Coming Soon

Russell Calloway’s best friend, Washington Lee, was the least likely monogamist of Russell’s acquaintances, but Washington somehow has become a model husband and father over the years. The celebration of Washington’s 35th wedding anniversary at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the COVID-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval --- frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact --- the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they never could have anticipated as fatal consequences ensue.

Huddled in an all-night diner over coffee and pancakes, a lonely middle-aged mom, an injured baseball pro, an elusive retiree and a young waitress examine the thoughts that plague them in the middle of the night. Within a few restless months, the group of strangers have become a fragile family. And when one of them goes missing in the dead of night, they’re thrust into a propulsive mystery. Though ill-prepared and unequipped for the job, they begin to piece together the clues left behind. In chasing down answers, they uncover a reason for their friend’s disappearance and are forced to wrestle with the question of how well you can really know anyone --- and once you do, how much you are willing to risk to save them...and, in doing so, save yourself.

Eddie Wilkens is a workaholic house painter. His wife has left him to her regret, and his main employee, Houston, is a loafer and scoundrel who barely shows up for work. Eddie is a thoughtful man who rarely gets angry, but he is ruled by a guilt that he has carried for nearly 20 years. Next door, a woman and her two sons move in with her frail and aging mother. The youngest boy, eight-year-old Russell, is quiet and small for his age and lives in constant terror of his increasingly lost and troubled 15-year-old brother, Curtis. As their mother struggles to keep the family together and the grandmother’s health begins to falter, they find themselves unable to protect Russell and themselves from Curtis’ cruelty, which threatens to explode in frenetic violence. Though neither knows it, Russell and Eddie will become each other’s saving grace.

On September 3, 1970, the New York City Marathon was run for the first time. One hundred twenty-seven runners paid a $1 entry fee. Only one woman competed. Fifty-four years later, nearly 50,000 runners finished the same race. Nearly half were women. More than three times as many runners applied, and over two million spectators watched. Today, runners from all over the world run the NYC Marathon and many others like it. Marathons are inclusive, fully global and still exploding in popularity. How did we get from there to here? As Martin Dugard explains, it was thanks to four very special runners who changed the way America --- and the world --- saw running: Frank Shorter, Steve Prefontaine, Joan Benoit Samuelson and Grete Waitz.

Julia Merchaud’s beloved historical drama, “A Patchwork Life,” revived her acting career. But her happiness turns to dismay when she learns that the hit show will have only one more season. Inspiration comes after a conversation with Summer Sullivan, one of the expert quilters who helped Julia prepare for her role. When Summer confides that Elm Creek Quilt Camp is in financial trouble, Julia concocts a brilliant plan that will help the Elm Creek Quilters and herself. Julia sets about persuading the cast and crew to join her for what she promises will be a marvelous week at a luxurious 19th-century mansion. Secretly, she hopes the bonding experience will convince them to sign on for another few seasons. But after several joyful days of quilting and camaraderie, Julia’s scheme takes an unexpected turn.

In 1998, desperate loneliness pushes preteen Amber to ignore the misgivings of her family, particularly her younger sister, when she befriends the troubled new kid in the neighborhood --- a boy with dead eyes, a fascination with fire, and no remorse. Their turbulent relationship is brief but creates lasting consequences. Twenty-two years later, in 2020, he resurfaces to kill Amber’s parents, and is in turn betrayed by his accomplice and killed in Amber's childhood home. After the deaths, Amber inherits the house and, in an effort to save money, moves in with her husband and two children, hoping to reclaim some sense of stability in the grief and chaos surrounding her. Instead, she finds that the familiar walls are haunted by more than just bitter memories and lockdown stress.

Between their busy lives and their far-flung residences, the Mother-Daughter Book Club --- four longtime college friends and their five daughters --- more often discuss the books on their nightstands via 2am texts than in-person meetings. And maybe it’s just as well, after what happened at their last get-together. So it’s an emotional reunion when they finally gather again, this time on the spectacular shores of Italy’s Lake Como. Sightseeing excursions, reminiscing fueled by “Como-politans,” and a hint of vacation romance all build toward the book club’s trademark “Night of Secrets.” These friends, and sometime rivals, are close readers --- of novels, memoirs, and each other. But as the years and the distance cast shadows and doubt, confidences and sympathies turn into surprising revelations.

