Feeling at the top of her game when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease, Harvard psychologist Alice Howland struggles to find meaning and purpose in her life as her concept of self gradually slips away.

Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who brings to life Bob's long-harbored...

Prof. Brandt Savage--grandson of the legendary action hero Doc Savage--is forced into a top-secret training program where he discovers his true calling...as the perfect assassin. Dr. Brandt Savage is on sabbatical from the University of Chicago. Instead of doing solo fieldwork in anthropology, the gawky, bespectacled PhD finds himself enrolled in a school where he is the sole pupil. His professor, "Meed," is demanding. She's also his captor. Savage...

Presents the hilarious and incisive story of Paul, a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, who, outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, is plagued by indignities as he tries to right the world's wrongs.

Joining a team researching a prehistoric ceremonial burial of a human woman and a part-human, part-Neanderthal child on Gibralter, forensics specialist Professor Gideon Oliver is confronted by all-too-modern murder when two suspicious deaths rock Gibralter.

"Doug, the husband of the [heir to a historic estate that once housed an arts colony], desperately needs the colony files to get his stalled academic career back on track. But what he discovers when he finally gets his hands on them is more than he bargained for. Doug may never learn the house's secrets, but the reader will, as Makkai leads us on a ... journey into the past of this eccentric family"--

Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can't afford his mortgage, he's exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won't speak to him. And then there's the money--the small fortune his late wife, Francine, kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children. Those children are Ethan, an anxious recluse living off his mother's money on a choice plot of Brooklyn real estate, and Maggie, a would-be...

Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him. He's a meek, stuffy doctorate student, and she's a brilliant, beautiful bohemian with limitless talent and imagination. Yet on the surface their marriage seemed perfectly tranquil. Then one night Sandrine is found dead in their bed from a deadly overdose of pain medication and alcohol, and Samuel is accused of poisoning her. As the truth of their turbulent marriage comes to light, Samuel must...