"It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil...

"On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp--an area known as "The Waters" to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan--herbalist and eccentric Hermine "Herself" Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest--the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn--has...

At the break of dawn, Caroline Shelby rolls into Oysterville, Washington, a tiny hamlet at the edge of the raging Pacific. She's come home. Home to a place she thought she'd left forever, home of her heart and memories, but not her future. Ten years ago, Caroline launched a career in the glamorous fashion world of Manhattan. But her success in New York imploded on a wave of scandal and tragedy, forcing her to flee to the only safe place she knows....

"These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the South, weaving together love, friendship, violence, survival, and revenge. A boy and his father watch a German submarine sink an oil tanker as evil forces in the disguise of federal agents try to ruin their family. A girl is beaten up outside a bar as her university-professor father navigates new...

"Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet...

"Haven't we all wanted to pretend everything's perfectly fine? Jane Campbell avoids confrontation at all costs. Given the choice, she'll always let her husband, Leon--a bestselling thriller author--fight their battles. She'd prefer to focus on the good things in life: precious days with her two young children, a steady and loving marriage, their mischievously playful cat Bonita, and her fulfilling job as a creative writing teacher. In Jane's eyes,...

"...A young woman is ensnared into returning to a place she had wanted to leave behind forever - her childhood home. There, at the age of ten, Liza Barton had shot her mother, trying desperately to protect her from her estranged stepfather, Ted Cartwright...To erase Liza's past, her adoptive parents change her name to Celia...When Georgette Grove, the real estate who sold the house to Alex, is brutally murdered and Celia is the first on the crime...

For fans of Ben Winters and Sarah Pinsker, this mind-bending and thought-provoking novel pushes the limits of fiction, questioning the violence sewn into our DNA. Violence is a thing of the past--but do new horrors lie in wait? Imagine a world devoid of violence--a world where fists can't hit, guns don't kill, and bombs can't destroy. In this tantalizing novel of possibility, this has--suddenly and inexplicably--become our new reality. The U.S. president...

"Parkland. Las Vegas. Dallas. Orlando. San Bernardino. Paris. Charleston. Sutherland Springs. Newtown. These cities are now known for the people who were shot and killed in them. More Americans have died from guns in the US in the last fifty years than in all the wars in American history. With less than 5% of the world's population, the people of the US own nearly half the world's guns. America also has the most annual gun deaths--homicide, suicide,...

Emma Walsh has finally worked up the courage to confront her husband James about his drinking--his alcoholic rages, his blackouts, and the fear his behavior has created for her and their two kids. But James never shows up to meet her as planned, and all her righteous words go unsaid. And unsaid they remain, because the next time Emma sees James, his body lies crumpled amidst the wreckage of his flashy car, which has been smashed to its final resting...