Lured by mysterious forces back to her childhood home, Sophia investigates the unsolved disappearances of several community members, including the mother who saved her from a near-drowning. Sophia's first memory is of drowning: the darkness of the water, the briny taste as it fills her throat. She remembers her mother pulling her to safety before disappearing forever. But Sophia has never been in the ocean... and her mother died years ago in a hospital....

"Letting go of your past is hard, as two teens learn during four nights of parties over one year. Despite their age difference, Tucker Campanelli and Erika Green really clicked when they worked together, but that was two summers ago. Now Tucker, plagued by his fraught relationship with his abusive, dying father, has little enthusiasm for his last year of high school. Erika, still coping with the fallout from a leaked sex video, didn't much enjoy her...

An adventurous diplomat's "engrossing and often darkly humorous" memoir of working with Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein(Publishers Weekly). In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions...

The former senator and presidential candidate offers a provocative new assessment of the first "national security president". James Monroe is remembered today primarily for two things: for being the last of the "Virginia Dynasty", following George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and for issuing the Monroe Doctrine, his statement of principles in 1823 that the western hemisphere was to be considered closed to European intervention....

"What's the point of an eternal battle? For milions of years, one hundred Eternals have roamed the Earth, secret protectors of humanity. Without them, mankind would be smears between the teeth of the demon-like Deviants. Their war has waged for all time, echoing in our myths and nightmares. But today, the Eternals face something new: change! Can they--or anyone on Earth--survive their discovery? An Eternal has been murdered by one of their own, and...

"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

"John F. Kennedy died almost half a century ago--yet because of his extraordinary promise and untimely death, his star still resonates strongly. On the anniversary of his assassination, celebrated political scientist and analyst Larry J. Sabato--himself a teenager in the early 1960s and inspired by JFK and his presidency--explores the fascinating and powerful influence he has had over five decades on the media, the general public, and especially on...

The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history. Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: "Hi sister Sally, we need your help." The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling...

The first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa. While "coming out" may have become primetime fare in the U.S., this film was met with angry protests when it was shot in the director's native Guinea and has generated heated debate among Africanists here as well. But beyond its controversial topic, Dakan is a contemporary African reinterpretation of the age-old Romeo and Juliet conflict between love and social convention. Director Mohamed...

Is our universe dying? Could there be other universes? In Parallel Worlds, world-renowned physicist and bestselling author Michio Kaku-an author who "has a knack for bringing the most ethereal ideas down to earth" (Wall Street Journal)-takes readers on a fascinating tour of cosmology, M-theory, and its implications for the fate of the universe. In his first book of physics since Hyperspace, Michio Kaku begins by describing the extraordinary advances...