Narrator

Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber
  • Perfect for fans of Kiersten Modglin’s The ArrangementThe Widow on Dwyer Court is a sexy psychological thriller that will leave you breathless.

    Thirty-six-year-old stay-at-home soccer mom Kate Burke is happily married to Matt Parsons, although their marriage looks very different behind closed doors. Kate is no longer interested in having sex with her husband. So, while they still love each other madly, they make an arrangement: Matt can have one-night stands with other women on work trips, but when he returns home, he has to tell Kate about them—every juicy detail.

    Because Kate has a secret life writing erotic romance novels, and Matt’s adulterous affairs are her bread and butter.

    The family equilibrium is upset, however, when Annie Meyers, an eccentric young widow, moves to town with her daughter. At first Kate is smitten with this wild, witty woman, who gives her a much-needed break from the other picture-perfect suburban moms, although she’s not sure how much of her secret life she’s willing to share with her new friend. But it turns out Annie has secrets too—big ones that could destroy all their lives.

  • “Scheming mean girls, sex and scandal, secrets and lies…what’s not to love?” — Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Last Girl Ghosted

    The Real Housewives meets murder in this deliciously savage and wildly entertaining thriller from Jeneva Rose, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Marriage, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, and Home Is Where the Bodies Are.

    Buckhead isn’t a place you live, it’s a place you survive. And that applies even to the wealthy housewives that have it all. Fancy cars, designer clothes, and daily salon appointments aren’t nearly enough to keep them fulfilled and happy. Because in this town, privilege and opulence go hand in hand with betrayal and revenge.

    Jenny, the owner of Glow, an exclusive membership-only beauty salon, knows that better than anyone, because she knows everything about these housewives—down to each individual strand of hair. Despite the toxicity, Jenny keeps her focus on running her business, and keeping the peace. However, peace proves to be impossible when one of her clients is murdered. Now, it’s up to Jenny and her knowledge of neighborhood secrets and gossip to help the police solve the case. It won’t be easy though, because while Buckhead may be all about appearances, nothing is as it seems.

    Never have mean girls been meaner, nor murder been so much fun than in this “sublimely bitchy” (Kirkus Reviews) and scandalous suspense novel from Jeneva Rose, the “queen of twists” (Colleen Hoover).

  • The go-to resource—now fully revised and updated—for building a healthy body image and making peace with food, once and for all.

    When it was first published, Intuitive Eating was revolutionary in its anti-dieting approach. The authors, both prominent health professionals in the field of nutrition and eating disorders, urge listners to embrace the goal of developing body positivity and reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating—to unlearn everything they were taught about calorie-counting and other aspects of diet culture and to learn about the harm of weight stigma. Today, their message is more relevant and pressing than ever. With this updated edition of the classic bestseller, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch teach listeners how to:

    • Follow the ten principles of Intuitive Eating to achieve a new and trusting relationship with food

    • Fight against diet culture and reject diet mentality forever

    • Find satisfaction in their food choices

    • Exercise kindness toward their feelings, their bodies, and themselves

    • Prevent or heal the wounds of an eating disorder

    • Respect their bodies and make peace with food—at any age, weight, or stage of development

    • Follow body positive feeds for inspiration and validation

    … and more easy-to-follow suggestions that can lead listeners to integrate Intuitive Eating into their everyday lives and feel the freedom that comes with trusting their inner wisdom—for life.

  • This groundbreaking multicultural anthology shares moving personal stories about the impacts of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

    An estimated 5.7 million Americans are afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, including ten percent of those over sixty-five, and it is the sixth leading cause of death. But its effects are more pervasive: For the nearly six million sufferers, there are more than sixteen million family caregivers and many more family members. Alzheimer’s wreaks havoc not only on brain cells—it is a disease of the spirit and heart for not only those who suffer from it, but also for their families.

