Good things happen at the lake. That’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and it’s true. Alice spent just one summer at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen—it’s where she took that photo, the one of three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat, the image that changed her life. Now Alice lives behind a lens. As a photographer, she’s most comfortable on the sidelines, letting other people shine. Lately though, she’s been itching for something more, and when Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice comes up with a plan for them both.
Nate Bargatze used to be a genius. That is, until the summer after seventh grade when he slipped, fell off a cliff, hit his head on a rock, and “my brain got, like, dented or something.” Before this accident, he dreamed of being “an electric engineer, or a brain doctor, or maybe a math person who does like, math things for a living.” Afterwards, a voice in his head told him, “It’s okay. You’re dumb now. All you got is standup.”* But the “math things’ industry’s loss is our gain because Nate went on to become one of today’s top-grossing comedians.
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up at dinner. At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues.
Dani Dorfman has somehow made it to her thirties without knowing what she wants to do with her life. So when an office romance ends poorly and gets her fired, she applies for a job in Amsterdam, idly dreaming of escaping the mess she’s created, but never imagining she’ll actually get it. Except she does. By the end of her first week in Amsterdam, she’s never felt more adrift or alone. Then she crashes her bike into her high school ex-boyfriend—and suddenly life is blooming with new opportunities.
In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, left pregnant and abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia Del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can’t contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at the San Francisco Examiner to hire her.
When her week begins, Rarity expects the biggest mystery she’ll need to solve is how a rare first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland ended up in her bookstore bathroom. But after book club member Shirley tells her that her husband George, who has dementia, is the prime suspect in a nursing home murder, Rarity feels as if she’s stepped through the looking glass.As someone who’s been given a second chance at life, Rarity wishes her friend Shirley a second chance at love. But Shirley has rebuffed her senior suitor Terrance out of loyalty to George.
Is love conditional? How do you navigate a relationship where someone’s best efforts are hurting you? When should you step away? These are some of the questions therapists and TikTok sensation KC Davis explores in Who Deserves Your Love. In writing that is both plainspoken and powerful, she explains how vulnerability, trauma, and personal history can be both the cause of and the solution to relationship struggles. KC offers explicit tools, including a priceless Decision Tree, to help you distinguish mistreatment from abuse, define your own values, and emotionally regulate in difficult situations.
Former correspondents E. and Henerey, accustomed to loving each other from afar, did not anticipate continuing their courtship in an enigmatic underwater city. When their journey through the Structure in E.’s garden strands them in a peculiar society preoccupied with the pleasures and perils of knowledge, E. and Henerey come to accept – and, more surprisingly still, embrace – the fact that they may never return home. A year and a half later, Sophy and Vyerin finally discover one of the elusive Entries that will help them seek their siblings.
When bookish Penny Collins reluctantly lets her sister drag her to an estate sale at a neighbor’s house, she’s hoping for a little diversion rummaging through dusty antiques. Instead she ends up in a public squabble over candlesticks with the deceased owner’s nephew, Anthony—right before a dead body tumbles out of a closet. Penny’s plan for the summer involved finalizing tenure at the university where she’s a computer sciences professor. Now she’s suddenly on the run with a man she barely knows, scaling walls, evading bullets, and accidentally stabbing henchmen.