Arcadia Public Library

"It's 2 AM on a Saturday night in the spring of 2001, and twenty-eight-year old Cecily Gardner sits alone in a dive bar on New York's Lower East Side, questioning her life. Feeling lonesome and homesick for the Midwest, she wonders if she'll ever make it as a reporter in the big city - and whether she made a terrible mistake in breaking up with her longtime boyfriend Matthew. As Cecily reaches for the phone to call him, she hears a guy on the barstool...

The lives of a cast of disparate New Yorkers are touched by a series of killings carried out by a man bereaved by the loss of his wife and children in the Twin Towers who sets out to wreak what he thinks of as a sacrificial vengeance on New York by becoming a terrorist himself.

Pam, Daniel, and Joe might be the worst punk band on the Lower East Side. Struggling to scrape together enough cash and musical talent to make it, they are waylaid by surprising arrivals, a daughter for Pam and Daniel; a solo hit single for Joe. As the '90s wane, the three friends share in one another's successes, working together to elevate Joe's superstardom and raise baby Flora. On September 11, 2001, the city's unfathomable devastation coincided...

"Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers. For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive,...

The last time Jonah saw Nor ed-Din, he was lying face-down in a pool of icy water in the Khyber Pass. He thought he had killed him, but now the trail of betrayal has come full circle. Friends since childhood, Jonah and Nor ed-Din had been groomed for the intelligence service, with Jonah as handler for Nor's penetration of ISI. But when Nor is cut loose after the Soviets are forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, the pattern of engagement and abandonment...