During a volatile year of self-discovery in the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, three friends preparing for an uncertain future head to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives--a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In...

"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...

Savor the magic of the season with #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber's newest Christmas novel, filled with warmth, humor, the promise of love, and a dash of unexpected adventure. Ashley Davison, a graduate student in California, desperately wants to spend the holidays with her family in Seattle. Dashiell Tyler, a former army intelligence officer, receives a job in Seattle and must arrive by December 23. Though frantic to book a...

A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere? Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists--especially Thomas Lumas and "The End of Mr. Y, "a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. Seeking answers,...

"Turns out that reading nothing but true crime isn't exactly conducive to modern dating-and one woman is going to have to learn how to give love a chance when she's used to suspecting the worst. PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She's even analyzing the genre in her dissertation-if she can manage to finish writing it. It's hard to find the time while she spends the summer in Florida, cleaning out her childhood home,...

A woman is murdered in Oxford. Her body is discovered by two men who meet for the first time at that moment: Arthur Seldom, a prestigious professor of logic, and Martin, a young graduate student who has just arrived at the University hoping to study with Seldom. It quickly becomes clear that this is the first in a series of murders, all of which are announced by the murderer with strange mathematical symbols. Professor and student join forces to try...

"In December 1960, Rick Hayworth drives his genius girlfriend, Crystal, and three other MIT grad students across the country to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for thirty years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she's...

Chloe Carter's Internet date commits the ultimate gastronomic faux pas: He dies before dessert Ever in search of the perfect meal-and the perfect man-twenty-something grad student and food connoisseur Chloe Carter draws the line at speed dating. But when the Massachusetts native reluctantly signs up for Back Bay Dates, she's soon communicating with a guy after her own heart. According to his online bio, DinnerDude is Eric Rafferty, a blond, six-foot...

When an anonymous benefactor offers to put Samantha Moore through school, with the stipulation that she write frequent letters to him on her progress, Sam finds safety in the letters as her program and her peers force her to confront her past.