    This groundbreaking anthology presents forty narratives, both nonfiction and fiction, that together capture the impact and complexity of Alzheimer’s and other dementias on patients, as well as their caregivers and family. Deeply personal, recounting the wrenching course of a disease that kills a loved one twice—first they forget who they are, and then the body succumbs—these stories also show how witnessing the disease and caring for someone with it can be powerfully transformative, calling forth amazing strength and grace.

  • Father-daughter duo Jonathan and Emily Jordan uncover the ingenious wartime tactics of some of history’s most powerful female leaders across millennia and continents, from the stifling battlefields of ancient Egypt to the frigid waters off the Falkland Islands.

    History’s killer queens come in all colors, ages, and leadership styles. Elizabeth Tudor and Golda Meir played the roles of high-stakes gamblers who studied maps with an unblinking, calculating eye. Angola’s Queen Njinga was willing to shed (and occasionally drink) blood to establish a stable kingdom in an Africa ravaged by the slave trade. Caterina Sforza defended her Italian holdings with cannon and scimitar, and Indira Gandhi launched a war to solve a refugee crisis.

    From ancient Persia to modern-day Britain, the daunting thresholds these exceptional women had to cross—and the clever, sometimes violent ways in which they overcame them—are evoked in vivid detail by Jordan and Jordan. The narrative sidles up to these war queens in the most dire, tumultuous moments of their reigns and examines the brilliant methods and maneuvers they each used to defend themselves and their people from enemy forces. In the end, we come away with a new awareness of the extraordinary power and potential of women in history who walked through war’s kiln and emerged from the other side—some burnished to greatness, others burned to cinders.

  • Elena Ferrante is the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, now an HBO original series. Collected here for the first time are the seeds of future novels, the timely reflections of this internationally beloved storyteller, the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” (New York Times).

    “This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me … I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that—if I have the will and the time—I’d like to develop within real narrative mechanisms.”

    With these words, Elena Ferrante bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian newspaper. For a full year, she wrote weekly articles, the subjects of which had been suggested by Guardian editors, making the writing process a sort of prolonged interlocution. The subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the experience of seeing her novels adapted for film and TV.

    Translated by Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of Ferrante’s novels, this volume is a must for all curious readers.

  • “Don’t miss it. This is a great one!” — Stephen King

    Soon to be an Amazon TV series

    I am the legion of the night …

    He appears in the darkness like a ghost, made of shadows and fear—the Midnight Man. He comes for the parents but leaves the children alive, tiny witnesses to unspeakable horror. The bedroom communities of Los Angeles are gripped with dread, and the attacks are escalating.

    Still reeling from her best friend’s close call in a bombing six months ago, FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix has come to Los Angeles to assist in the Midnight Man investigation and do what she does best—hunt a serial killer. Her work is what keeps her going, but something about this UNSUB—unknown subject—doesn’t sit right. She soon realizes that this case will test not only her skills but also her dedication, for within the heart of a killer lives a secret that mirrors Caitlin’s own past. Hesitancy is not an option, but will she be able to do what must be done if the time comes?

    Tense and impactful, Edgar Award winner Meg Gardiner’s latest UNSUB thriller will leave you on the edge of your seat until its riveting conclusion.

  • Everyone has a secret. For some, it’s worth dying to protect. For others, it’s worth killing.

    The glass beach house was supposed to be the getaway that Susan needed. Eager to help her transplanted family set down roots in their new town―and desperate for some kid-free conversation―she invites her new neighbors to join in on a week-long sublet with her and her workaholic husband.

    Over the course of the first evening, liquor loosens inhibitions and lips. The three couples begin picking up on the others’ marital tensions and work frustrations, as well as revealing their own. But someone says too much. And the next morning one of the women is discovered dead on the private beach.

    Town detective Gabby Watkins must figure out who permanently silenced the deceased. As she investigates, she learns that everyone in the glass house was hiding something that could tie them to the murder, and that the biggest secrets of all are often in plain sight for anyone willing to look.

    A taut, locked room mystery with an unforgettable cast of characters, One Little Secret promises to keep readers’ eyes glued to the pages and debating the blinders that we all put on in the service of politeness.

