Maggie Mae Wheeler is content with her life. At 30, she has grand plans for her vintage record shop in the charming Midwestern town where she grew up, and is soon to be engaged to her childhood best friend. But when she discovers a letter she wrote to herself at thirteen, being content doesn’t feel like enough anymore—Maggie needs answers to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Since losing her parents, the only family she has ever known, Maggie decides that finding her birth mother is the best place to start.

After her sister Nena’s sudden death, Xiomara, an Afro-Latina singer and actress born and raised in Washington Heights, is numb. With her sister gone, Xiomara, painfully close to thirty, is living in a tiny apartment with her ultra-Catholic Puerto Rican mother, and having the same shitty sex with the same shitty men that she’s been entertaining for years. Behind on rent despite two minimum-wage jobs, one of which involves singing show tunes while serving pancakes to tourists at Ellen’s Stardust Diner, Xiomara is bitingly cynical, especially in her grief, and barely treading water.

Frida and Gabriel arrive seeking a fresh start at the stunning Ara Hotel in the secluded desert of Escalante, Utah. Once so close they were able to finish each other’s sentences, they’ve grown apart in recent years after a sudden, unspeakable tragedy. Now, at the luxe resort, they are ready to reconnect between dips in the pool and hikes on spectacular desert trails. It all feels like paradise—until the dead body of a beautiful young woman who was vacationing at the Ara with her powerful, much older husband is discovered.

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.

Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They’re well-adjusted women with impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. So it’s with great anticipation that three generations of Fishers gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday. But when Patrick’s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, no one is prepared for the shockwaves it sends.

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.

When four influential members are poisoned at London’s most exclusive private club, a young waitress is arrested. Her personal life and upbringing are dissected, and theories and perceptions about her spiral out of control. After the murder accusation, five men begin to question how well they really knew her. To each of them—her father, a reporter, her former lover, her friend, and her lawyer—she is someone entirely different. But which is the true face of Katherine Cole? And is she a killer?

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.

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.

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.

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. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

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.

All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel. The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.

Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.