After a failed marriage and miscarriage, Maggie Wentworth and her sister Allison relocate from the noise and stressful pace of Manhattan to rural upstate New York, where they hope to find a simpler, more meaningful life. The diaries discovered in a steamer trunk in the attic of the old Victorian house they bought, brings Maggie into spiritual contact with a woman much like herself, who lived there fifty years earlier.

Members of the order, founded in 1845 in Michigan, offer insight into a neglected part of feminist research as they deal with the same issues addressed by secular women, among them power, economic autonomy, friendship and spirituality, socialization, and professional commitment. They also discuss less general themes such as their relationship with sister communities and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and the life, duty and experience of the nuns. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Joss Whedon's work presents various representations of home spaces that give depth to his stories and storytelling. Through the spaceship in Firefly, a farmhouse in Avengers: Age of Ultron or Whedon's own house in Much Ado About Nothing, his work collectively offers audiences the opportunity to question the ways we relate to and inhabit homes. Focusing on his television series, films and comics, this collection of new essays explores the diversity of home spaces in Whedon's many 'verses, and the complexity these spaces afford the narratives, characters, objects and relationships within them.

An evocative and exquisitely written debut novel about family, empire and money. Impressive in its scope and ambition, this first novel is at once a family saga, a book that reimagines the myth of the empire, and a history of objects. The Echo Chamber is narrated by fifty-four- year-old Evie Steppman, who grew up in Nigeria in the 1950s during the last decade of British rule. As a child, Evie exhibited extraordinarily acute powers of hearing; now, alone in an attic in Scotland that is filled with objects from her past and with her powers of hearing starting to fade, she sets out to record her history before it all disintegrates into a meaningless din. Tales of the twelfth-century mapmaker in Palermo, stories whispered by embittered expatriates, and eyewitness accounts from Nigeria's civil war mingle with Evie's memories of her childhood, of her grandfather, a watchmaker who attempted to forge a mechanical likeness of his dead wife, and of her travels across America. Williams's interest in history and storytelling and his talent for evoking multiple voices will remind readers of the work of David Mitchell, Peter Carey, and Jonathan Safran Foer.