"We'll choose to remain invisible. To everyone except each other . . . "Brought together by chance as teenagers at Turning Winds, a home for girls, Nora, Ozzie, Monica, and Grace quickly bond over their troubled pasts and form their own family, which they dub The Invisibles. With a fierce loyalty to each other, the girls feel that they can overcome any obstacle thrown their way. Though the walls they've built around themselves to keep out the rest of the world are thick, they discover one night, when tragedy strikes, that there are cracks in their tight-knit circle.While Ozzie, Monica, and Grace leave after graduation to forge a fresh start, Nora decides to stay behind in Willow Grove. Now, fifteen years later, she's content living a quiet, single life working in the local library and collecting "first lines"—her favorite opening lines from novels. But when Ozzie calls out of the blue to let her know Grace has attempted suicide and is desperate for them to reconvene, Nora is torn between elation at seeing the women who were once her most cherished, trusted friends and anxiety over the unresolved conflicts that will most certainly surface.As the women gather and reminisce, the truth about their lives comes to light. And when The Invisibles decide to take the road trip they always dreamed of, they will be forced to reveal their deepest secrets and confront the night that changed them forever.

The author of City of Refuge returns with a startling novel of race, violence, and identity. The year is 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he lives by his wits and earns money performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass—leader of the Virginia Harmonists, a minstrel troupe struggling to compete with dozens of similar ensembles—who senses that Henry's skill and magnetism could restore his show's sagging fortunes. The problem is that black performers are not allowed to appear onstage, even in Philadelphia. Together the two concoct a dangerous masquerade to protect Henry's identity, and he creates a sensation in his first appearances with the Harmonists. Yet even as the troupe's fortunes begin to improve, a brutal slave hunter named Tull Burton has been employed by Henry's former master to track down the runaway and retrieve him, dead or alive.A Free State is both a riveting chase novel and a searing parable of liberty and its costs. Charged with narrative tension and unforgettable characters, A Free State is a thrilling work by a novelist at the height of his powers.

Heaven to Betsy: Betsy Ray is loving every minute of freshman year at Deep Valley High—with new and old friends all around her . . . not to mention boys! But most intriguing of all is the one she and her best friend, Tacy, dub "the Tall Dark Stranger."Betsy in Spite of Herself: Betsy is at the center of every activity as a Deep Valley High sophomore—and suddenly, thanks to her old friend Tib, she's offered a golden opportunity for glorious transformation. But will she impress the special boy by becoming dramatic, mysterious Betsye—or would she be better off just being Betsy in spite of herself?

Bad Marie is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie's mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen's angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen's husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she's doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both Caitlin and Benoit Doniel. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be "bad".

Thirty years ago, Martin Owenby came to New York City with dreams of becoming a writer. Now his existence revolves around cheap Scotch and weekend flings with equally damaged men. When he learns that his older brother, Leon, has gone missing, he must return to the Owenby farm in Solace Fork, North Carolina, to assist in the search. But that means facing a past filled with regrets, the family that never understood him, the girl whose heart he broke, and the best friend who has faithfully kept the home fires burning. As the mystery surrounding Leon's disappearance deepens, so too does the weight of decades-long unresolved differences and unspoken feelings—forcing Martin to deal with the hardest lessons about home, duty, and love.

Suspenseful, comic, and profoundly moving, the latest novel in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series follows one of modern literature's most beloved and indelible characters—Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her complicated past.Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of "leaving like a lady," Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her "logical family" in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker, Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter, Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.Some members of Anna's family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada's Black Rock Desert where sixty thousand revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another Nevada destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the sixteen-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty, troubled heart of her Depression-era childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams, and to attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.The ninth and final novel in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, The Days of Anna Madrigal is the triumphant resolution to a saga of urban family life that has enchanted and enlightened readers around the world since 1976.

This acclaimed historical novel is based on two actual incidents: In 1829 in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In Dessa Rose, the author asks the question: "What if these two women met?"From there the story unfolds: two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance; a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom; trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the two women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. United by fate but divided by prejudice, these two women are locked in a thrilling battle for freedom, sisterhood, friendship, and love.