  • In Banshee, Samantha Baxter―wife, mother, poetry professor―learns she has breast cancer and then ruins her own life.

    Tumbling through a catastrophic midlife crisis, she gives herself permission to partake in behaviors she’s observed in her male colleagues, including having an affair with a student her daughter’s age, ranting at board meetings, and telling her poetry students what she really thinks of their work.

    Underneath biting, witty narration lurks a childish, confused, and unrealized adult woman hell-bent on destroying her relationships and professional life, all within the span of a few weeks.

    Part comedy, part tragedy, Banshee dramatizes the emotions that lie behind our inhibitions―and the consequences of unleashing them.

  • In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus’ short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe’s Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award.

    The collection includes the novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus’ writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work.

    Two years later, the title story of Dubus’ sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. “The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

    While the collection’s opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in “Andromache”—Dubus’ first story to appear in the New Yorker (1968)—which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

  • While the title novella of Dubus’ Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection’s opening story strikes a much darker tone: “Killings”—the basis of the Academy Award–nominated film In the Bedroom—is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love.

    Dubus’ prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story “Waiting”: the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus fourteen months to write and was more than one hundred pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form.

    Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called “The Pretty Girl”—the opening novella of The Times Are Never So Bad—“the most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written.”

    Richard Russo’s introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus’ work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece “A Father’s Story,” Russo writes: “I won’t mince words. It’s one of the finest stories ever penned by an American.”

  • The Cross Country Runner brings together Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, and The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus’ fifth collection of short stories and novellas, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Tobias Wolff.

    “‘It’s divorce that did it,’ his father had said last night.” So begins Voices from the Moon, the 126-page novella that shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating between the viewpoints of Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the five other members of his family, the story takes place over the course of a single day.

    The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of any previous Dubus collection—racial tension in the navy, a detective-story homage, a Hispanic shortstop, the unlikely pairing of an eleven-year-old kid and a dangerous Vietnam vet.

    This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus’ previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in book form for the first time is “The Cross Country Runner,” which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was thirty years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The final story—the Western-themed “Sisters”—is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just sixty-three years old.

  • From the mind of the man Stephen King calls “a master of the macabre,” comes a brilliant new collection of no-punches-pulled horror stories, some never before collected and many originals that have never been published anywhere before. Bentley Little can take the innocuous, twist it around, and write a story that will change your way of thinking. Walking Alone: Short Stories is a shining example of his talent to scare you, creep you out, and make you shudder.

  • Do you remember your first love? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you had a second chance to follow your heart? In this collection of novellas written by award-winning and bestselling authors, come home to Echo Ridge as summer winds down and hearts once broken and lost are given one more chance, a second chance to love.

    A Brand New Second Chance by Lucy McConnell

    With a broken heart and an unsure future, Abigail Martin moves home to Echo Ridge to capture the parts of her teenage years she missed out on because she’d had a steady boyfriend. Kissing a random guy, flirting with strangers, hanging out at Fay’s after a football game—all of it. Carter Montgomery offers his help, because he’s a helpful kind of guy, and she quickly falls for his quiet humor, kindness, and heated kisses. Fearing that she hasn’t lived enough of life to settle down, Abigail must decide if she’s going to break Carter’s heart or give love a brand-new second chance.

    A Perfect Fit by Janette Rallison

    Jojo Halifax believes that winning Echo Ridge’s float competition is just what her fledgling art career needs. And if that means giving her ex-boyfriend, Anthony, a second chance so she can be a designer on his team, well, she’s willing to make the sacrifice. But when a lost bet leads to a blind date with her brother’s friend Wyatt, she begins to have second thoughts about second chances. Wyatt is handsome and charming and just might have been paid to make her forget about Anthony. Is falling for his charm worth the risk, or should she take Anthony back again?

