LETRAS

October 1942: it’s been two years since Kate Rees was sent to Paris on a British Secret Service mission to assassinate Hitler. Since then, she has left spycraft behind to take a training job as a sharpshooting instructor in the Scottish Highlands. But her quiet life is violently disrupted when Colonel Stepney, her former handler, drags her back into the fray for a risky three-pronged mission in Paris. Each task is more dangerous than the next: Deliver a package of forbidden biological material. Assassinate a high-ranking German operative whose knowledge of invasion plans could turn the tide of the war against the Allies. Rescue a British agent who once saved Kate’s life—and get out. Kate will encounter sheiks and spies, poets and partisans, as she races to keep up with the constantly shifting nature of her assignment, showing every ounce of her Oregonian grit in the process.

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.

In this entertaining young readers edition of the environmental studies classic, Michael Pollan demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a reciprocal relationship. He links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, energy, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, coffee, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also helped them to thrive.

A powerful exploration of how we pay attention that will transform the ways we connect with one another – at home, at work, and beyond. Paying attention is a crucial human skill, yet many of us have forgotten how to listen carefully and observe intentionally. Deluged by social media and hobbled by the increasing social isolation it fosters, we need to rediscover the deeply human ways we connect with others.

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party never seems to end, he's often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him--that he's a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby's just across the bay.