When the stars align, anything can happen. On stage at an awards banquet is the last place Lexi Cole expected to drown. But as she accepts the award for top-seller at her realty firm, something unusual catches Lexi’s eye: aman surrounded by a dark haze. Then she hears a woman screaming for help, and the taste of saltwater overwhelms her. Just as Lexi’s throat begins to close, the man leaves the room and the sensation of drowning abruptly stops. Later that night, the man dies of an overdose, and Lexi learns about the traumatic boating accident that killed his sons and tore his family apart.
Every year Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to northern Maine where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much of their long friendship unspoken. Although the state has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that had simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worse-case scenario, folks in the capitol. But after two weeks hunting moose off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked to find a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road.
When thirty-year-old post-double-mastectomy BRCA 1 carrier and reluctant thrill-seeker Alison Mullally arrives at her ex-boyfriend Sam’s funeral to find that no one knows he dumped her, she agrees to play the grieving girlfriend for the sake of the family and pack up Sam’s apartment with his prickly best friend, Adam Berg. After all, it’ll only take four weekends . . But Adam doesn’t want Alison anywhere near him. Forced to spend long hours with the grump, and his monosyllabic demeanor, Alison decides she must put her people-pleasing abilities to the test.
Alex Marks’s move to New York City is supposed to be a fresh start. She plans to lay low with her mundane copywriting job but the news of the murder of her childhood hero, Francis Keen, throws her for a loop. Beloved staff writer and the woman behind the famous advice column, Dear Constance, Keen’s death is a shock to her countless fans and readers. When Alex sees an advertisement searching for her replacement, she impulsively applies. But almost immediately, she begins to receive strange letters at the office and soon, Alex wonders why the murderer has never been found.
Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both threw open the doors of the Holman House, their rambling home in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in choosing to further the experiment of communal living into a new generation.
Annie never much believed in love. That is, until meeting Mark. After crossing paths on morning commutes, they connect at a group counseling session for trauma survivors. Each recognizes something in the other, though both hide their own troubled pasts. It’s a whirlwind romance that propels Annie through their courtship, all the way to her wedding day. But as Annie stands at the altar, casting her eyes over the rows of well-wishers, she spots a stranger in the crowd, and she soon learns that her new life isn’t going to be the happily ever after that she had planned.
Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn’t allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother’s beautiful white horse. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers. After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known.
In November 2021, an obscure email from the California Department of Education landed in New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller’s inbox. The football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, a state-run school with only 168 high school students, was having an undefeated season. It was uplifting. During the pandemic’s gloom, it was a happy story. It was a sports story but not an ordinary one, built on the chemistry between a group of underestimated boys and their superhero advocate coach, Keith Adams, a deaf former athlete himself.
When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications. The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now. In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives.