Set in a near future where disease is mostly cured, a woman given a terminal diagnosis becomes the object of a reality program that wants to televise her final days. She resists being packaged for entertainment, unaware that a reporter bearing covert cameras is recording her without consent.

Three extended nonfiction essays look closely at distinct episodes where people tried to redirect, constrain, or rebuild around powerful natural forces: efforts on a major river system, responses to a volcanic eruption, and work against mountain debris flows.

Set in Laos in the 1970s, an elderly physician with little formal forensic experience is appointed state coroner. He confronts suspicious deaths amid political upheaval and scarce institutional support, and must piece together causes and motives while navigating party politics and local customs.

An aging Midwestern couple prepares for a final family Christmas while their three adult children, each entangled in personal and professional crises, converge around longstanding resentments and private failures.

A retelling of the early life of Merlin that frames his psychic visions and uncertain parentage within the fractured, post-Roman kingdoms of Britain.

A 15-year-old math-minded narrator who describes his world through exact observations decides to investigate the mystery of a neighbor's dead dog. The investigatory quest exposes family tensions and forces the narrator to navigate social rules and sources of fear while trying to hold to his own systems of logic.

A murder is discovered on the grounds of Belle Vie, a working antebellum plantation in Louisiana that now operates as an event venue. The estate’s manager becomes entangled in the official investigation and the local upheaval that follows, with labor relations and the plantation’s history intensifying the stakes.

An eleven-year-old English boy discovers on his birthday that he belongs to an ancient group of guardians opposed to a rising Dark. Faced with recovering lost magical talismans and learning his new role, he must act quickly as the balance between Light and Dark tightens.

Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg, occupies himself by researching a centuries-old royal mystery: whether King Richard III was truly guilty of the crimes long attributed to him.