and escaped a life of torture, in order to share her story with the world.

When Ben, a suburban family man, takes a business trip to rural Pennsylvania, he decides to spend the afternoon before his dinner meeting on a short hike. Once he sets out into the woods behind his hotel, he quickly comes to realize that the path he has chosen cannot be given up easily. With no choice but to move forward, Ben finds himself falling deeper and deeper into a world of man-eating giants, bizarre demons and colossal insects. On a quest of epic, life-or-death proportions, Ben finds help comes in some of the most unexpected forms, including a profane crustacean and a variety of magical objects, tools, and potions. Desperate to return to his family, Ben is determined to track down the “Producer,” the creator of the world in which he is being held hostage and the only one who can free him from the path.

In 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her “soul place,” she said --- a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge --- until the 1930s, when the Nazis’ rise to power forced them to leave. The trip was his grandmother’s chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned nearly 20 years later, it was about to be demolished. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, and a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all but one had been forced out.

The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor. This was no conventional mail network, but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind 13 quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen --- a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries.

The end of communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those heady days to the autocratic police state of Putin’s new Russia? THE INVENTION OF RUSSIA reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation. Arkady Ostrovsky introduces us to the propagandists, oligarchs and fixers who have set Russia’s course since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Determined to be different from other people, the MacEntees have carved out a place for themselves in Irish life by the sheer force of their personalities. There's Deirdre, the aged matriarch and former star of the stage. Her estranged writer husband, Manus, now lives with a younger man. Their daughter, Alma, is an unapologetically ambitious television presenter, while Acushla plays the part of the perfect political wife. And there's Macdara, the fragile and gentle soul of the family. But when a series of misfortunes befall the family over the course of one long, hot summer, even the MacEntees will struggle to make sense of who they are.

“My time in Paris,” says Paula McLain (THE PARIS WIFE), “was like no one else’s ever.” For each of the 18 bestselling authors in this warm, inspiring and charming collection of personal essays on the City of Light, nothing could be more true. While all of the female writers featured here have written books connected to Paris, their personal stories of the city are wildly different. Meg Waite Clayton (THE RACE FOR PARIS) and M. J. Rose (THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES) share the romantic secrets that have made Paris the destination for lovers for hundreds of years. Susan Vreeland (THE GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE) and J. Courtney Sullivan (THE ENGAGEMENTS) peek behind the stereotype of snobbish Parisians to show us the genuine kindness of real people.

Every law firm has its backroom bench of brilliant workaholic nerds ferocious in their commitment to the law and to their clients. Such a player is Milton Bernstein of Abbott & Windsor. He's highly valued by the partners for his skills, but untested in the courtroom. Milton's younger brother, Hal, is his polar opposite --- strikingly handsome, a high school baseball legend in St. Louis who was on his way to the major leagues until he destroyed his prospects in a motorcycle accident. Neither brilliant nor driven, Hal has to face up to earning a living. For now he's killing time as a lifeguard at an exclusive country club. But the lives of both brothers are about to change.

Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limps back into New York’s frenzied harbor with the ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.

Sal seems to appear out of nowhere --- a bruised and tattered 13-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home where he's welcomed into the Bliss family, assuming he's a runaway from a nearby farm town. When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, Ohio, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. While the Bliss family wrestles with their own personal demons, a fanatic drives the town to the brink of a catastrophe that will change this sleepy Ohio backwater forever.

From the horseback days of the Old West through the gangster days of the 1930s, Frank Hamer (known only as the “villain” of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde) stood on the frontlines of some of the most important and exciting periods in American history. He participated in the Bandit War of 1915, survived the climactic gunfight in the last blood feud of the Old West, battled the Mexican Revolution’s spillover across the border, protected African Americans from lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, and ran down gangsters, bootleggers and Communists. When at last his career came to an end, it was only when he ran up against another legendary Texan: Lyndon B. Johnson.

Jeff Hinkley, investigator for the British Horseracing Authority, has been seconded to the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA), where he has been asked to find a mole in their organization --- an informant who is passing on confidential information to those under suspicion in American racing. At the Kentucky Derby, Jeff joins the FACSA team in a raid on a horse trainer’s barn at Churchill Downs, but the bust is a disaster, and someone ends up dead. Then, on the morning of the Derby itself, three of the most favored horses in the field fall sick. Jeff discovers far more than he was bargaining for: corrupt individuals who will stop at nothing to capture the most elusive prize in world sport --- the Triple Crown.

With Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot investigating a young woman’s death, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Banks finds himself taking on the coldest of cases: a fifty-year-old assault allegedly per-petrated by beloved celebrity Danny Caxton. Now Caxton stands accused at the center of a media storm, and it’s Banks’s job to discover the shocking truth. As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton’s manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence --- while the investigation leads him down the darkest of paths…