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By the age of 30, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a Paris garret had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her novels were outselling even Victor Hugo. Her enormous and radical corpus would grow to include 70 novels, travel writing, plays, autobiography and political writing. But despite this prodigious talent, Sand was simultaneously a figure of scandal. Cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women. Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy? Or did her sexual and emotional relationships form part of her dialogue with the world around her: a dialogue that’s intrinsic to writing itself? To what extent do we invent ourselves? And what can we learn, from Sand’s life and art?

Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate one May afternoon when a small white dog appears. The teenaged girl that had been staying nearby with the dog is nowhere to be found, and Jane decides to return it to his registered owner hours away in London, in the deepest backwaters of Hampstead. But when Jane arrives, she is immediately unsettled --- because she has a dark history with this house. Through the window, she catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman, not the missing girl she’d hoped to find. Facing a crossroads similar to the one that first led her to this home 25 years ago, Jane knows that the house holds the key --- to the missing teenager, to the lost dog, and to dark secrets they’d all rather leave buried.

Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighborhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She’s decided to put down roots with Blue, the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with. But little doubts about her perfect new life start to grow, and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn’t, Frankie’s concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: help me. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused “cat cam” collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbors and the secrets they’re hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep.

In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government’s work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one. Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as “scavengers” and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in THE HOUSEWIVES UNDERGROUND, Kaitlyn Tiffany takes readers back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s --- a time when Americans’ belief in their government was eroding --- introducing readers to the so-called housewives who asked the first, hardest questions about one of the most shocking events in American history.

Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém --- a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue. The mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and --- most lethal of all --- a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined.

When a widowed Lucy Cooper returns to the Cooper estate to grieve her estranged father, she discovers catastrophe: The property is mired in debt she canʼt repay, and Ben Ressler has unexpectedly turned up on her doorstep. As a teenager, Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing nearby at the Peabody estate. Now, after a fatal accident ended his NFL career, Ben has returned to live quietly in the Peabodys’ caretaker lodge. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive. As Lucy reconstructs her father’s troubling final days, she uncovers his research on pirate treasure and the winter of 1717. This history offers Lucy a way to heal from the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn reveals someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.

Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state --- one with proprietary AI implanted in his head --- from California to the East Coast. Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember. Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.

In these seven powerful stories, Aamina Ahmad finds a world of pathos in the narrowest circumstances, from the fugitive intimacies of villages where nothing escapes notice to the crevices where city dwellers seek refuge from urban striving and indifference. JULY SUN captures  the plight of ordinary people caught between love and duty, freedom and social constraint --- a man who witnesses an illicit moment of tenderness, a police officer who must choose whether to follow the laws of God or of man, a woman who takes matters into her own hands in the face of an unexpected pregnancy.

Siblings Allison and Luke have been through a lot together. They’ve always stood by each other. They’d do anything for each other. Or so it seems. When Allison’s husband, Finley, is murdered, the investigation threatens to expose the siblings’ darkest secrets. An illicit affair. A decades-old accident. A stunning deception. How do these events explain Finley’s death? How far will Allison and Luke go to keep their secrets buried? And can the siblings even trust one another anymore? As the investigation winds tighter and past and present collide, the most shocking betrayal might lie a little too close to home.

Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children --- and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous. As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created --- and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?

When Josie King left Las Vegas in the '90s, she never looked back. The daughter of gambling mogul Roy King, she’s been living a quiet life in LA as an accountant and a single mom when she finds herself summoned back to Sin City. Now, 15 years later, her father has died unexpectedly, and Josie’s siblings are already gathered for the reading of his will...only to discover that in order to inherit they must spend three years working together at the notorious family casino. Josie’s pride won’t let her walk away from the family empire again, so she agrees to take charge of the casino’s finances. She quickly discovers that while Roy King was once the most powerful man in Vegas, times have changed. Las Vegas is more dangerous than ever, but Josie knows that to save the family business she’ll have to wade in deeper.

Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on. Told in colliding voices --- children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible --- THE SUMMER OF THE SERPENT is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood.

