Books

Simon and Robyn are a young married couple whose life is going just as planned until a chance encounter with an acquaintance from Simon's high school sends their world into a harrowing tailspin. Simon doesn't recognize Gordo at first, but after a series of uninvited encounters and mysterious gifts prove troubling, a horrifying secret from the past is uncovered after more than 20 years. As Robyn learns the unsettling truth about what happened between Simon and Gordo, she starts to question: how well do we really know the people closest to us, and are past bygones ever really bygones?

In a world that is increasingly dependent on electricity, a power outage seems like an awful predicament, as we can't imagine ourselves living in a world deprived of electricity. With this in mind, after a lingering power outage, a father and his two daughters will find themselves trapped in a completely different reality; one that will change their lives forever. But, is this outage regional, or does it affect the entire country? In the end--as these, and other, more crucial questions require an answer--no one can tell if the family has what it takes to survive; nonetheless, they will still have to put to the test their skills, their adaptability and endurance, but above all, find the courage to challenge the integrity of their familial bonds.

"Remember" is the contemporary story of Zev, who discovers that the Nazi guard who murdered his family some 70 years ago is living in America under an assumed identity. Despite the obvious challenges, Zev sets out on a mission to deliver long-delayed justice with his own trembling hand. What follows is a remarkable cross-continent road-trip with surprising consequences.

Three time periods - young adolescence, mid-teen and young adult - in the life of black-American Chiron is presented. When a child, Chiron lives with his single, crack addict mother Paula in a crime ridden neighborhood in Miami. Chiron is a shy, withdrawn child largely due to his small size and being neglected by his mother, who is more concerned about getting her fixes and satisfying her carnal needs than taking care of him. Because of these issues, Chiron is bullied, the slurs hurled at him which he doesn't understand beyond knowing that they are meant to be hurtful. Besides his same aged Cuban-American friend Kevin, Chiron is given what little guidance he has in life from a neighborhood drug dealer named Juan, who can see that he is neglected, and Juan's caring girlfriend Teresa, whose home acts as a sanctuary away from the bullies and away from Paula's abuse. With this childhood as a foundation, Chiron may have a predetermined path in life, one that will only be magnified in terms of its problems when he reaches his difficult teen years when peer pressure affects what he and many of his peers do, unless he follows Juan's advice of truly making his own decisions for himself.

Seventeen years after she was abducted by a stranger named Benjamin McKay (Jason Isaacs), twenty-three-year-old Leanne Dargon (Saoirse Ronan), who has been in his captivity all this time, is discovered, and eventually reunited with her biological parents, Marcy (Cynthia Nixon) and Glen Dargon (David Warshofsky), while Ben is now in prison charged with her kidnapping. Ben was able to hide her locked in his basement all of this time, telling her that he saved her from world destruction, which she would have no reason not to believe. Leanne has no true recollection of her time before Ben, who renamed her "Leia", and thus is the only family she has ever known. Over those seventeen years, Marcy and Glen dealt with the abduction in different ways, Marcy, whose primary focus was and still is Leanne, to the point of never having returned to work. Marcy, Glen, and Leia enter into their reunion with this history. So while Marcy and Glen have a memory of their six-year-old daughter who they want back in a young adult form, Leia only sees in front of her two strangers. Their parent/offspring relationship is thus formal and strained at best. But it takes a turn when Marcy discovers just how much of an attachment Leia still has to Ben, who Marcy only sees as the man who destroyed their family. Marcy goes to extreme measures to get back the "Leanne" she so desperately wants, at the possible expense of everything else in her life.

Alice Howland is a renowned linguistics professor happily married with three grown children. All that begins to change when she strangely starts to forget words and then more. When her doctor diagnoses her with Early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, Alice and her family's lives face a harrowing challenge as this terminal degenerative neurological ailment slowly progresses to an inevitable conclusion they all dread. Along the way, Alice struggles to not only to fight the inner decay, but to make the most of her remaining time to find the love and peace to make simply living worthwhile.

The Girl on the Train is the story of Rachel Watson's life post-divorce. Every day, she takes the train in to work in New York, and every day the train passes by her old house. The house she lived in with her husband, who still lives there, with his new wife and child. As she attempts to not focus on her pain, she starts watching a couple who live a few houses down -- Megan and Scott Hipwell. She creates a wonderful dream life for them in her head, about how they are a perfect happy family. And then one day, as the train passes, she sees something shocking, filling her with rage. The next day, she wakes up with a horrible hangover, various wounds and bruises, and no memory of the night before. She has only a feeling: something bad happened. Then come the TV reports: Megan Hipwell is missing. Rachel becomes invested in the case and trying to find out what happened to Megan, where she is, and what exactly she herself was up to that same night Megan went missing.

