Claire Baglin’s On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator’s summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and a sharp ear for workplace jargon, dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin’s depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. The past is remarkably vivid in On the Clock: her childhood memories of their bleak small town and of summer vacations spent at campgrounds by the sea in Brittany resonate. And the present blazes in scenes of the young woman’s current fast-food trial: the awful boss, the nasty manager, and all the tedium and horror of dead-end work: Slowly the oven door opens and a nursery-school tune announces that the salad rolls can come out [and] I’m mired in the heart of pointlessness. I stick a straw into the whipped cream but don’t take off the end of the paper wrapper so they’ll know it hasn’t been used, I’m conscientious.

Rin moves into a new flat on the day the aliens arrive. Their new flatmates are laid-back Sanjay and conspiracy theorist Pete. It doesn't take long to notice some oddities about the pair, like hoarding cardboard and hissing at people when they're angry. Something strange is going on, but it's not all due to the aliens.

From the renowned paleontologist and bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a sweeping evolutionary history of birds, from their dinosaur origins to the 14,000 extraordinary species alive today. Tens of billions of birds share the planet with us, an astonishingly diverse array of species that are present nearly everywhere humans call home—and many places we do not. With their flamboyant plumage, joyous dawn serenades, extraordinary aerial feats, they have captivated human imagination for millennia. Undeniably delicate creatures with hollow bones and thin skin protected by downy feathers, how did such a seemingly fragile species break the bounds of Earth and begin to fly, how have they survived millennia, and how does their legacy shape our world? Hailed as “one of the stars of modern paleontology” (National Geographic), Brusatte begins his quest to the tell the story of birds by exploring how dinosaurs gradually developed the trademark features of birds one-by-one—feathers, wings, beaks, big brains, keen senses, and warm-blooded metabolisms. He investigates why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago and chronicles how these survivors rapidly proliferated in a barren landscape to produce the huge diversity of avian species we know today. Along the way, we meet a variety of remarkable – now extinct – species: • 10-foot-tall terror birds with beaks that sliced flesh • 1.5-ton elephant birds that lived on Madagascar and laid eggs the size of footballs • Pelagornithid seabirds with 20-foot wingspans • A ferocious Jamaican ibis that used its wings as clubs to attack rivals Yet, Brusatte also urges us to appreciate the extraordinariness of birds alive today – penguins that literally fly underwater, parrots that can mimic human speech and hummingbirds that hover mid-air and dive at 50 miles per hour. A fascinating scientific history that unearths the origins of birds, The Story of Birds establishes the living legacy of this remarkable species.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

In America, demons wear white hoods. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die. Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up. Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?

In America, demons wear white hoods. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die. Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up. Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?