Living in a "perfect" world without social ills, a boy approaches the time when he will receive a life assignment from the Elders, but his selection leads him to a mysterious man known as the Giver, who reveals the dark secrets behind the utopian facade.

In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations...

Citing costly memory-related inconveniences suffered by average individuals, a science journalist chronicles his own struggles with chronic forgetfulness and his life-changing year in memory training, as well as sharing historical lore and ancient memory techniques.

When a middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral, he's drawn back to a place once alive with monsters and magic.

"A thriller about a desperate mother with a troubled past. One year ago, Isabelle Drake's life changed forever: her toddler son, Mason, was taken out of his crib in the middle of the night while she and her husband were asleep in the next room. With little evidence and few leads for the police to chase, the case quickly went cold. However, Isabelle cannot rest until Mason is returned to her--literally. Except for the occasional catnap or small blackout...

"A car accident causes Scarlett to start remembering pieces of an unfamiliar past. When a new guy moves into town, Scarlett feels an instant spark. But Noah knows the truth of Scarlett's past, and he's determined to shield her from it ... because Scarlett grew up in a cult called Eternal Light, controlled by her biological parents. And they want her back"--

Amos Decker and his FBI partner Alex Jamison are visiting Decker's hometown of Burlington, Ohio, when he's approached by Meryl Hawkins-- the first person Decker ever arrested for murder back when he was a young detective. A dozen years in prison have left Hawkins unrecognizably aged and terminally ill, but one thing hasn't changed: he maintains he never committed the murders. Could it be possible that Decker made a mistake all those years ago? Digging...

Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. Every hour, says Doerr, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear. Yet at the same time children, surveying territory that is entirely new to them, push back the darkness, form fresh memories, and remake the world. Set on four continents, stories...

Canaan is a quiet city on an idyllic world, hemmed in by high walls, but every twelve years the town breaks out in a chaos of bloody violence, after which all the people undergo the Forgetting, in which they are left without any trace of memory of themselves, their families, or their lives--but somehow seventeen-year-old Nadia has never forgotten, and she is determined to find out what causes it and how to put a stop to the Forgetting forever.