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Featured Guide

Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, 17-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating each of them in the accident. During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. But Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident --- suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal.

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B.A. Shapiro, author of The Lost Masterpiece

B.A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-19th-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot --- the one woman in their midst who never got her due --- and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. Tamara discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil.

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Renée Ahdieh, author of Park Avenue

The daughter of Korean bodega owners, Jia Song has just made junior partner at her prestigious Manhattan law firm, and she is about to score the ultraluxe gold-on-gold Birkin bag of her dreams. So when her boss asks her to sit in on the hush-hush family implosion of a high-level client, she accepts without hesitation --- only to find out that it is one of the most famous Korean families in the world. The Park family’s net worth is estimated at a billion dollars, and their mega-successful Korean beauty brand has shaped the culture for the past two decades. But the patriarch is filing for divorce while his wife is dying, and their three children can’t stop snapping at one another. With both the family fortune and legacy under threat from the worst kind of scandal, it’s up to Jia to set things right --- and she only has a month to do it.

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Hal Ebbott, author of Among Friends

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s 52nd birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over 30 years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them. This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt in an unspeakable act, the aftermath of which exposes treacherous fault lines upon which they have long dwelt.

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Kaira Rouda, author of Jill Is Not Happy

If you ask Jill Tingley, she’ll tell you that she and her husband, Jack, are college sweethearts living the dream in Southern California. Theirs is an enviable life, though they’ve grown distant in recent years. With their daughter, Maggie, away at college, Jill suggests a road trip to reconnect. Jack would rather do anything else than drive to Utah with his wife. He’s only stayed in this marriage because of a shared secret, a tragedy in the past that he wanted to keep buried. And for his daughter’s sake. But Jack is finished with the charade of his marriage. He’s filing for divorce as soon as they return, no matter what. But he doesn’t realize what else Jill is hiding. So begins a cat-and-mouse road trip as a cunning wife and a reluctant husband match wits and drive each other to the edge.

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Megan Abbott, author of El Dorado Drive

The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister, Pam --- currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband --- and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club. The Wheel offers women like themselves --- middle-aged and of declining means --- a way to make their own money, independent of husbands or families. Quickly, however, the Wheel’s success, and their own addiction to it, leads to greater and greater risks --- and a crime so shocking that it threatens to bring everything down with it.

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Kristin Harmel, author of The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau

Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance. But one night in 1942, Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette’s four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane’s body was found floating in the Seine --- but the bracelet was nowhere to be found. Seventy years later, Colette’s life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston.

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Julie Clark, author of The Ghostwriter

June 1975. The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets. Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she's offered a job to ghostwrite her father's last book. What she doesn't know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it's not another horror novel he wants her to write. After 50 years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

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Bridget Crocker, author of The River's Daughter: A Memoir

After Bridget Crocker’s parents’ volatile divorce, she moved with her mother from Southern California to Wyoming. Her life was idyllic, growing up in a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River --- until her mother suddenly took up a radical new lifestyle. The one constant in her life, the place Bridget felt whole and fully herself, was the river. When she discovered the world of whitewater rafting, she knew she’d found her calling. On the river, Bridget learned to read the natural world around her and came to know the language of rivers. One of the few female guides on the Snake River, she then traveled to the Zambezi River in Africa, some of the most dangerous whitewater in the world, where she faced death and learned to conquer her fears --- both on the water and off.

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Austin Taylor, author of Notes on Infinity

Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor, can envision her future anew at Harvard. Jack, a boy in Zoe’s organic chemistry class, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath. When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor’s lab, the two become entwined as colleagues. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel anti-aging drug. Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money, the magazine covers, and the national news stories detailing their success, Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership.

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