An immortal swordsman kills the bandits who were beating a stranger, then sits down on the verge to wait for the stranger to freeze to death, because a dead wielder is a free sword. He lasts about forty minutes before he gets up and builds a fire.

A cremation worker takes a pair of bolt cutters to an unattended body, posts one finger to a high school principal, and explains afterwards that she meant it as a finger pointing at somebody. It is the most sensible thing any adult does in this novel.

An old woman sells herbs at the Woodhaven market in a dress of a yellow so vivid nobody else in town can manage it. She is the least dangerous person in the book and the first one hanged. The seventeenth-century half of this novel is far better than a mass-market thriller had any obligation to be.

In the back of a studio SUV, a publicist coaches a twenty-one-year-old on how to describe his costar to reporters. Ambitious is terrible. Careful is not great, but caring is wonderful. Beautiful is excellent, though he must not say it, only show it with his eyes. John Green's first adult novel begins where most Hollywood novels end.

A widow sits alone in a dark museum gallery for three years because it is the only place she can cry unobserved. That room, not the time travel, is where this sequel actually lives. Niffenegger has come back to Chicago to write about what people do in the hours before somebody dies.

A famous novelist sits in a locked office clicking through the bestseller list one title at a time, reading synopses, taking notes, hunting for something fresh enough to sell and familiar enough to be safe. He has three months to deliver. He does not have a story. Everything that follows grows out of that empty afternoon.

A contract killer stands in a category three storm, soaked to the skin, politely negotiating with a lion the size of a horse. Islington's cyberpunk standalone is short, savage and much stranger than its premise suggests.