"Alice Armitage is a police officer. Or she was. Or perhaps she just imagines she was. Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. Though convinced that she doesn't really belong there, she finds companionship with the other patients in the ward despite their challenging and often intimidating issues. So...

"In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake -- if it was a mistake -- until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn't feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support...

"[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women's lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel." —Chicago Tribune
The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.
For all of her life, forty-four-year-old...

A tale set in eighteenth-century Cambridge finds bookseller John Holdsworth commissioned to investigate Lady Anne Oldershaw's son's mental illness, a deep melancholy tied to a woman's mysterious death and a secret society.

An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.

In the first of these two science fiction stories a scientist invents a machine that transports him into the future. In the second story a man watches his body slowly become invisible.

A nineteenth-century tale of life aboard a New England whaling ship whose captain is obsessed with the pursuit of a large white whale.

No other obsession strikes as hard as the love that hits a teenaged boy especially if he's the sort of kid who is no saner than he wants to be. From the moment Adam Webb sees Francine Haggard in the van that is supposed to return them to the Institute Loiseaux the two young mental patients are inextricably connected. Adam will never let this girl go. From hiding her in his bedroom to spiriting her away to Minnesota's north woods, "Miss Entropia" becomes...

"My friend and former Hunter classmate, Sarah Eggers, wrote a poem years ago referencing an anecdote about Frida Kahlo that has never left me: Clare Boothe Luce, editor of Vanity Fare, commissioned Frida to paint a commemorative portrait of her close friend, Dorothy Hale, a Ziegfeld girl and struggling actress who had committed suicide. Frida took it upon herself to execute an "ex-voto" style painting, detailing Dorothy's jump from the sixteenth floor...

Fifteen years ago, a deranged young man abducted a teenage girl in a parking lot. He chose her for her innocence. Then he punished her for her beauty. Then he dowsed her with gasoline and tried to purify her with fire. Detective Jacob Rein managed to stop the lunatic before it was too late. But now the girl who survived that horrible ordeal has been found dead of an apparent suicide. Near her body is a letter from "The Master"--a blood-chilling promise...