Indian American author Manil Suri grew up in a large crumbling apartment in Bombay (now Mumbai) which his parents, who were Hindu, shared with three Muslim families. Their single room, at times a refuge from the religious and territorial tensions pervading the apartment, was also a prison that held them captive. At age 20, Suri managed to break free and come to the US, where he finally found the freedom to embrace his sexuality and find a life partner. But the room, which still held his parents hostage, kept wrenching him back to Bombay. Eventually it was only his mother, Prem, left, who had staked all her happiness on her son but was unable to escape the room’s hold on her. When a rash of mysterious incidents seemed to beset the room, Suri realized how little time he had left to convince Prem that a happier life might await beyond the four walls that both enthralled and imprisoned her.

In April 1912, 23-year-old Lady Victoria Oldbrooke is traveling with her beloved father from England on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. But when the ship strikes an iceberg, and lifeboats are lowered with women and children first, Lord Alfred gives his place to another, and they are separated. Before he goes down with the ship, he asks his friend Bert Banning, a mill owner from Manchester, to promise he’ll marry his daughter and care for her. Devastated by the loss of Lord Alfred, Victoria and Bert take comfort in their growing friendship. Cruelly shunned by everyone she knows, even family friends, she marries Bert and moves to his home in Manchester. Isolated from her familiar universe and peers, and fascinated by Bert’s business, Victoria learns all she can about it. When he meets a tragic end, in spite of opposition from all sides, she steps into his shoes and applies everything she learned.

Five years after the death of his youngest brother, Dan Moran is now the published trans author of the autofictional novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is teaching fiction in Brooklyn and working on his next book when a mysterious envelope arrives for him in the mail. Addressed to the wrong name, it includes a childhood photo of his deceased brother. Against his better judgment, Dan returns to his childhood home on the eve of his brother’s memorial dinner. His estranged family is surprised to see him, but he ignores them. He searches for a constellation of unidentified women who may have been involved with his brother, all while being mistaken for another man. He hopes his investigation will reveal exactly who he was to his brother, but what he discovers is the irrevocable distance between who we are and how we are perceived.

Beekeeper Jake Stevenson should be celebrating. His honey farm has been inundated with orders. Instead, Jake is worried. He can’t seem to hire anyone and there’s no way he can do it all by himself, no matter how adept he’s become at maneuvering among the beehives in his wheelchair. Meanwhile Flaco López, a young migrant from Mexico, is lost when he stumbles upon Jake’s beehives in a high alpine meadow. As Flaco takes refuge on Jake’s farm, they begin to form a tentative friendship. Then a local rabble rouser begins to rally support to build a commercial hunting camp that would destroy Mount Hood’s pristine wilderness --- the home of Jake’s honeybees and Abigail’s beloved bumblebees. And Jake, Abigail and Flaco must come together to protect everything they hold dear. 

At 26, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in. No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself. But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.

Christmas, 1857. After her abolitionist husband is murdered in the lawless Kansas Territory, Lidie Newton returns, in mourning, to her hometown of Quincy, Illinois. But her sisters have little comfort to offer, and Lidie is haunted by the memories of her failures --- until she takes an interest in her niece, Annie. Beautiful, self-assured and mischievous, Annie becomes an actress at the local theater, and when she is offered the opportunity to perform abroad, she decides to run away. But travel is dangerous for a young unmarried woman, so Lidie, armed with her pistol and her wit, goes with her. The two women embark on a perilous journey across the Atlantic, rushing toward an unknown future in England. Annie takes a stage name and finds her way to a career, while Lidie becomes her ladies' maid. But will either of them be content with her new lot in life?

In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is 81 years old. She's lived on her idyllic street, Kenny Lane, for 60 years --- longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else's business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past that she has worked exceedingly hard at concealing. Because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end. When a new little girl (talkative, curious, nosy) moves into the neighborhood and stops at nothing to befriend Elsie, her carefully-constructed life threatens to come crashing down as the secrets in Elsie's past start coming to light. Who was "Mad Mabel" 50 years ago? Who is Elsie Fitzpatrick today? And if the past has a habit of repeating itself, who has the most to lose?