    Almost Home by Heather Tullis

    Damon lived in ten towns while growing up, but Echo Ridge is one of the few that started to feel like home before his parents relocated their family again. Now a widower, moving back to the small ski resort town is irresistible for him—but somewhat less so for his daughter, Maggie. Learning that Haley, the girl who had gotten away, is back in town is an unexpected bonus. When Haley left a high-powered job in New York City to take care of her grandmother, she never expected to run into the boy she’d been crushing on sixteen years earlier. When they end up working together on the homecoming float, she finds the attraction between them just as compelling as before. But when given a choice, will she give him her heart or leave love behind to return to her job in the city?

    Change of Plans by Cami Checketts

    Kaitlyn Johanson comes home to Echo Ridge planning to bring the sparks back with her high school boyfriend, Mason, work at Kenworth’s, and enjoy family and the beautiful valley. She never expected her heartthrob—nationally-acclaimed lacrosse player, Axel Olsen—would visit her hometown. When Axel steals her attention, and possibly her heart, from the man she was supposed to marry, she has to choose between taking a risk on new love or giving old love a second chance.

    Coming Home to Love by Rachelle J. Christensen

    When Laney Richins left Echo Ridge, New York, eight years ago, she vowed she’d never return, but life had other plans. Those plans included her cute little boy and a divorce, so Laney moved back home and started over. Working in the flower shop seems like the perfect plan until Billy Redford, the man she should have married shows up. Billy Redford’s heart was broken when his high school sweetheart turned her back on him and fled Echo Ridge for the big-city lights. Running into Laney in Echo Ridge now brings up past feelings he thought were long gone. She’s prettier than ever, still seems to read his mind, and despite his protests, ends up on the homecoming dance’s building and decorating committee with him. Billy knows how to build just about anything, but he isn’t sure he knows how to mend a broken heart.

  • One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them.

    Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect; yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker’s Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far-off places—and loves—around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

    A novel that examines conviction, connection, repayment, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us.

  • Deep within your mind is a realm filled with powerful symbols that drive your thoughts, behaviors, and actions—often without your knowledge. This is the hidden world of archetypes, universal symbols responsible for who you are, how the world sees you, and what you believe about yourself and your life’s purpose.

    The Power of Archetypes will help you identify, understand, and work with the archetypes that exist beyond your conscious awareness to create your reality “behind the scenes.” You will also learn how to clear out old symbols that may be blocking you from the happiness and success you dream of. You will examine

    • the roles of the subconscious and collective unconscious in shaping your identity, and why it is so hard to change “you”;
    • the most common archetypes and what they symbolize;
    • global archetypes in religion, politics, and pop culture, and how they affect you; and
    • ways to identify archetypes working in your life as well as the skills to change them and become more authentic.

    Archetypes reveal your plot and your purpose. The good news is, if you don’t like them, you can choose more empowering symbols to create a completely new story of your life.

  • Brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller.

    In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the “Czar of Noir,” this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

    From the introduction:

    Jerry Thompson: “Discovering the wang-dang-doodle jams of the Pointer Sisters shifted my entire focus. Stunning black women were scatting and bebopping all the way into my soul. I think what we’ve put together in Oakland Noir is a volume where this city is a character in every story. He’s a slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line and tambourine duet. She’s a white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to farmer and flea markets, to sell crafts and get hooked up with some fine kat with dreadlocks and a criminal record. And it’s in the faces of young fearless muthafuckers pounding keyboards and snapping fingers, lips, Snapchats, and Facebook timelines. It’s the core of not only Black Lives Matter but all lives matter. We are the children of fantasy and of the funk.”

    Eddie Muller: “These days, writers and readers aren’t denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun because it’s become the fashionable way to get published. You know, ‘gritty violence’ and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places—the cruelty of the world’s innate indifference and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you’re not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you’re not really writing noir.”

  • Bill Pronzini is crime-writing royalty. His more than eighty published novels have won or been nominated for Edgar, Hammett, Anthony, Shamus, and Macavity awards—a clean sweep of the crime fiction award field—and received rave reviews from critics. He crafts masterful stories, often from multiple perspectives, in which the human condition is on full display. The Violated is no exception.

