An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park “Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.”—Hampton Sides, author of The Wide Wide Sea “With taut prose and sublime storytelling, Kahler crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking.”—Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures. As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder. Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

What if Eve had said, "No?" What if another had taken the fruit and only half of humanity had fallen? A breath-taking vision of the heart of God and humankinds' unbroken relationship with Him in the Garden of Eden. When Eve rejects the serpent's temptation, all of creation breathes a sigh of relief, but years later another is asked the same question and their answer will tear Paradise apart. How will the fallen relate to the unfallen? And how will God treat those who have spurned His perfect will? A magnificent story of sin and grace, relationship and rupture, which reveals the beauty of God and the misery of life lived apart from Him. But always there is the promise of redemption!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic true crime story of the most successful bootlegger in American history and the murder that shocked the nation, from the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy “Gatsby-era noir at its best.”—Erik Larson An ID Book Club Selection • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a multi-millionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers," writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, host at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new cars for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States. Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt is determined to bring him down. Willebrandt's bosses at the Justice Department hired her right out of law school, assuming she'd pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintain with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she dispatches her best investigator, Franklin Dodge, to look into his empire. It's a decision with deadly consequences. With the fledgling FBI on the case, Remus is quickly imprisoned for violating the Volstead Act. Her husband behind bars, Imogene begins an affair with Dodge. Together, they plot to ruin Remus, sparking a bitter feud that soon reaches the highest levels of government--and that can only end in murder. Combining deep historical research with novelistic flair, The Ghosts of Eden Park is the unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story of a rags-to-riches entrepreneur and a long-forgotten heroine, of the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, and of the infinite human capacity to deceive. Praise for The Ghosts of Eden Park “An exhaustively researched, hugely entertaining work of popular history that . . . exhumes a colorful crew of once-celebrated characters and restores them to full-blooded life. . . . [Abbott’s] métier is narrative nonfiction and—as this vibrant, enormously readable book makes clear—she is one of the masters of the art.”—The Wall Street Journal “Satisfyingly sensational and thoroughly researched.”—The Columbus Dispatch “Absorbing . . . a Prohibition-era page-turner.”—Chicago Tribune

Do you long for a more honest, imaginative, and Scripture-rich companion for the Advent season? A devotional willing to acknowledge the darkness of exile and the brokenness you see around and within, so you might rejoice more fully in the arrival of Jesus, the Light of the World? In Advent for Exiles songwriter and storyteller Caroline Cobb weaves together Scripture readings, song lyrics, poetic prose, biblical imagery, and responsive exercises to help you: break away from the hurried holiday pace, and daily stoke your anticipation for Jesus’s coming engage both your mind and your imagination in the truth of God’s Word walk in the shoes of the Old Testament exiles, linking arms with them as they ache for the Messiah travel the Advent road from darkness to daybreak, exile to homecoming, and wilderness to a flourishing garden explore how the full story of Scripture—from creation to Christ’s return—informs and expands your delight at Christmas As the darkness of a long night sharpens our longing for the sunrise, this book of daily readings for the month of December will whet your appetite for the promised Messiah and amplify your joy at His arrival. Come slow your pace, engage your imagination, and feast on the rich and relevant biblical theme of exile: His light shining in our darkness, His seed sprouting green in our wilderness. Allow yourself to experience the ache of Advent, so you might rejoice all the more at the beauty of Christ’s coming!

Paradise Lost: a Divine Comedy or Profane Bathos? (, Ai-ichigen) breaks the spell, awakening the dreamer. For living in our dreams, we struggle to live in Paradise. Darwin said the origin of species was by means of natural selection, the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life; & history has borne him out. Proceeding from a faulty & partial memory, it needs repeating & constant amending; yet it renders no progress: history affirms the blind & random nature of human events! Schooled that by the labors of our native intelligence, we alone could subdue Darwin, we have made nature pay for our great industry. Our mighty institutions embrace Darwinian principles making us highly competitive through fear & separation. Love & unification we spurn to maintain our competitive edge, believing that by keeping our independence, our freedom we secure; for space & time were limited. These beliefs, being empirical, we never question. But what if Darwin was wrong? if things don’t evolve? if life were vouchsafed? For science avers that nature is lawless. It follows no rules in having no point or purpose. Positing a cosmic intelligence steering nature offends science. All the laws & meanings we find in nature are what science gives it. Yet were point & purpose never any part of this world, then how could we know them or even possess them in ourselves? & that includes our native wits. So, science concedes that life is deterministic &, promptly, reality dissolves; for life, we know to be uncertain & rife with choices. What we dare not question, this book answers. Strangers here we have become, thinking life in Paradise could ever be a struggle. Having turned fantasy into reality, Paradise is lost on us!

KISSES AND CURSES MADE FOR BEWITCHING BEDFELLOWS Like a specter, Detective Armand LaMorte moved with the shadows, stealthy and secretive, and was an expert tracker. Crescent City criminals didn’t have a chance when he was on their trail—and no woman had a chance of resisting his native-born allure…. Eden Bennett was no exception. In her darkest hours, Armand offered her strength and safety while a decades-old mystery threatened to destroy what was left of her family. Ensconced in Armand’s cloak of security, she knew no danger. But a killer was closing in…on them both.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary, unforgettable” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) memoir of redemption and second chances amidst America’s mass incarceration epidemic, from a member of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and beatings from his mother worsened, which sent him on a downward spiral. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to survive, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of nineteen, full of anger and despair. Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next. During his nineteen-year incarceration, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, Senghor discovered literature, meditation, self-examination, and the kindness of others—tools he used to confront the demons of his past, forgive the people who hurt him, and begin atoning for the wrongs he had committed. Upon his release at age thirty-eight, Senghor became an activist and mentor to young men and women facing circumstances like his. His work in the community and the courage to share his story led him to fellowships at the MIT Media Lab and the Kellogg Foundation and invitations to speak at events like TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival. In equal turns, Writing My Wrongs is a page-turning portrait of life in the shadow of poverty, violence, and fear; an unforgettable story of redemption; and a compelling witness to our country’s need for rethinking its approach to crime, prison, and the men and women sent there.