NO WAY HOME tells the haunting story of Terrence Tully, an LA medical resident who is abruptly informed that his mother has died. Arriving at her home in a forlorn Nevada desert town, the naive doctor finds himself “like a swimmer caught in a riptide,” drawn into a love triangle involving the manipulative, margarita–swilling receptionist Bethany and her ex–boyfriend Jesse, a vengeful middle–school teacher cocksure about his sexual prowess. There is indeed no way home for Tully, who cannot extricate himself from this aimless, post–twenty–something world where motorcycle races and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex and recreational highs. Is retribution, Boyle asks, a natural human instinct? Can sexual jealousy bring on a level of vengeance that is downright pathological?

When a reclusive man is found dead under grisly circumstances in the Colorado wilderness, CBI Agent Frankie Cash and Eagle County Sheriff Jim Colcord, whom we met in EXTINCTION, team up again on their most enigmatic and dangerous case yet. Their investigation uncovers a trail of bizarre killings, baffling money transfers and a fanatical secret society. And all the while, the resurrected Neanderthals, who vanished into the Colorado mountains, seem to be biding their time for something…spectacular.

Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they have been stealing away from their respective lives, leaving no trace of their relationship behind. Their time together is always excruciatingly sweet and all too short. Until one day they wake up in an apartment neither of them recognizes, with no memory of how they got there. They find themselves in a new, unnamed city, a self-contained sanctuary where adulterers live openly as couples. Here there are fountains and old town squares and perfect cafes with checkered tablecloths. Ripe fruits wait on the counter each morning, invisible threads bind each lover to the other, and their primary responsibility is to enjoy one another. Contact with the real world is impossible and the city’s whims are mysterious --- but now those stolen afternoons never have to end.

After its proxies are devastated and its offensive capability pummeled in the latest war in the middle east, a rogue group of Iranian regime officials create a brazen plot to strike back at their hated enemies once and for all. They envision a series of operational dominos culminating in a devastating attack, and the first step is the assassination of the Israeli prime minister.  And there’s only one assassin with the skills to pull it off: Abdul Rahman, known in the shadows as the Ghost. The only Operator who can hunt him down is the man who stopped him before: Pike Logan. The Ghost may hold the key to an escalation that will upend the worldwide balance of power, and if Pike fails, the fallout won’t just be personal --- it’ll be global.

Franz Escher is waiting for the electrician. His power outlet has a loose connection. To pass the time, he buries himself in a book about a Mafia key witness named Elio Russo. Elio is in jail, awaiting release. He has betrayed so many people that he fears for his life. Unable to sleep, he lies awake at night reading a book about a man named Franz Escher who's waiting for the electrician. His power outlet has a loose connection. In SHORT CIRCUIT, a dazzling display of literary pyrotechnics styled after one of M. C. Escher’s impossible drawings, two different stories gradually intertwine to solve each other. It is a brilliant, inventive detective novel that becomes an electrifying show of sparks culminating in one final short circuit.

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the English Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, nearly three hours later, all but two of the migrants had died, the worst single loss of life ever to occur in the Channel. Vincent Delecroix’s acclaimed SMALL BOAT is a fictional first-person account of the French navy officer who took the migrants’ calls --- and her attempts to justify the indefensible. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster, than the crises behind these tragedies. What unfolds is a gripping, thought-provoking examination of the darkest threat to our humanity.

Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia --- dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings --- has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. In these pieces, and in her inimitable first-person voice, at once intimate and wide-ranging, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She traces her journey across the country in search of love and work and belonging --- her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation --- and offers insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.

EXCITING OPPORTUNITY: Caretaker urgently needed. Three days of work. Competitive pay. Serious applicants ONLY. Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting grabbed her attention. It had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all --- vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she's not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for. Besides, it’s only three days’ work. Three days, cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness. What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property—and Macy Mullins just might be the only thing standing between it and the rest of humanity.

Montana, 1935. Bludgeoned and buried alive by his bank-robbing partner and half brother, Benjamin Kilt should have been a corpse. But now very much on this side of heaven, Kilt’s quest for revenge will be unlike anything the West has ever seen. Kilt is joined on his journey by Bonnie, a 13-year-old Indigenous girl he somewhat reluctantly rescues from her abusive “keeper.” It is through Bonnie’s recollections in old age of Kilt’s thorny quest for justice that Dane Bahr’s masterful tale unwinds, showcasing the tragic, complicated history of the two brothers and leading to a showdown at the very ranch where they were raised.

In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie. Jumping into a Star Eater's mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them --- the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real. But Ro's certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them. To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.