This sweeping tale captures the essence of Texas on a staggering scale as it chronicles the life and times of cattleman Jordan "Bick" Benedict, his naive young society wife, Leslie, and three generations of land-rich sons. A sensational story of power, love, cattle barons, and oil tycoons, Giant was the basis of the classic film starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson.

From the acclaimed author of Sheltering Rain comes an intensely moving story of two women whose lives entwine through a lovely seaside house.The tiny, well-ordered seaside village of Merham holds little to interest the adventurous -- except for Arcadia, the breathtaking art deco house perched above the shoreline. Attracted to this magical place, young Lottie Swift surrenders freely to its temptations and ultimately must face the hard consequences of her actions.Years later another young woman comes to Merham. A designer hired to make over the now-empty Arcadia, Daisy Parsons seeks a new beginning, as Lottie once did. Fleeing a broken relationship, Daisy finds refuge at Arcadia, and something more -- a love she thought she would never know again.

"The first time I saw Nica after she died was at Jamie Amory's Fourth of July party . . ."A stunning debut about murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep schoolDeath sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and fast—a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide-note confession—but memory and instinct won't allow Nica's older sister Grace to accept the case as closed. Dropped out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.Compulsively readable, Lili Anolik's debut novel combines the haunting atmospherics of The Secret History and the hairpin plot twists of Megan Abbott's Dare Me.

Three wickedly funny sisters.One family's extraordinary legacy.A single suicide note that spans a century ...Meet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee, and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn't easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what curves life throws at these siblings—and it's hurled plenty—they always have a wisecrack, and one another.In the waning days of 1999, the trio decides it's time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee, and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga lifetimes in the making—one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself. Unspooling threads of history, personal memory, and family lore, they weave a mesmerizing account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.Funny, heartbreaking, and utterly original, A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent novel about three unforgettable women bound to each other, and to their remarkable family, through the blessings and the burdens bestowed by blood.

The author of the acclaimed Indiscretion returns with a searing tale of love, passion, and obsession—the story of one man's all-consuming desire for a beautiful, bewitching, and elusive woman"At night she is often in my dreams, always just out of reach, across a table, laughing, climbing a stair, disappearing into the next room, or on the verge of love, until something causes me to wake up unconsummated, aware of her continued absence in my life even if she was still with me every day. I remember when I first met her. It changed my life."Since he was a shy, protected young man, Wylie Rose has been drawn to the alluring, unconventional Bonet siblings, the children of a bohemian Spanish painter and an American heiress. But none affects him more than the enchanting Cesca, a girl of shimmering, incandescent beauty with a wild, irrepressible spirit.Wylie's friendship with her brother Aurelio, a budding painter of singular talent, brings him near Cesca's circle. A young woman confident in her charms, Cesca is amused by Wylie's youthful sensuality and trusting innocence. Toying with his devotion, she draws him closer to her fire— ultimately ruining him for any other woman.Wylie goes willingly whenever Cesca so tantalizingly reappears in his life, despite the emotional chaos left in her wake. Long ago, Wylie's father warned him about the Bonets. "They're beautiful, talented, rich. It's all very seductive. But they'll take everything and give nothing in return." One day Wylie will make an unexpected choice—a decision that will haunt him and echo through their lives.Spanning several decades, moving through the worlds of high society and art, and peopled with poignant characters, Girl in the Moonlight takes us from the wooded cottages of the Hamptons to the dining rooms of Upper East Side Manhattan to the glamorous nightlife of Paris and Barcelona. As he vividly brings to life Wylie and Cesca's tempestuous, heart-wrenching affair, Charles Dubow probes the devastating depths of misguided passion and the nature of true love.

