No one's ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office....

He lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from society, which will destroy him if he is ever seen. She dwells in seclusion, a fugitive from enemies who will do her harm if she is ever found. But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives. Something more than chance — and nothing less than destiny — has brought them together in a world whose hour of reckoning is fast approaching.

Many of us are living with the sense that things are not right with the world and are in a state of spiritual PTSD. Sarah Wilson argues that this sense of despair and disconnection is ironically what unites us. Drawing on science, literature, philosophy and the wisdom of some experts, and her personal journey, Wilson offers a hopeful path forward to the life we love.

"A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another ... They make a promise to climb the mountain, but--over the course of the next seven years--it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their...

When a man becomes stranded after an airplane crash, he must decide whether to remain in his makeshift camp or to venture through the unknown in hopes of survival.

"Dora Frenhofer, a once successful but now aging and embittered no velist, knows her mind is going. She is determined, however, to finish her final book, and reverse her fortunes, before time runs out. Alone in her London home during the pandemic, she creates, and is in turn created by, the fascinating real characters from her own life. Like a twenty-first-century Scheherazade, Dora spins stories to ward off her end. From New Delhi to New York, Copenhagen...

"Team Human is a manifesto--a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff's most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together--not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money,...

"In a moment of crisis, Ellis Abbey leaves her daughter, Viola, unattended--for just a few minutes. But when she returns, Viola is gone. A breaking point in an already fractured marriage, Viola's abduction causes Ellis to disappear as well--into grief, guilt, and addiction. Convinced she can only do more harm to her family, Ellis leaves her husband and young sons, burying her desperate ache for her children deeper with every step into the mountain...

"When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into [an] ... exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another"--

"Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and...