In the void of space, alien creatures puppet dead flesh through darkened corridors. A simple date becomes a dance with a shapeshifting horror, while shadow creatures stalk forgotten towns. And in quiet suburban homes, doors to nightmare realms appear in ordinary basements.

Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. Lena lands in Naxos with her best friend in tow for the unveiling of her son's pet project—the luxurious Agape Villas. Years of marriage amongst the wealthy elite has whittled Lena's spirit into rope and sinew, smothered by tasteful cocktail dresses and unending small talk.

A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.

Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind.

Keiko Furukura is thirty-six, and she has been happily working at a Tokyo “Smile Mart” for eighteen years, fitting in by copying her colleagues’ dress and mannerisms, playing the part of a “normal person” excellently—more or less. But her packaged idyll is threatened by mounting pressure to find a husband and a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action to protect her peaceful world.

How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future—as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus. Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler—until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate—until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform.

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit.

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.

When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home. They should have asked why the farm was for sale. Three years ago, a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon after, the girl’s mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs, the more stories she finds of women with a connection to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends.

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.

Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger sibling, Emmett, paralyzed by indecision and working in a shipping warehouse—who find themselves at their family home in Kentucky and upend each other’s lives in devastating ways.

Chloe Vance, dreamer of the family, needs to tell her pragmatic mom, Edie, that she has accepted a low-paying art instructor role at a Christian school in Prague. Her older sister, Lauren—the "responsible one"—is doing all she can to hide the fact she's been fired for a foolish mistake and is desperately seeking her next career move. Meanwhile, Edie, estranged from her own sister following their mother's recent death, is frankly in no mood for anything else to change.

The Ophelia is your typical billionaire yacht: ridiculously luxurious, owned by a ruthless money man, and staffed by a crew whose only job is to indulge the guests’ every wish. Model-gorgeous Sasha is a last-minute hire for a weeklong Atlantic crossing. She joins fellow stewardesses Jade, Imogen, Euphemia, and Lola. The Ophelia’s stewardesses are almost identical—blonde and model-gorgeous—and all were lured to the Ophelia by high wages and a chance to leave their problems behind when they set sail. But despite its sleek opulence, the Ophelia isn’t as heavenly as it seems.

Shaw Connolly is no stranger to trauma. As a fingerprints analyst, she’s one of the first on-site for crimes, including murder scenes and a mysterious string of arsons popping up throughout the rural Maine community her department serves. But the tragedy of her little sister’s disappearance sixteen years ago has always weighed on her the most; Thea is never far from her thoughts or dreams, and Shaw knows that her obsession with finding the truth about Thea is driving her husband away and impacting her two boys. Still, she can't let it go.