In this new international thriller from the author of The Geneva Option, UN covert negotiator Yael Azoulay is drawn into a web of betrayal and intrigue that leads from deep within America's military-industrial complex to the Middle East and beyond.Yael Azoulay went rogue in Geneva and nearly lost her life; although her physical wounds are healed, she will never be able to forget what happened. Now back in New York, when the secretary-general asks her to meet with the CEO of the Prometheus Group, a lobbying and asset management firm with extensive links to the Pentagon and dubious business interests in the volatile Middle East, she cannot refuse his request.Working under Prometheus's radar, Yael uncovers a chilling conspiracy with ties to Iran . . . and to a shocking source from her past. The end game is nothing less than a devastating—and very lucrative—new war in the Middle East. But the closer she comes to the truth, the more Yael begins to expose herself, revealing a life riddled with secrets. As she confronts the ghosts of her past, the few certainties of her life begin to crumble around her, laying bare a terrifying truth: that she has enormously powerful enemies who neither forgive, nor forget.

A deep-cover CIA agent races across Europe to save the daughter he never knew in this electrifying debut thriller— an international sensation billed as "Homeland meets Stieg Larsson"—that heralds the arrival of a new master.Early 1980s, Damascus. A nameless American spy abandons his newborn child to an uncertain fate. His inability to forgive himself for what he has done leads him on a lifelong quest to escape his past that will take him to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq—anywhere where the danger and the stress allow him to forget.Thirty years later, EU aide Klara Walldéen is learning to navigate the world of politics—the lines between friend and enemy, truth and lies. But Klara has just seen something she should not have: a laptop containing information so sensitive that people will kill to keep it hidden. Suddenly she is thrown into a terrifying chase through Europe, with no idea who is hunting her or why.Their stories converge one stormy Christmas Eve in the Swedish archipelago, where blood is spilled, shocking discoveries are made, and the past inevitably catches up with the present.

They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class. In other ways, they are nothing you can imagine: many come from working-class families themselves. The progeny of Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants who escaped war-torn Europe, they take pride in flagrantly spurning Wall Street. Under the thumb of an all-powerful international oil cartel, the energy market had long eluded the grasp of America's hungry capitalists. Neither the oil royalty of Houston nor the titans of Wall Street had ever succeeded in fully wresting away control. But facing extinction, the rough-and-tumble traders of Nymex led by the reluctant son of a producemerchant went after this Goliath and won, creating the world's first free oil market and minting billions in the process. Their stunning journey from poverty to prosperity belies the brutal and violent history that is their legacy. For the first time, The Asylum unmasks the oil market's self-described "inmates" in all their un*ed and dysfunctional glory: the happily married father from Long Island whose lust for money and power was exceeded only by his taste for cruel pranks; the Italian kung fu fighting gasoline trader whose ferocity in the trading pits earned him countless millions; the cheerful Nazi hunter who traded quietly by day and ambushed Nazi sympathizers by night; and the Irish-born femme fatale who outsmarted all but one of the exchange's chairmen the Hungarian emigre who, try as he might, could do nothing to rein in the oil market's unruly inhabitants. From the treacherous boardroom schemes to the hookers and blow of the trading pits; from the repeat terrorist attacks and FBI stings to the grand alliances and outrageous fortunes that brought the global economy to the brink, The Asylum ventures deep into the belly of the beast, revealing how raw ambition and the endless quest for wealth can change the very nature of both man and market. Showcasing seven years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Leah McGrath Goodman reveals what really happened behind the scenes as oil prices topped out and what choice the traders ultimately made when forced to choose between their longtime brotherhood and their precious oil monopoly.

What is it like to killWhat is it like to be under fireHow do you know what rightWhat can you never forgetIn The Things They Cannot Say , award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who by sharing the truth about their wars display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war including his complicity in a murder and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.

