Every day in middle school can feel like the end of the world. Eleanor Dross knows a thing or two about the end of the world, thanks to a survivalist grandfather who stockpiles freeze-dried food and supplies. So when she reads about a scientist's prediction that an asteroid will strike Earth in April, Eleanor knows her family will be prepared. Her classmates are on their own. Eleanor has just one friend she wants to keep safe: Mack. They've been best...

"Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan's earliest to her most recent work. In "So Late in the Day," Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in "The Long and Painful Death" a writer's arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll...

"In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter 'the real world.' She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the...

When a beautiful tourist washes up on a wild inlet, inspector Richard Jury finds himself looking at a murder that's very similar to two other unsolved cases. "When the body of a French woman washes up on a wild inlet off the Cornish coast, Brian Macalvie, divisional commander with the Devon-Cornwall police is called in. Who could have killed this beautiful tourist, the only visible footprints nearby belonging to the two little girls who found her?...

"Twelve-year-old Aru Shah has a tendency to stretch the truth in order to fit in at school. While her classmates are jetting off to family vacations in exotic locales, she'll be spending her autumn break at home, in the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture, waiting for her mom to return from her latest archeological trip. Is it any wonder that Aru makes up stories about being royalty, traveling to Paris, and having a chauffeur? One day, three...

"On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end. ...Erik...

"Katherine Hamilton's goal in high school was to escape from her dead-end hometown of Asheford, Maryland. Fifteen years later she's got a degree in hospitality management and a great job supervising every aspect of the day-to-day operations of a high-end boutique hotel on the Baltimore waterfront. Then her high school best friend asks her to come talk with the town leaders of Asheford, but she won't say why. Kate can't cut her last link to her past,...

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer's career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track -- until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the "lucky" associates. She's offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she'd get her old job back. In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan...

When Beth disappears, everyone says she's run off with another man. She's just a fly-by-night party girl who can't be trusted. But Natalie, her best friend, doesn't believe it, not at all. She's sure something more sinister is going on. So sure that proving it just might kill her. Meanwhile, Victor, one of Beth's and Nat's favorite bar patrons, has fallen and ended up in the hospital. When he hears that Beth is gone, he doesn't buy it either. And...

Joe Gunther and his team -- the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) -- are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and back-up. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd, seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen year old gravesite is exposed, revealing...