Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger. Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress.

When barrister Gabriel Ward steps out of his rooms at exactly two minutes to seven on a sunny May morning in 1901, his mind is so full of his latest case—the disputed authorship of bestselling children’s book Millie the Temple Church Mouse—that he scarcely registers the body of the Lord Chief Justice of England on his doorstep. But even he cannot fail to notice the judge’s dusty bare feet, in shocking contrast to his flawless evening dress, nor the silver carving knife sticking out of his chest.

Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

1914, Fiji: 25-year-old Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise—or, as he calls it, “this godforsaken island.” After a promising start to his police career in his native India and Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of getting back to Hong Kong. When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream “kidnapping,” the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case.

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.

A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.

Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There's a Kinga for every day: on Mondays, you can catch Kinga A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. Kingas A-G, perhaps unsurprisingly, live a varied life—between them is a professional matchmaker, a scent-crazed perfumer and a window cleaner, all with varying degrees of apathy, anger, introversion and bossiness. At least three of them are Team Toxic.

For almost five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, standing as the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. With the risk of nuclear annihilation too high for physical combat, conflict was reserved for the psychological sphere. No one understood this battle of hearts, minds, and intellects more clearly than Bucharest-born George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA books program.” This initiative aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

Estella Ecker has returned to Rockfall House, the last place on earth she wants to be. Years after she ran away from her overbearing father, she has been forced back home to walk in his footsteps, teaching at the college he dominated and living in the fabulous home where he entertained artists and scholars for decades—and perhaps she owns it now, because her mercurial mother has disappeared. At the center of everything—the whispers, the rumors, the secrets—is her father’s library of rare books, which she had been forbidden to touch while he was alive to stop her.

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.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.

Growing up Black in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian’s life is already mapped out. But Ray has a gift and a dream—he’s determined to become a world-class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way. Not his mother, who wants him to stop making such a racket; not the fact that he can’t afford a violin suitable to his talents; not even the racism inherent in the world of classical music.

It's 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it's clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.

If you ask Jill Tingley, she'll tell you she and her husband Jack are college sweethearts living the dream in Southern California. Newly empty nesting with their daughter Maggie away at college, Jill suggests a road trip to reconnect. Jack would rather do anything else than drive to Utah with his wife. He's only stayed in this marriage because of a shared secret, a tragedy in the past he wanted to keep buried. But Jack is finished with the charade of his marriage. He's filing for divorce as soon as they return, no matter what. But he doesn't realize what else Jill is hiding.