Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend.

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.

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank.

Equal parts funny and tender, What Will People Think? is a heart-bursting exploration of what it means to discover and embrace the hidden parts of yourself, and how love in all forms can make you whole.

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.

Bo is running out of time. Yet time is one of the few things he’s got left. These days, his quiet existence is broken up only by daily visits from his home care team. Fortunately, he still has his beloved elkhound Sixten to keep him company … though now his son, with whom Bo has had a rocky relationship, insists upon taking the dog away, claiming that Bo has grown too old to properly care for him. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotion, leading Bo to take stock of his life, his relationships, and the imperfect way he’s expressed his love over the years.

Honor seems to have everything: she adores her bright and beautiful daughter, Chloe, and her charming, handsome husband, Tom, even if he works one hundred hours a week. Yet Honor’s longing for another baby threatens to eclipse all of it―until a shocking event changes their lives forever. Years later, Tom makes a decision that ripples through their families' lives in ways he could never have foreseen.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...