"In the northernmost reaches of Scotland, where a string of little islands in the North Sea stretches towards Norway, lives Gertie MacIntyre, a proud island girl by birth. Her social circle is small but tight: family and friends, particularly the women in her knitting circle. In the whitewashed cottages of their hometown, everyone knows everyone, and the ladies of the knitting circle know more than most. In a place of long dark winters and geographic...

"Marco Polo is a retired Christmas ornament, but in his mind he is a great mouse explorer. Because he's tiny and likely to be lost, he is the least-borrowed of the Book Buddies--toys that children can check out of the library just like a book--and he almost never leaves the library. But the little mouse finally meets the right match in Seth, a boy who is about to attend his first sleepover. If Seth were to bring the stuffed bunny he usually sleeps...

"A thirty-five-year-old Ursula Byrne, "VP of Strategic Audacity" at a branding agency in Manhattan, is successful, witty, whip-smart, and single. She's tried all the dating apps, and let's just say: she's underwhelmed by her options. You'd think that by now someone would have come up with something more bespoke; a way for users to be more tailored about who and what they want in a life partner--how hard could that be? Enter The Arc: a highly secretive,...

From novelist and playwright Julian Gough, and the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Jim Field, comes a brilliantly funny story of a rabbit and bear who discover that things are always better when they're shared with a friend ... Bear wakes up early from hibernation. If she can't sleep, then at least she can make a snowman. Rabbit has never made a snowman, but he definitely wants to make one that's better than Bear's. But with an avalanche and...

"The execution of a Vatican archivist within the shadow of the Kremlin exposes a conspiracy going back three centuries--to the bloody era of the Russian Tsars. Before his murder, he manages to dispatch a coded message, a warning of a terrifying threat, one tied to a secret buried within the Golden Library of Tsars, a vast and treasured archive that had vanished into history. As combative forces race for the truth behind this death and alarming discovery,...

A collection of stories that follows a bewildered bartender, a grieving beautician, a jilted urban planner and others as their lives unravel in unexpected ways, revealing primal urges and raw emotions against the backdrop of a fractured, overwhelmed America.

"A stunning collection of interconnected stories, set mostly in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion...

"Andrew's just trying to make it through Picture Day, which is easier said than done when it seems like the whole world is out to get him--from a bully to a science experiment gone wrong to a someone else's juice snot (don't ask). But as Andrew goes through the school day, and as one thing after another goes wrong, that little kernel of worry in his stomach is getting hotter and hotter, until it threatens to pop and turn into a public panic attack,...