Amélie comes from a noble family that has fallen on hard times, which is how she came to be in a miserable marriage to simple merchant Hans. While her frugal and pragmatic husband spends most of his time in his library or at his raucous merchant’s guild, Amélie grudgingly tends to the domestic chores expected […]
A family urn is stolen and three armed gangsters set off to retrieve it. They trace the urn back to two thieves who live in a three-story, six-unit apartment building in a small town, but complications quickly arise, and what could have been a simple task quickly spirals out of control. As they drive into […]
Journalist and podcaster Princiotti isn’t ashamed of her pop-music obsession, and thinks you shouldn’t be, either. She traces her love of the genre back to 2003, when she was 9, and “Hilary Duff was the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family.” The subject of Princiotti’s book is the […]
Designated “Driver Eight,” 15-year-old Shiloh attempts neural linking with “the machine.” This giant robot landed on Earth long ago, and scientists from around the world have gradually recovered scattered parts. In the U.S., Synap Technologies, run by Shiloh’s father, Director Raguel, oversees each new robot-operating “Driver.” Shiloh, like others before them, uses something called the […]
It’s 2212, and 17-year old Earther Weslie has won the Interplanetary Alliance Life Support Bot competition for her bot named ILSA, or Individualized Life Support Assistant unit 001. The prize is a first-class ticket on luxury starship The Boundless, scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to Mars, a five-week trip. In this future, the […]
German journalist and author Wittstock tells an irresistible story. He begins in the summer of 1940. Most of his subjects had fled Germany in the 1930s, then fled again, to Vichy France, unoccupied but submissive. Jews and intellectuals knew that their days were numbered. Although shocked by France’s collapse, most Americans opposed helping refugees. Running […]
The year is 4050, and there is a serial killer on the loose. The Family Guy—so called because he murders entire families—is such an elusive and dangerous criminal that the authorities decide the only way to capture him is to build a real-life synthetic investigator designed with the mind and memories of fictional Scotland Yard […]
Born in 1934 during the Great Depression, the author remembers the first time he saw a television set. The thrill he had always enjoyed in movie theaters “was now available in people’s living rooms.” From that moment in the 1940s onward, Jankowski was hooked on TV. After graduating from Canisius College as an English major […]
In this heartwarming adventure story, McCarty takes readers on a modern-day romp in the woods of Boone, North Carolina. Ten-year-old Thomas has come with his family, who present white, to stay near Canaan Woods with Aunt Cecilia, a painter, in the home she and his mom grew up in. It’s a chance for Mom, who’s […]
On a family holiday in Kent, England, the meticulously organized August and her husband, Andrew, visit Shepherd Neame, Britain’s oldest brewery, for a tasting tour. August is suddenly transported to an alternate timeline when the historic beer, called Five Bees, was first brewed. Waking up naked and confused, August stumbles to a doorstep, guided by […]