September 2020

Jack London's 1903 short novel: Buck, a 140-pound St. Bernard / Scotch Shepherd mix living the comfortable life on Judge Miller's California ranch, is stolen one night by a gambling-debt-saddled gardener's helper, sold into the Klondike Gold Rush as a sled dog, and slowly discovers - through cold, club, fang, and the man named John Thornton he comes to love - the wolf that has always been inside him.

George Orwell's 1945 fable: the animals of Manor Farm, inspired by an old prize boar named Major, rise up and drive out the drunk Mr. Jones, paint seven commandments on the barn wall, and over the next several years watch as two pigs - the idealist Snowball and the schemer Napoleon - turn the revolution into exactly the regime it was supposed to replace.

Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia of the World State - five castes grown in bottles, a population conditioned in its sleep to love its predetermined role, soma to manage anything that conditioning didn't reach - tested against an outsider named John, raised on a Reservation by a London Beta named Linda and brought back to a London where the freedom to suffer is the only freedom left to demand.

An NYPD veteran who lost a child during a hostage negotiation retreats to Morningstar Lake with his German Shepherd Quincy and his saxophone; a widow named Kristin McCarthy borrows her friend Marsha's Catskills cottage and brings her eleven-year-old daughter Ashley, a recent rape survivor who has stopped being able to be in her own house - and the music carries across the water in Linda Barrett's first Flying Solo novel.

In the summer of 2009, recent college graduate Lindsey takes a nanny job for an influential Martha's Vineyard family and becomes close to their nearly-fifteen-year-old daughter Georgie - until a night by the lighthouse breaks the friendship and locks both women into a ten-year silence about what happened, in Julia Spiro's debut novel about class, complicity, and why people who survive things don't always speak.

Music therapist Kendra Michaels - blind for the first twenty years of her life, now sighted with the unnerving observational reflexes those twenty years built - is pulled out of the consulting work she's tried to leave behind by Adam Lynch, a former FBI agent known as the Puppetmaster, who arrives with a San Diego serial-stabbing case and the leverage that Kendra's ex-lover, FBI agent Jeff Stedler, has gone missing while investigating it.

Wedding photographer Libby McKenzie - newly home to Virginia after a divorce, multiple miscarriages, and her father's death - takes a job photographing a wedding at the Woodmont estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, becomes drawn to its honeysuckle-overgrown greenhouse, and pulls a thread that runs back through the estate's owner Elaine, a 1940s teen named Sadie, and the closed adoption Libby has carried questions about her whole life.

Kate Atkinson's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection follows Pamela - newly retired teacher, thoroughly divorced, mother to a thirty-year-old son who has refused to leave the house, devotee of the exclamation mark as a coping mechanism - through a stretch of disastrous online dating and into the tub for a bath that ends with the discovery that she is, somehow, post-menopausally and inexplicably, pregnant.

Mary Gaitskill's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection braids three voices around a single rape trial - the seventy-year-old retired schoolteacher who was assaulted, the fifty-year-old former student of hers who is accused, and the apathetic grand juror whose unwanted seat in the box is going to ask more of her than she came in prepared to give.

Emma Donoghue's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection imagines a 2060 in which the climate crisis has been answered by a society that strongly disincentivizes having children - and Miriam, who has accepted the rules her whole life, finds at a work retreat that she and a coworker named Ned both want what almost no one is allowed to want anymore.

A tech reporter's misdirected email connects two women eight thousand miles apart - both named Sandra Guzman, both contract content moderators for the same mega social media platform, one in New Jersey and one in the Philippines - and the friendship that grows between them across the inbox starts to look, by the end, like the beginning of a campaign.

Caroline Kepnes's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection sends an exhausted, recently-fired new mother named Shelby chasing a Hallmark-movie fantasy with a secret admirer - and lands her, in a darkly comic Stepford Wives-meets-The Prisoner pivot, on a rehabilitation ranch for women classified W2 who must be retrained into W1 before they're allowed to go home.

In Roxane Gay's short, administrative dystopia, every girl is tested at sixteen to see whether the state will license her to have a child of her own; Hadley failed, so she goes to the baby library, where unlicensed women can borrow an infant girl on a two-week loan.

An Ancestry.com match arrives in the inbox of a woman who has spent forty-plus years pretending the baby she gave up for adoption in 1964 never existed - and Cheryl Strayed traces, in a tight short story for Amazon's Out of Line collection, what happens when a teenager named Geraldine Waters has to integrate the life she actually lived with the one she's been telling.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning third novel: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives the bombing of the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother, walks out of the rubble with Carel Fabritius's tiny 1654 painting of a chained goldfinch, and spends the next fourteen years carrying it from Park Avenue to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, alongside the most unforgettable problem child in recent fiction.

Russian-Kazakhstani guide Anatoli Boukreev's firsthand account of the 1996 Everest disaster - co-written with G. Weston DeWalt, published the same year as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and offering the Mountain Madness team's perspective on the storm that killed eight climbers and the three trips into it that Boukreev made alone to bring three of his clients back alive.

When a Cheviot Hills couple unearths an old hospital supply box with an infant skeleton from the early 1950s, then a nanny is found shot in a nearby park beside more recent infant bones picked clean and coated in beeswax, Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis follow two trails - one back to a 1950s pediatric nurse and a doctor in a rare Duesenberg, the other into the gated estate of movie stars Donny Rader and Prema Moon.