A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.

At a Ph.D. program in Southern California, Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, spend their time working on their theses, getting high, and keeping track of the poor air quality due to nearby forest fires. No one believes Sarah when she reports a fellow student for raping her at a party—“He’s such a good guy!”—and the Title IX office simply files away the information, just like the police. Nathan is the only person who cares. When Sarah finds Nathan dead of an overdose from a drug he’s always avoided, she knows something isn’t right.

A high school history teacher in a small Colorado town, Guthrie is raising his two young sons alone. Thoughtful and honest, he is guiding them through a world that is not always kind. Victoria, one of his students, is pregnant, homeless, and vulnerable to the scorn of the town. When Guthrie helps two elderly ranchers take the young woman into their home, an unlikely extended family is born.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.

Nikki Serafino is enjoying the sunset from her boat in her beloved port city of Naples, Italy, when she discovers the body of a man in the warm waters of the bay. An investigator working as the liaison between local police and American troops, Nikki is certainly no stranger to violence and organized crime, but this case grows complicated when the victim turns out to be a U.S. Navy captain stationed at the nearby military base—and the autopsy reveals foul play.

Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur; Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual; and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather at Sylvie’s old beach house - not for festivities this time, but to clean it out before it is sold. Can they survive together without her?

From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined me and my daughter.”

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

The island was abandoned for fifty years. So how did the body get there? Three hundred miles from the mainland in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean lies Navigaceo: a tiny island that was hastily abandoned fifty years ago and has been uninhabited ever since. Until now. Tess Macfarlane is a documentary filmmaker tasked with capturing the wild beauty of Navigaceo. Accompanied by a small team of researchers, her job is to film everything she sees. But Tess sees too much: a body. It's clearly a recent murder.

On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings. The seven lots went for £781,000—at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby's as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and paved the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years.

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of freedom.

When Catherine Raven finished her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana. She was as emotionally isolated as she was physically, but she viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. In the meantime, she taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Then one day she realized that a mangy-looking fox was showing up on her property every afternoon at 4:15 p.m.

Born in Sweden in 1964, Neneh Cherry’s father Ahmadu was a musician from Sierra Leone. Her mother, Moki, was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish textile artist. Her parents split up just after Neneh was born, and not long afterwards Moki met and fell in love with acclaimed jazz musician Don Cherry. Eventually, the strong pull New York City in the 1970s drew him them there, but they made a home wherever they traveled. Neneh and her brother Eagle-Eye experienced a life of creativity, freedom, and, of course, music.

The first of our organs to form and the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of what makes us human; as long as it continues to beat, there is hope. In The Story of a Heart, Dr. Rachel Clarke interweaves the history of medical innovations behind transplant surgery with the story of two children—one of whom desperately needs a new heart.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

After leaving behind the routines of work life, Kevin Ryan sets out on a 4,000-mile journey by bicycle across America to discover who he is after a fulfilling and busy career. From the charming small towns of New England to the vast, rugged landscapes of the Rocky Mountains, this inspiring memoir captures not only the physical adventure but also the deeper, more personal quest for a renewed sense of purpose.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability. This transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy.

During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen." She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland.

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.

When ecologist Carl Safina and his wife, Patricia, took in a near-death baby owl, they expected that, like other wild orphans they'd rescued, she'd be a temporary presence. But Alfie's feathers were not growing correctly, requiring prolonged care. As Alfie grew and gained strength, she became a part of the family, joining a menagerie of dogs and chickens and making a home for herself in the backyard.

When Frieda Hughes moved to a ramshackle estate in the wilds of Wales, she was expecting to take on a few projects: planting a garden, painting, writing her poetry column for The Times (London), and possibly even breathing new life into her ailing marriage. But instead, she found herself rescuing a baby magpie, the sole survivor of a nest destroyed in a storm—and embarking on an obsession that would change the course of her life.

Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.