Kelly Oxford is . . . A wunderkind producer of pirated stage productions for six-year-olds Not the queen of the world An underage schnitzel-house dishwasher The kid who stood up to a bully and almost passed out from the resulting adrenaline rush A born salesman Capable of willing her eyesight to be 20/20 That girl who peed her pants in the gas station that one time Totally an expert on strep throat Incapable of making Leonardo DiCaprio her boyfriend A writer A certified therapy assistant who heals with Metallica mixtapes Not fat enough to be super snuggly. Bea, age four Not above using raspberry-studded sh*t to get out of a speeding ticket Bitingly funny. But everybody knows that. Roger Ebert Sad that David Copperfield doesn't own a falcon A terrible liar

In this superb short fiction collection, Elmore Leonard, “the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever” (New York Times Book Review), once again illustrates how the line between the law and the lawbreakers is not as firm as we might think. In the title story, the basis for the hit FX series Justified, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens meets up with an old friend, but they’re now on different sides of the law. Federal marshal Karen Sisco, from Out of Sight, returns in “Karen Makes Out,” once again inadvertently mixing pleasure with business. In “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” Mrs. Mahmood gets more than she bargains for when she conspires with her maid to end her unhappy marriage. These nine stories are the great Elmore Leonard at his vivid, hilarious, and unfailingly human best.

The award-winning author of The Electric Michelangelo returns with her first novel in nearly six years, a literary masterpiece about the reintroduction of wild wolves into the United Kingdom.She hears them howling along the buffer zone, a long harmonic.One leading, then many.At night there is no need to imagine, no need to dream.They reign outside the mind.Rachel Caine is a zoologist working in Nez Perce, Idaho, as part of a wolf recovery project. She spends her days, and often nights, tracking the every move of a wild wolf pack—their size, their behavior, their howl patterns. It is a fairly solitary existence, but Rachel is content.When she receives a call from the wealthy and mysterious Earl of Annerdale, who is interested in reintroducing the grey wolf to Northern England, Rachel agrees to a meeting. She is certain she wants no part of this project, but the Earl's estate is close to the village where Rachel grew up, and where her aging mother now lives in a care facility. It has been far too long since Rachel has gone home, and so she returns to face the ghosts of her past.The Wolf Border is a breathtaking story about the frontier of the human spirit, from one of the most celebrated young writers working today.

Ready or not, medical practice is changing. Advances in the field of genomics—the study of how our DNA is constructed and functions—have made it easier for physicians to diagnose, treat, and even predict today's many pressing health concerns. With the emergence of genomic sequencing and DNA analysis, this is an exciting moment in science, medicine, and personal health.But it's also an uncertain time, one fraught with understandable and uncomfortable questions:Can we take advantage of genomic progress and avoid genomic discriminationCan medicine be tailored to a patient's unique DNA profileHow will DNA banks and electronic medical records affect our privacy and welfareShould we screen our healthy child's DNAWhen is information too much information?In Genomic Messages, George Annas, j.d., m.p.h., and Sherman Elias, M.D., a health lawyer/bioethicist and an obstetrician-gynecologist/geneticist, respectively, answer these and other pressing questions about genomics. Together, they detail the field’s past, present, and future, while laying out its myriad legal, medical, and ethical ramifications. They empower individuals and families with the knowledge to make better decisions about their short-term and long-term health.Comprehensive, accessible, and revolutionary, Genomic Messages is the definitive guide to genomics, personalized medicine, and the future of healthcare.

Your Days of Dieting Are NumberedAmerica's number one weight-loss website, SparkPeople.com, combines the latest science on nutrition and their experts' experience working with millions of people to lose weight to deliver everything you need to turn your body into a lean, mean, calorie-burning machine. If you've had false starts, if you've tried to diet but given up, if you've lost weight and gained it back, finally there's a lasting solution. With The Spark Solution, there will be no next time.Why waste time, energy, and money experimenting with weight-loss tactics that don't workIt's time to stop the yo-yo dieting cycle; jump-start your weight loss and get ready for long-term success—in just two weeks. With incredibly delicious, healthy recipes that enable you to eat the food you love, customizable workouts perfect for your busy life, and daily tips and inspiration that will motivate you for success, The Spark Solution is built around three key components scientifically proven to deliver results in just two weeks. The program is packed with metabolism boosters—from the frequency with which and amounts you're eating to the types of workouts you're doing. The plan is designed to make over your mind-set and tackle the most common diet bad habits. And you'll also gain the momentum needed to build healthy habits for your journey to better health and permanent weight loss.Millions have already tried it. Now you can find out their top diet secrets—not only how they lost weight but also how they discovered a path to healthy living.