Helen Plum Library

As they do each June, the Foxes have driven the winding roads of Appalachia to drop off their children for a two-week stay at their grandmother's. Here, 12-year-old Thea can run free and breathe in the smells of pine and fresh bread and Grammie's handmade candles. But as her parents head back to suburban Virginia, they have no idea they're about to cross paths with a ticking time bomb. Back in Kentucky, Thea and her grandmother Lucy both awaken from...

After being expelled from their ancestral home, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she know why she and her mother had...

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

Summer Sullivan, the youngest founding member of Elm Creek Quilts, has spent the last two years pursuing a master's degree in history at the University of Chicago. Her unexpected return home to the celebrated quilter's retreat is met with delight but also concern from her mother, Gwen; her best friend, Sarah; master quilter Sylvia; and her other colleagues, and rightly so. Stymied by writer's block, Summer hasn't finished her thesis, and she can't...

Lois Saunders thought that marrying the right man would finally cure her loneliness. But as picture-perfect as her husband is, she is suffocating in their loveless marriage. In 1951, though, unhappiness is hardly grounds for divorce, except in Reno, Nevada. At the Golden Yarrow, the most respectable of Reno's famous "divorce ranches," Lois finds herself living with half a dozen other would-be divorcees, all in Reno for the six weeks' residency that...

In Nazi-era Berlin, Sophia Alexander shoulders immense responsibility after her mother's death, managing her family and aiding the resistance. Amidst Hitler's tyranny, Sophia assists in her sister's daring escape from Germany, endures personal losses, and joins the Sisters of Mercy. Despite danger, she persists in rescuing Jewish children, defying surveillance and persecution, determined to help those in need, even at the risk of her freedom.

These 12 stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as King's novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel 'the exhilartion of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,' and in You Like It Darker, listeners will feel that exhilaration too, again and again. "Two Talented Bastids explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got...

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series....