    In Echo Park, in the small town of Santa Rita, California, the mutilated body of Martin Torrey is found by two passersby. A registered sex offender, Torrey has been a suspect in a string of recent rapes, and instant suspicion for his murder falls on the relatives and friends of the women attacked. Police chief Griffin Kells and detective Robert Ortiz are under increasing pressure from the public and from a mayor demanding results in a case that has no easy solution.

    Pronzini cleverly unfolds the case through alternating perspectives—Martin Torrey’s wife, caught between her grief and the fear her husband was guilty; the outraged husbands of the women violated; the enterprising editor of the local paper; the mayor concerned most with his own ratings; the detectives, often spinning in circles—until a surprising break leads to a completely unexpected conclusion. The Violated is Bill Pronzini at the height of his storytelling powers.

  • Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.

    Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. When her close-knit group of high-achieving friends celebrate the end of their grueling workdays with alcohol-fueled nights at the city’s clubs and summer weekends partying at the beach, the feel-good times can spiral wildly out of control.

    Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

  • The writer known as Elena Ferrante has taken pains to hide her identity in the hope that readers would focus on her body of work. But in this volume, she invites us into her workshop and offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk—those drawers from which emerged her three early standalone novels and the four installments of the Neapolitan Novels, the New York Times bestselling “enduring masterpiece” (The Atlantic).

    Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, Frantumaglia is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. Ferrante answers many of her readers’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that that story isn’t good enough. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies. The result is a vibrant and intimate self-portrait of a writer at work.

  • An exotic trip to Iceland puts Teddy the zookeeper in the middle of the murder case of a wealthy bird watcher.

    California zookeeper Theodora Bentley travels to Iceland to pick up an orphaned polar bear cub destined for the Gunn Zoo’s newly installed Northern Climes exhibit. The trip is intended to be a combination of work and play. But on day two, while horseback riding near a picturesque seaside village, Teddy discovers a man lying atop a puffin burrow, shot through the head.

    The victim is identified as American bird watcher Simon Parr, winner of the largest Powerball payout in history. Is Teddy a witness—or a suspect? Others include not only Parr’s wife, a famed suspense novelist, but fellow members of the birding club Parr had generously treated to their lavish Icelandic expedition. Hardly your average birders, several of them have had serious brushes with the law back in the states.

    Guessing that an American would best understand other Americans, police detective Thorvaald Haraldsson grudgingly concedes her innocence and allows Teddy to tag along with the group to volcanoes, glaciers, and deep continental rifts in quest of rare bird species. But once another member of the club is murdered and a rockfall barely misses Teddy’s head, Haraldsson forbids her to continue. She ignores him and, in a stunning, solitary face-off with the killer in Iceland’s wild interior, concludes an investigation at once exotic, thrilling, and rich in animal lore.

  • Meryl Becker is living a mother’s dream. Meg, the oldest of her three beautiful daughters, is engaged to a wonderful man from one of the country’s most prominent families. Of course, Meryl wants to give Meg the perfect wedding—who wouldn’t? But when her two younger daughters, Amy and Jo, also become engaged to celebrated bachelors, Meryl has to admit that three weddings is more than she and her husband, Hugh, can realistically afford.

    The solution? A triple wedding! At first, it’s a tough sell to the girls, and juggling three sets of future in-laws is a logistical nightmare. But when Hugh loses his teaching job, and Meryl’s aging mother suddenly moves in with them, a triple wedding is the only way to get all three sisters down the aisle. When the grand plan becomes public, the onslaught of media attention adds to Meryl’s mounting pressure. Suddenly, appearances are everything—and she will do whatever it takes to keep the wedding on track as money gets tight, her mother starts acting nutty, and her own thirty-year marriage starts to unravel.

    In the weeks leading up to the nuptials, secrets are revealed, passions ignite, and surprising revelations show Meryl and her daughters the true meaning of love, marriage, and family. Jamie Brenner’s The Wedding Sisters invites listeners to the most unpredictable wedding of the year.

