Xe Sands

"Fall 2016 Library Journal Editors' Pick "In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, " Lillian Boxfish writes, "I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street ..." She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it." Now it's the last night...

"A history of the Flat Earth movement and a look at the recent boom in conspiratorial thinking in America"-- Since 2015 there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is flat. Weill draws a direct line from today's conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. When faced with a complicated world out of...

In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood-in the throes of Cold War paranoia-seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son. Years later,...

As a girl, Genevieve Martin spent the happiest summer of her life in Paris, learning the delicate art of locksmithing at her uncle's side. But since then, living back in the States, she has become more private, more subdued. She has been an observer of life rather than an active participant, holding herself back from those around her, including her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Paris never really left Genevieve, and, as her marriage crumbles, she finds herself...

"When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home...

In November 1944, eighteen-year-old June Walker boards an unmarked bus, destined for a city that doesn't officially exist. Oak Ridge, Tennessee has sprung up in a matter of months--a town of trailers and segregated houses, 24-hour cafeterias, and constant security checks. There, June joins hundreds of other young girls operating massive machines whose purpose is never explained. They know they are helping to win the war, but must ask no questions...

Twiss and her sister Milly have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health. But back in the summer of 1947 they knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. That was the summer their golf pro father got in to an accident that cost him his swing and his charm; and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. Their priest announced that God didn't exist...

Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus attempts to uncover the truth about her great-great-grandmother, whose ghost is said to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe. Julia Schuster Staab died nearly a century before the hauntings were reported at La Posada, once the grand home of Julia and her Jewish merchant husband. Tracing the strands of Julia's life and unsettled afterlife, Nordhaus delivers a spellbinding exploration of myth, family history, and...

"Divorce attorney Harper James can't catch a break. Bad enough that she runs into her ex-hubby, Nick, at her sister's destination wedding, but now, by a cruel twist of fate, she's being forced to make a cross-country road trip with him. And her almost-fiancae back at home is not likely to be sympathetic. Harper can't help that Nick has come blazing back into her life in all of his frustratingly appealing, gorgeous architect glory. But in Nick's eyes,...

When Hatteras Island old-timer Iola Anne Poole passes away at ninety-one, the struggling young mother in her rental cottage finds herself charged with cleaning out Iola's rambling Victorian house. Running from a messy, dangerous past, Tandi Jo Reese never expects to find more than a temporary hiding place within Iola's walls. But all that changes when she discovers eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes. Hidden in the boxes is the story of a...