"Baja California, 1979. Viridiana spends her days watching the dead sharks piled beside the seashore, as the fishermen pull their nets. There is nothing else to do, nothing else to watch, under the harsh sun. She's bored. Terribly bored. Yet her head is filled with dreams of Hollywood films, of romance, of a future beyond the drab town where her only option is to marry and have children. Three wealthy American tourists arrive for the summer, and Viridiana...

"In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father - who she believed died during her infancy - and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hévíz in Hungary....

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo - free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight - the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father...

"After Grandpa dies, a girl and her mother take the trip he had planned for her, kayaking along the Pacific west coast to look for the whales that he loved. The trip will do them good, Mom says, but the girl isn't sure. How can that be true when grandpa isn't there? And how will they find a whale in all that water, anyway? There is so much to see as they paddle through white-tipped waves and calm coves: glowing moon jellies, fluttering anemones and...

"Food anthropologist Miriam Quinones-Smith's move from New York to Coral Shores, Miami, puts her academic career on hold to stay at home with her young son. Adding to her funk is an opinionated mother-in-law and a husband rekindling a friendship with his ex. Gracias to her best friend, Alma, she gets a short-term job as a Caribbean cooking expert on a Spanish-language morning TV show. But when the newly minted star attends a Women's Club luncheon,...

Maia D'Apliese and her five sisters gather together at their childhood home, "Atlantis"--a fabulous, secluded castle situated on the shores of Lake Geneva--having been told that their beloved father, who adopted them all as babies, has died. Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage--a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there,she begins to put together the pieces of her...

Ivy, seventeen, wants to break the cycle of the Milbourn women, who lead dazzling lives and die young, but when the mother who abandoned her returns home, Ivy's world is shattered. No summer classes this year, none of Granddad's intense expectations to live up to the family name. The summer before Ivy's senior year is going to be all bonfires, barbecues, and friends. But when the mother who abandoned her returns home with two young daughters in...

We live in an age of perfectionism. Every day, we're bombarded with the beautiful, successful, slim, socially-conscious and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self. We see this person constantly in shop windows, in newspapers, on the television, at the movies and all over our social media. We berate ourselves when we don't match up to them--when we're too fat, too old, too poor, or too sad. This cycle can be extremely...

What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013-14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: The blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. In this lyrical book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true...

"One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and...