  • Sometimes fences make for nice neighbors. Other times they hide the evil within.

    Orchard Grove is a town like any other, with quiet neighborhoods and apple groves … though Ethan, the depressed screenplay writer, and his secretive wife, Susan, would tell you differently. So would the seductive serial killer living next door. The apple trees are fertilized with evil, and the backyard fences aren’t enough to stop the manipulative mind games and dangerous lies. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and then erased, as Ethan does what it takes to survive.

  • Fresh from her introduction to the dangerous world of criminals and cons in Jump the Gun, smart, sexy, and movie-crazy Annabelle Starkey flies to Portland, Oregon, to visit to her newly relocated parents. They, like Annabelle, are rebooting their lives, although the directions their new starts will take are not yet clear. Annabelle is now part of a fledgling detective agency headquartered in New York, home turf to her boyfriend, Mickey, just retired from the NYPD.

    Having arrived safely at her parents’ home, Annabelle is ready to relax when she discovers her backpack has been switched for one holding a gun—a gun linked to a murder. Has she been set up, or was she simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? The Portland Police Department isn’t sure. Then a frantic young woman appears and claims the gun is hers. And worringly, Annabelle wonders whether the man who sat next to her on the plane might now be stalking her.

    Alarmed and without a gun of her own, Annabelle is armed only with wits, wisecracks, and her ability to run. Soon Mickey and streetwise backup Luis arrive, adding boots on the ground and their seasoned crime-busting skills, but it is Annabelle who pieces together a case traversing Portland’s patchwork of communities, proving to herself, her partners, and her parents that, as an investigator, she’s got the right stuff.

  • An edgy tale of mixed feelings and motherhood by the New York Times bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend

    Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her.

    After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family in this “arresting” (Publishers Weekly) novel by the author of the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series.

  • The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women—the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila—who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy.

    In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, Elena and Lila’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved.

    Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.

  • A woman goes home to Naples after her mother’s mysterious death in a “tour de force” (Seattle Times) by the New York Times bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend.

    Following her mother’s untimely and unexplained drowning, which was preceded by a series of strange phone calls, forty-five-year-old Delia leaves Rome and embarks on a voyage of discovery through the beguiling yet often hostile streets of her native Naples. She is searching for the truth about her family and the men in her mother’s life, past and present, including an abusive husband.

    What Delia discovers will be more unsettling than she imagines, but will also reveal truths about herself, in this psychological mystery marked by “tactile, beautifully restrained prose” (Publishers Weekly) about mothers and daughters and the complicated knot of lies and emotions that binds them.

  • The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman’s experiences after being suddenly left by her husband after fifteen years of marriage.

    With two young children to care for, Olga finds it more and more difficult to do the things she used to: keep a spotless house, cook meals with creativity and passion, refrain from using obscenities. After running into her husband with his much-younger new lover in public, she cannot even refrain from assaulting him physically.

    Olga conveys her journey from denial to devastating emptiness—and when she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

  • In the third book in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood.

    Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons.

    Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” (Library Journal).

  • The follow-up to My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name continues the epic New York Times bestselling literary quartet that has inspired an HBO series, and returns us to the world of Lila and Elena, who grew up together in post-WWII Naples, Italy.

    In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and a source of strength in the face of life’s challenges.

    In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time” (New York Times), gives us a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging, a meditation on love and jealousy, freedom and commitment—at once a masterfully plotted page-turner and an intense, generous-hearted family saga.

  • Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times bestselling “enduring masterpiece” (The Atlantic) about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples

    Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship.

    This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women.

  • From 1966 to 1980, Damon Knight created the Orbit series of anthologies, representing the finest writing in the science fiction genre. Nineteen of Kate Wilhelm's stories were included in this series of twenty-one volumes. Among these are "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," an exploration of infertility and cloning in the aftermath of global environmental collapse. It won the Locus, Jupiter, and Hugo awards for Best Novel in 1977. "The Planners" reaches into the moral conflicts of a primate researcher and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1968. Other stories include a road trip into a woman's psyche; primal fears through the eyes of a wise and empathetic alien; an encounter in a bus depot during a raging winter storm; and the first "interactive" reality TV show. Ms. Wilhelm's stories are prophetic yet as recognizable as a story in this morning's paper.

