ARLEENE

When, at age forty-six, Nancy Pelosi, mother of five, asked her youngest daughter if she should run for Congress, Alexandra Pelosi answered: “Mother, get a life!” And so Nancy did, and what a life it has been. In The Art of Power, Pelosi describes for the first time what it takes to make history—not only as the first woman to ascend to the most powerful legislative role in our nation, but to pass laws that would save lives and livelihoods, from the emergency rescue of the economy in 2008 to transforming health care.

Only 25 and newly crowned, Elizabeth vows to rule the country as both queen and king. But her counselors continually press her to form an advantageous marriage and produce an heir. Though none of the suitors have yet worked their way to her throne, the dashing - though married - Lord Robert lays claim to Elizabeth's heart.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals - and a young boy - whose lives intersect in Paris.

In the snowbound city of Kiev, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.

Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns that a local teenage girl has gone missing.

On Prince Edward Island, aging siblings Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt a boy to help with chores around the farm. But when Mathew arrives at the train platform, the only living creature in sight, legs dangling from the piles of shingles where she sits, is a freckled, green-eyed, redheaded little girl. Mathew senses immediately that life at Green Gables is going to be very different. And how right he is.

Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart.

Dear Reader: When I think of Heart of the Night, I think of one of the characters in the book, late-night disc jockey Jared Snow. So do many of my readers, if the mail they send me is any indication. It's his voice - always his voice - there on the radio, as soothing as a massage and twice as sexy. For me, Jared Snow is also a concept, the idea that a single voice on the radio is heard by many different people, with a different effect on each.