June 1975. Maggie Bishop has just graduated high school, the future hers to embrace --- but she’s still reeling from the death of her older brother, Chip. A devastating diagnosis the summer before prompted Chip to leave home for a few months, never revealing where he went. Maggie’s search for clues leads her to The Red Maple Inn, a mountaintop resort in the Poconos. At the Red Maple, Maggie is welcomed into a tight-knit community. As she unravels secrets about her brother’s final days, she begins to connect with the people he loved, and whose lives he touched. Through the warmth of strangers, Maggie begins to heal and is able to help others cope with loss.

Edison Bixby is wealthy, handsome and, due to a traumatic brain injury, impulsively rude. He’s also a brilliant insurance investigator who solves baffling crimes by figuring out how the design of the man-made world around us makes them possible. Enter Wally Nash: a struggling actor hired to keep Bixby from offending everyone he meets. Their first case together looks like a simple accident. Caroline Crowley took a nasty fall down a staircase at a shopping mall in front of dozens of witnesses. Video clearly shows the deadly misstep. But Bixby is certain she was murdered by design, subtly manipulated into causing her own demise. The mall itself made the crime intentional, if not inevitable. Now Bixby must prove his outrageous theory before a very cunning killer gets others on his hit list.

Kate, consultant for the University of Virginia, is tasked with interviewing six-year-old Henley about the girl’s alleged past-life recollections. 24 years ago, Kate’s friend Becca McGuire vanished from her bunk at a now-shuttered summer camp and was never seen again. But the mystery of her disappearance is only deepening. Because Henley’s memories of her “other life” are ones that could only belong to Becca. For Kate, Henley’s recurring, suffocating nightmares and her disturbing illustrations of places she has never been, seem to spell out the unbelievable. Somewhere, somehow, the truth about what really happened to Becca is locked inside this little girl. As Henley’s uncanny memories surface, so do old secrets --- each one drawing Kate inexorably back to that terrible long-ago summer by the lake.

When four ride-or-die friends reunite for a getaway, they’re desperate for a break. Marie feels like an impostor teaching “How to Say No” seminars while her marriage falls apart. Brooke’s motherhood is proving out of reach. Lucy’s dream career has broken her spirit. And Collins feels trapped in grief by her late husband’s legacy. Now, at a breaking point, they make a pact: Quit. And help each other through the fallout. A husband gets a much-needed wake-up call. A singles retreat is a widow’s perfect escape. A very public career exit becomes a never-too-late return to college. And a childless life becomes a bold new plan to travel the world. But letting go will be more complicated than they imagined. Confronting hard truths about love, loss and starting over, these four women must discover what’s worth fighting for.

Recently returned from his last case in Ireland, elite forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Dr. Alexander Gregory receives a call from the French police he can't ignore. It's Paris Fashion Week, and some of the world's most beautiful women are turning up dead --- each killed in a frenzy, their faces slashed as the world's press looks on. Amid the carnage, one victim survives --- but she's too traumatized to speak. Without her testimony, the police are powerless to stop the killer before he strikes again. Can Gregory unlock the secrets buried in her mind before it's too late?

Meet Puck: the nonbinary, 30-year-old mastermind behind "Homewreckers," a dating show that puts troubled couples through hell. Used to being the one pulling the strings, it shocks Puck when their life undergoes a plot twist of its own and their college roommate Mia announces her engagement to her ex’s best friend, Damon. When they arrive for a week of wedding festivities at an upscale resort in the Appalachian forest, Puck immediately sees that Mia’s marriage will lead to misery, and takes it upon themself to save their friends by rearranging the couples --- without anyone finding out. But as Puck comes up against a type-A maid of honor hell-bent on making this wedding happen, it becomes clear that they will have to deliver the greatest stunt of their career. If only they can take their eyes off the bridesmaid. After all, the course of true love never did run smooth.

After a failed relationship and an unsettled teaching career, Sara Barlow returns to her childhood home in Arlington, Virginia, hoping for a fresh start. But when she applies for a job at her old high school, a chance glimpse into the gymnasium shakes her to the core --- she spots the man she suspects was involved in a classmate’s violent death a decade earlier. Haunted by the past, Sara confronts the memories she’s spent years trying to suppress: her sister Suzanne’s fatal car crash, her secret summer with the reckless Devlin Barrie and the anonymous 911 call she made after witnessing what she believes was a murder. As the construction of Interstate 66 physically fractures her community, Sara grapples with emotional fault lines of her own --- guilt, silence and buried truth.

