The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family’s roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion—both toward and away from us—and it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Ada Limón reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans they’ve crawled into.

In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limón suggests that we must cleave to the world as it “keep[s] opening before us,” for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person’s mouth “is the same / mouth as everyone’s, all trying to say the same thing.” For Limón, it’s the saying—individual and collective—that transforms each of us into “a wound overcome by wonder,” that allows “the wind itself” to be our “own wild whisper.”

The coauthor of the international best-selling book The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, Beverly Whipple joins neuroscientist Barry R. Komisaruk and endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores to view orgasm through the lenses of behavioral neuroscience along with cognitive and physiological sciences. Covering every type of sexual peak experience in women and men from intense to phantom, this fascinating and comprehensive work illuminates the hows, whats, and wherefores of orgasm.

The authors explain how and why orgasms happen, why they fail to happen, and what brain and body events are put into play at the moment of orgasm. They also describes the genital-brain connection, how the brain produces orgasms, how aging affects orgasm, and the effects of prescription medication, street drugs, hormones, disorders, and diseases.

Lovely Alice Lacey is a true Incomparable, and her marriage to the Duke of Ferrant is set to be the event of the Season. No one knows that she secretly loves someone else. No one, that is, but a clever talking mynah bird who announces her intimacies at the worst possible moment!

Now Alice’s marriage is off to a decidedly frigid start, and her new husband is soon rumored to be seeing another woman. But the more her world turns inside out, the more Alice discovers that the man she thought she loved was never what he appeared to be, and the man she married is something far more than she’d hoped. Now all she must do is convince her husband that their match was meant to be . . .

Nancy Herkness invites readers back to Sanctuary, West Virginia, in Book Three of the award-winning Whisper Horse series.

Fleeing professional scandal and a broken engagement, veterinarian Hannah Linden abandons Chicago for the mountain town of Sanctuary, West Virginia, hoping to put her troubles with men and the media behind her. But when she encounters world-famous chef Adam Bosch, she finds herself increasingly drawn to the charming but darkly complex man and his troubled teenage son, Matt. Adam, a recovering alcoholic, fears he can never be a worthy father to the surly, distant boy he has just come to know, and enlists Hannah’s help in his struggle to connect with his son.

The emotional storms weathered by a mother and daughter yield a profound new understanding in a moving short story by the bestselling, award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists.

When Zikora, a DC lawyer from Nigeria, tells her equally high-powered lover that she’s pregnant, he abandons her. But it’s Zikora’s demanding, self-possessed mother, in town for the birth, who makes Zikora feel like a lonely little girl all over again. Stunned by the speed with which her ideal life fell apart, she turns to reflecting on her mother’s painful past and struggle for dignity. Preparing for motherhood, Zikora begins to see more clearly what her own mother wants for her, for her new baby, and for herself.

Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. The cottage his mother had rented for three and sixpence a week had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surrounded by a lovely half-acre garden and, most importantly, it was big enough for the seven children in her care. It was here, in a verdant valley tucked into the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, that Laurie Lee learned to look at life with a painter’s eye and a poet’s heart—qualities of vision that, decades later, would make him one of England’s most cherished authors.

In this vivid recollection of a magical time and place, water falls from the scullery pump “sparkling like liquid sky.” Autumn is more than a season—it is a land eternally aflame, like Moses’s burning bush.