George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.

When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Nate Yellow Tail is one of the survivors of the deadly revenge murders of Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Five years after the massacre on the Blackfeet reservation, Nate finds himself in the hospital after a terrible accident that should’ve killed him and that nearly killed his best friend Sebby, who is hanging onto life in a room a few doors down. Given the chance to reset his life, Nate steps up–and into a camper van with three older Blackfeet, to find the bones of the lone boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and repatriate him home. The problem is, when they get the bones, something terrible has escaped with them.

Professional thief and inveterate trickster Kinch Na Shannack has always enjoyed a good book. But now his life, and the future of all of Manreach, depends on him deciphering a very bad book indeed; a stolen, sentient tome that tries to kill him every time he opens it—and often when it’s closed.

A year ago, Cass, Peter, and Dandy were strangers in the seaside town of Maple Bay, Nova Scotia, who teamed up to search for a missing stash of pirate jewels. Though they didn’t find the goods, Cass wrote a book about the experience. The night before it’s set to publish, Dandy’s cousin, Cookie, tells Dandy and Cass that she knows about more lost treasure on nearby Breakneck Island. The MacLeary family took care of Breakneck’s lighthouse for generations before disappearing in 1932, Cookie says, and rumors claim they left behind a fortune. The next morning, Cookie is found dead at home. Meanwhile, Peter becomes involved with a colleague, who asks Peter to explore Breakneck Island with him one-on-one. Everyone winds up landing on the shores of the island on the same day, only to discover they have some ruthless competition for the MacLeary family’s lost fortune.

When a fallen tree causes a five-car pileup on a dark, forested road, the occupants seek refuge in the only place around: a near-empty dive bar. With no cell service and a storm raging outside, the five strangers are forced to wait it out together. But something is off about the woman sitting alone at the bar. One of the drivers swears they saw her standing in the road right before the crash, and there’s something about the woods outside that fills them with an unnatural dread. As psychological unease creeps in and tensions escalate, the group becomes desperate to unravel the threads that tie them together before facing whatever waits for them outside in the night.

Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.