From the author of My Kind of Crazy comes an uplifting YA contemporary about two teens on an unexpected journey to forge their own paths.
WHERE THE ROAD LEADS US
by Robin Reul
Sourcebooks, April 2021
Jack has always known what he wanted: to follow in his father’s footsteps to Columbia University and become a doctor. But when his father unexpectedly dies, Jack’s careful plans start to unravel. Then, on the eve of leaving for college, he discovers a letter his father wrote to his estranged brother, Alex, stamped and unsent. Jack sees an opportunity: if he goes to San Francisco and finds his brother, he might be able to heal the past and truly move forward.
Hallie is sitting on huge news that she isn’t ready to share with anyone. And she doesn’t want to think about it, either; she’s just learned that her closest friend from her online cancer support group has taken a turn for the worst. There’s a small window to travel to Oregon to see him and say goodbye, but she knows her protective parents would never let her go. Hallie’s life suddenly feels like it’s spinning out of control, so she does the only thing she can think of: she buys a bus ticket to Oregon, and tells her parents she’s going to a friend’s for the weekend.
Jack and Hallie had a class together years ago, but haven’t seen each other since. But fate puts them into the same rideshare to the bus terminal, setting off a whirlwind road trip that may lead them to their own true selves…and maybe to each other.
Robin Reul has been writing since she was in early elementary school, when she used to make her own book club flyers for her classmates and then pen them original stories. Though she grew up on movie sets and worked for many years in the film and television industry both as an actress and in motion picture development, she ultimately decided to focus her attention on writing young adult novels. She lives in Los Angeles suburbia.
A return trip to the South Pole is an impossible dream for many of us – but the medic Carmen Possnig did just that. On behalf of the European Space Agency, she spent a year in the heart of the Antarctica to find out what it’s like to live in extreme weather conditions, with a distinct lower level of oxygen and in complete isolation from the rest of the world. With twelve other scientists, she spent the winter at the Concordia research station in the eternal ice. There, she not only encountered the breathtaking beauty of the most extreme continent on Earth, but also her own limits: Sharing a tight space with other people for twelve months, in a world that remains dark for months on end and where the temperature drops to -80°C, requires a huge physical and mental effort. Carmen Possnig’s personal and witty travel report, and its wealth of photographs, opens up a window onto an alien world – making us marvel at our planet’s diversity, and at how adaptable human nature can be.
During the final months of the Weimar Republic, a highly regarded doctor disappears. His sports car is found abandoned on the shores of a lake near Berlin. The homicide division investigates and discovers that the respectable medic’s carefully cultivated façade has been hiding a shady double life, whose trail leads from Berlin all the way to Barcelona. Oliver Hilmes has reconstructed this sensational and puzzling case from files discovered in Berlin’s regional archive. Enriched with fictional touches, Dr Mühe’s Disappearance is the gripping and ingenious story of the search for truth, and of the dark side of middle-class life on the eve of dictatorship.
When Betty and John meet in London at a rally for nuclear disarmament, both are living with secrets about what that war did to them. After fleeing from Germany with her father in 1945, Betty lives with her memories of the Russian occupation, a young Russian officer, and the mysterious disappearance of her sister. John too, is plagued by flashbacks to his time as a translator for the top-secret T-force which uncovered Nazi scientific secrets, and to a young German woman who was brutally murdered, and for whose murder he was framed unless he talked… As their relationship develops, their lives unfold, unravel and entwine. But when a man from the past surfaces, he threatens to reveal secrets. Secrets which will embroil them in the Cold War and threaten their very existence.
Faiza has it all: a handsome husband, three beautiful children, and an idyllic lifestyle in Wimbledon Village. But then – in the middle of her first botox appointment – she gets a phone call from Tom telling her he’s lost his lucrative banking job. Her world starts to crumble. Tom thinks they will be fine – after all, they have their emergency savings to fall back on. Faiza knows better: she’s spent it. Desperate to avoid telling her husband or her friends that they are now penniless, Faiza decides to keep up appearances – and earn back the money before Tom has noticed its gone. In the process of trying to put it back, can she find the Faiza she used to be, before the trappings of her life overwhelmed her? And then, as one lie spirals into another, she starts to realise that she’s not the only one whose perfect life hides something much darker…