Filmed over 12 years with the same cast,

Forty-six year old Diane Després - "Die" - has been widowed for three years. Considered white trash by many, Die does whatever she needs, including strutting her body in front of male employers who will look, to make an honest living. That bread-winning ability is affected when she makes the decision to remove her only offspring, fifteen year old Steve Després, from her previously imposed institutionalization, one step below juvenile detention. She institutionalized him shortly following her husband's death due to Steve's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and his violent outbursts. He was just kicked out of the latest in a long line of facilities for setting fire to the cafeteria, in turn injuring another boy. She made this decision to deinstitutionalize him as she didn't like the alternative, sending him into more restrictive juvenile detention from which he would probably never be rehabilitated. However, with this deinstitutionalization, she has to take care of him which means only being able to do home based work. Despite they always yelling expletives at each other and Steve sometimes demonstrating those violent tendencies toward her, Die and Steve truly do love each other, his emotions which are sometimes manifested as an Oedipus complex especially as he seems to need her complete attention most specifically when it is being directed at possible male suitors. Their lives, both individually and as a family, are affected with the entrance of two of their neighbors. The first is Paul, a lawyer, who does have that sexual interest in Die as he tries to help Steve through his legal problems. The second and more important is Kyla, who lives across the street with her husband Patrick and their adolescent daughter, they who are in transit in their life to wherever Patrick's job will take them. Kyla is a high school teacher on sabbatical as she deals with her own emotional issues, which are manifested in stuttering whenever she feels incapable of dealing with her life. Kyla may find that she needs the Després as much as they need her.

Aspiring actress serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions and jazz musician Sebastian scrapes by playing cocktail-party gigs in dingy bars. But as success mounts, they are faced with decisions that fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.

On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne reports that his wife, Amy, has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick's portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

Ireland, early 1950s. Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is a young woman working in a grocery shop. She has greater ambitions and moves to Brooklyn, New York, leaving her mother and sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), behind. She is terribly homesick but eventually settles down, finding a job, studying to be a bookkeeper and meeting a nice young Italian man, Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). Things are going well, but then she learns that Rose has died, and decides to return to Ireland, temporarily. She and Tony hastily get married, and then she sets off back to Ireland, alone. Life is about to get complicated.

Lee Chandler is a brooding, irritable loner who works as a handyman for a Boston apartment block. One damp winter day he gets a call summoning him to his hometown, north of the city. His brother's heart has given out suddenly, and he's been named guardian to his 16-year-old nephew. As if losing his only sibling and doubts about raising a teenager weren't enough, his return to the past re-opens an unspeakable tragedy.

A middle-aged couple from Scotland finds refuge in a man-made cave deep in the wilderness of the lush and undisturbed French woodlands. As a result, renouncing every ounce of her human nature and deeply traumatised after the loss of her only son, the mother encloses herself in this dark and dank cavity in the hope of escaping the frightful hole of depression. However, matters will rapidly deteriorate, as she becomes more and more unwilling, or, better yet, unable just to be on her feet, reducing herself to a human-like feral animal. But, in the end, defeated and utterly hopeless, the anguished father will make his last stand, as he tries to salvage the remains of their shattered life; nevertheless, is there any hope left?

In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

At a foster-care facility for at-risk teenagers, Grace is a young counselor trying to do her best for kids who often have been pulled from the worst kinds of home situations. Even then, life is not easy as Grace and her colleagues care for kids who are too often profoundly scarred, even as they try to have lives of their own. Now, things are coming to a head as Grace readies for marriage even as some her charges are coming to major turning points in their lives. To cope, Grace will have to make difficult perceptions and decisions that could put her career, and more importantly her charges, at dire risk.

The film is divided into six segments. (1) "Pasternak": While being on a plane, a model and a music critic realise they have a common acquaintance called Pasternak. Soon they discover that every passenger and crew member on board know Pasternak. Is this coincidence? (2) "The Rats": A waitress recognizes her client - it's the loan shark who caused a tragedy in her family. The cook suggests mixing rat poison with his food, but the waitress refuses. The stubborn cook, however, decides to proceed with her plan. (3) "The Strongest": Two drivers on a lone highway have an argument with tragic consequences. (4) "Little Bomb": A demolition engineer has his car towed by a truck for parking in a wrong place and he has an argument with the employee of the towing company. This event destroys his private and professional life, and he plots revenge against the corrupt towing company and the city hall. (5) "The Proposal": A reckless son of a wealthy family has an overnight hit-and-run accident, in which a pregnant woman gets killed. He wakes his parents up and his father calls the lawyer. The parents propose to pay the groundkeeper to take the blame for the boy. Soon the father discovers that he is a victim of extortion of his lawyer and the public prosecutor in charge of the investigation. What will be his decision? (6) "Until Death Do Us Apart": During the wedding party, the bride discovers that her newlywed husband has been cheating on her with one of the guests, and she decides to pay him back.

A man begins to suspect that his long-distance girlfriend whom he met on the Internet has been living in the same city as him, and he sets out looking for her.