  • Nora Silk doesn't really fit in on Hemlock Street, where every house looks the same. She's divorced. She wears a charm bracelet and high heels and red toreador pants. And the way she raises her kids is a scandal. But as time passes, the neighbors start having second thoughts about Nora. The women's apprehension evolves into admiration. The men's lust evolves into awe. The children are drawn to her in ways they can't explain. And everyone on this little street in 1959 Long Island seems to sense the possibilities and perils of a different kind of future when they look at Nora Silk.

    This extraordinary novel by the author of The River King and Local Girls takes us back to a time when the exotic both terrified and intrigued us, and despite our most desperate attempts, our passions and secrets remained as stubbornly alive as the weeds in our well-trimmed lawns. 

  • With "incantatory prose" that "sweeps over the reader like a dream" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

    In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

    These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

    From the writer that Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart" comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

  • As St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold knows firsthand, the grueling hours and demands of Big Law take their toll on young lawyers. Some turn to drugs, some quit the profession, and occasionally one quits altogether. According to the medical examiner, Sari Bashir quit altogether that Thursday night when she fell to her death from the eighth floor of the downtown garage where she parked her car.

    The police ruled her death a suicide. Stanley Plotkin, however, rules it a homicide. Stanley is the weird mail-room clerk at Sari's law firm, but he is also a genius. Among his obsessions is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a massive compilation that correlates hundreds of facial muscle actions with specific emotions and mental states. For someone like Stanley, whose Asperger's syndrome renders him incapable of intuiting emotions from facial expressions, his mastery of FACS has caused him to conclude that Sari did not kill herself.

    Rachel was close with Sari, who worked for her during law school. She also knows Stanley—and his quirkiness and genius—because their mothers are friends. Thus when Stanley announces his conclusion to Rachel as she drives him home from Sari's memorial service, she can't simply dismiss it. And when Sari's father pleads with Rachel to review the police file on his daughter's suicide, she reluctantly starts down a path that will lead into the heart of a dark criminal enterprise in which Sari was simply collateral damage.

  • Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon—these are our guides through the Wastelands.

    From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.

    Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction—including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King—Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.

    Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.

  • In this classic crime novel and hypnotic thriller, a panic-stricken young wife races against time to prove that her convicted husband did not murder his mistress. Writing in first person from the wife’s viewpoint, Woolrich evokes her love and anguish and, finally, desperation as she becomes an avenging angel in her attempt to rescue her husband from execution.
  • From New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick comes a beautiful novel of sisterhood lost and found—and of the ways we create the rich tapestries that encompass the past and the future.

    The economic downturn has hit New Bern, Connecticut, and Tessa Woodruff’s herbal apothecary shop, For the Love of Lavender, is suffering. So is her once-happy thirty-four-year marriage to Lee. They’d given up everything to come back to New Bern from Boston and start their business, but now they’re wondering if they made the right decision. To relieve the strain, Tessa signs up for a quilting class at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, and to her surprise, rediscovers the power of sisterhood—along with the childhood friend she thought she’d lost forever.

    Madelyn Beecher left New Bern twenty years ago and never looked back. But when her husband is convicted of running a Ponzi scheme and she’s left with nothing but her late grandmother’s cottage, she is forced to return to the town she fled. Unfortunately, the cottage is in terrible shape. Madelyn’s only hope is to transform it into an inn. But to succeed, she’ll need the help of her fellow quilters, including the one friend she never thought she’d see again—or forgive. Now Madelyn and Tessa will have to relive old memories, forge new ones, and realize it’s possible to start over, one stitch at a time—as long as you’re surrounded by friends.