In 1957, newly orphaned Aria Jones is sent to live with her aunt, a fading star who hides away in Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont. But the Marmont isn’t meant for small girls with big hearts, and Aria’s first few nights reveal an insidious secret that continues to haunt her as she grows up in the hotel’s halls. If Aria can just stay invisible and invite no trouble as she saves money, then she can leave the Marmont and live life on her own terms. Her carefully laid plans fall apart when the hotel is bought by Theo Winchester, a reclusive rock star turned unexpected caretaker of his daughter, Adele. To earn the last bit of money she needs to escape, Aria becomes Adele’s tutor, which brings Aria closer to Theo and ignites a passion she never expected.

Brandon is a hopeless romantic. So when a handsome stranger named Jon checks in at the hotel he works at and invites Brandon to his room, Brandon ignores the advice of his crew and accepts. What follows is a tale as old as time: they hook up, Jon promises to text, Brandon falls in love and Jon ghosts. When Jon checks out early, leaving behind a bag of belongings and his cellphone, Brandon takes the phone and sets out to find him, thinking that this must at last be his Cinderella story. But he gets more than he bargained for when he witnesses a murder and sees Jon fleeing the scene. Brandon, Ollie, Nicole and Ian decide to solve the mystery of the murder and uncover Jon's true identity…they just have to figure it out before a target falls on their own backs.

Sandwiched between caring for her mother and rebuilding the relationship with her estranged daughter, Emma, Rosie Lucas’s life is full. In the best way. With Emma and her three-year old daughter, Olive, back home, Rosie has a chance to fix the past. What she doesn’t have time for is a romantic relationship. And even if she did, Andrew Morgan is the last person she’d choose. Still as an irresistible flirtation builds between them, he becomes her unexpected confidante on the distance Rosie can’t seem to overcome with Emma. Emma isn’t proud of her past. But she’s pulled herself up by the bootstraps, caring for her own daughter, and protecting her mom at all costs. But some secrets refuse to stay buried, and sometimes the truth is more shocking than fiction. Rosie and Emma will have to navigate an unimaginable path forward. Together. 

Dahlia Delaney’s marriage just imploded, her friend group picked a side (not hers), and her fancy San Francisco life now fits into a single suitcase. Armed with one blurry childhood memory of her abuela’s garden, Dahlia impulsively hops on a flight to Valencia, Spain, to reconnect with distant family --- and maybe herself. But Valencia isn’t just sunny plazas and sangria. There’s her chaotic new job at a quirky expat bar, a family she barely knows but who embrace her like she’s always belonged, and a brooding American bar owner who’s frustratingly attractive and entirely too familiar. As Dahlia stumbles through language mishaps, clashing cultures, and late-night paella with new friends, she begins to realize that the fresh start she came for might turn into something even better --- if she can let go of the life she planned and embrace the one unfolding around her.

Mia Daoud yearns to be free. Growing up in socially conservative Morocco, her imagination fired by her banker father’s charisma and political idealism, her doctor mother’s feminist example and social conscience, and the boundless possibilities suggested by her favorite authors, she learns to go after what she wants, even if it means jumping through fire to get it. Determined to be true to her sexuality and to differentiate herself from her adoring younger sister, she sets out in search of her place in the world --- from Casablanca to Paris to London, and against the backdrop of era-defining events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, guided by a preternatural sense of justice and an unerring instinct for what makes her feel most alive.

Summer, 1969. Eleanor she might not remember how to sing or play guitar soon, so why not join the music festivals sweeping the country? Except Eleanor forgets to tell anyone where she's going. When her daughter, Leanne, discovers her mother missing, she enlists the help of her own daughter, Nora, to help her find Eleanor. The last thing Nora wants to do is hit the road. But then Nora hears her grandmother on the radio --- singing. Nora and Leanne hop in their Lincoln Continental for a cross-country road trip, always one step behind Eleanor, who has been dubbed the Dame of Rock n' Roll by none other than Johnny Carson.