  • A hero without peer or scruples, Sam Gunn has a nose for trouble, money, and women, though not necessarily in that order. A man with the ego (and stature) of a Napoleon, the business acumen of a P. T. Barnum, and the raging hormones of a teenage boy, Sam is the finest astronaut NASA ever trained and dumped. But more than money, more than women, Sam Gunn loves justice—and he really does love money and women. Whether he’s suing the pope, helping twin sisters entangled in the virtual sex trade, or on trial for his life, charged with interplanetary genocide, you can be sure of one thing: this is one space jockey who’ll meet every challenge with a smile on his lips, an ace up his sleeve, and a weapon in his pocket.

    Now, for the first time in one volume, Hugo-winner Ben Bova presents all the tales of Sam Gunn to date, including three never before collected in book form. Here is the entire chronicle of Sam Gunn, trailblazer and scoundrel, as he scams his way from one end of the solar system to the other, giving bold new meaning to the term venture capitalist.

  • Charon was the most ruthless—and brilliant—criminal of the twenty-first century, a practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. He is dead now, and General Thomas Wharington believes his team of experts has deleted all the electronic copies that the megalomaniacal inventor created of himself. However, one major problem remains: Alpha, the only android survivor of Charon’s cybernetic empire.

    Outwardly indistinguishable from a human woman, Alpha has superhuman strength and speed, and perhaps even more deadly capabilities still unknown. Thomas’ superiors want her dismantled and studied, but to Wharington, it feels like murder. He stalls for time, a move that could prove disastrous. Alpha escapes from an escape-proof compound, kidnaps Wharington, and takes him to one of Charon’s hidden installations. Charon might be dead, but Alpha continues to carry out her late master’s orders, and she refuses to elaborate on what those orders entail.

    Meanwhile, her behavior is becoming more human, or so it seems. Is she developing emotions and a conscience, or is she just learning to counterfeit them as a means of carrying out her enigmatic orders? And do those orders include Wharington’s death sentence?

  • Engineered from the finest genes and trained to be a secret courier in a future world, Friday operates over a near-future Earth, where chaos reigns. North America has become Balkanized into dozens of independent states, sharing only a bizarrely vulgarized culture. Now, Friday finds herself on shuttlecock assignment at the seemingly whimsical behest of her secret employer, known to her only as "Boss." Traveling from New Zealand to Canada, from one new state of America's disunion to the next, she is confronted with a series of professional as well as personal crises that put her to the test. She must findquick, expeditious solutions as one calamity after another threatens to explode in her face.

    Not since Valentine Michael Smith, hero of Stranger in a Strange Land, has Heinlein created a more captivating protagonist. Fridayproves once again why Henlein's novels have sold millions of copies, won countless awards, and earned him the title of Grand Master of Science Fiction.

  • When a shipwrecked stranger washed up on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton's home, she was unaware that he was something more than human. He said his name was Turner Pascal—but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. This man only held the remainder of Pascal's consciousness in a technologically enhanced humanoid body. He was, in fact, an experiment by the notorious criminal Charon, a practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. Charon has been secretly copying human minds into android brains, with plans to make his own army of slaves.

    On the run from this most ruthless criminal, Samantha and Turner seek help from Sunrise Alley, an underground organization of AIs and androids that have gone rogue. But these cybernetic outlaws are rumored to have their own hidden agenda—not necessarily congruent with humanity's welfare.

  • In the spirit of How to Make an American Quilt and The Joy Luck Club comes this novel about friendship and redemption.

    After the sudden loss of Stella, her only child, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle in Providence, Rhode Island. Seeking a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days, she little realizes that the circle will change her life.

    Alice, Scarlet, Lulu, Beth, Harriet, and Ellen welcome Mary into their circle despite her reluctance to open her heart to them. Each woman teaches Mary a new knitting technique, and, as they do, they reveal to her their own personal stories of loss, love, and hope. Eventually, through the hours they spend knitting and talking together, Mary is finally able to tell her own story of grief. In doing so, she reclaims her love for her husband, faces the hard truths about her relationship with her mother, and finds the spark of life again.