Narnia... the land beyond the wardrobe, the secret country known only to Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy... the place where the adventure begins.Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia.But soon Edmund and then Peter and Susan discover the Magic and meet Aslan, the Great Lion, for themselves. In the blink of an eye, their lives are changed forever.A fully illustrated version of the most popular book in The Chronicles of Narnia, with glowing full page artwork and an abridged text for easier reading.

    The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

    A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.

    In the process, he transformed both crime writing and the American language.Written during the war, The Lady in the Lake (1943) takes Philip Marlowe out of the seamy L.A. streets to the deceptive tranquility of the surrounding mountains, as the search for a businessman’s missing wife expands into an elegy of loneliness and loss. The darker tone typical of Chandler’s later fiction is evident in The Little Sister (1949), in which an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a seemingly naïve young woman from Manhattan, Kansas, are the key players in a plot that provides fuel for a bitter indictment of Hollywood and Chandler’s most savage portrayal of his adopted city.The Long Goodbye (1953), his most ambitious and self-revealing novel, uncovers a more anguished resonance in the Marlowe character, in a plot that hinges on the betrayal of friendship and the compromises of middle age. Playback (1958), written originally as a screenplay, is Chandler’s seventh and last novel.A special feature of this volume is Chandler’s long-unavailable screenplay for the film noir classic, Double Indemnity (1944), adapted from James M. Cain’s novel. Written with director Billy Wilder, it is one of the best screenplays in American cinema, masterful in construction and dialogue. Supplementing the volume, and providing a more personal glimpse of Chandler’s personality, is a selection of letters and essays—including “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which Chandler muses on his pulp roots and on the special qualities of his hero and style.

    Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy...Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty...Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year."Hard-bitten ... ingenious ... Ellroy segues into political intrigue without missing a beat." —The New York Times"Vastly entertaining." —Los Angeles Times"One hellishly exciting ride." —Detroit Free Press"A supremely controlled work of art." —The New York Times Book Review

    if indeed there were crimes.The youngest of forty - a child with no name and no past - she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden - in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights - she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.Then everything changes... and nothing changes.A young woman who has never known men - a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints - must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.

    His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.

    Mismatched partner cops Somerset and Mills are on the trail of a psychotic murderer who intends to avenge the seven deadly sins, starting with gluttony.

    Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

    Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

    Myst captivated the world when it was first conceived and created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller. Its extraordinary success has gone on to spawn Riven, Myst III Exile, and most recently, Uru: The Ages Beyond Myst. Devoted fans of these surreal adventure games gather yearly at "Mysterium" (whose event sites are spreading to other countries) to exchange game strategies, share stories, and meet up with old friends.The Myst Reader is a literary companion to the CD-ROM games and a compendium of the bestselling official Myst trilogy: The Book of Atrus, The Book of Ti'ana, and The Book of D'ni. Devoted fans and new players alike will be delighted to have three books in this mythic saga together for the first time in one value-priced volume, which will be published in time to coincide with the long-awaited release of Myst Revelations.

    Jane Roberts has contributed to The Oversoul Seven Trilogy as an author.Roberts was considered one of the most important psychics of the twentieth century.

    But from this generous act comes a tragedy which will haunt her for years.When, years later, Sara meets Brogan, a young Irishman working in England, she feels she has found a friend at last. But Brogan has a secret which he dare tell no one, not even Sara.And in a Dublin slum, Brogan's little sister Polly is growing up. The only girl in a family of boys, she knows herself to be much loved, but it is not until Sara begins to work at the Salvation Army children's home, Strawberry Fields, that the two girls meet - and Brogan's secret is told at last...

    Presenting three endearing favorites in classic children's literature, a Burnett anthology follows the stories of the contrary and curious Mary, the wise and brave Sarah, and the lovable young Lord Fauntleroy.

    Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events from that summer of 1981. Wise beyond his years, curious about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he is a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, memories that unexpectedly change when Brian comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth.

    The bestselling novels from the foremost philosopher of the modern age, this set includes Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

    Today her groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African-Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant African-American writers. This volume, with its companion, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings brings together for the first time all of Hurston's best writings in one authoritative set. "Folklore is the arts of the people," Hurston wrote, "before they find out that there is any such thing as art."

    One that looks human and exemplifies the ideal world he comes from, a world free from human nature's greed and cruelty. That creature would be "prot", as he calls himself, the newest patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute.Prot seems to know more than he should about faster-than-the-speed-of-light-travel. And besides drawing constellations as viewed from K-PAX, the name of his home planet, "prot" can describe its orbit around double suns in unpublished detail. Who is "prot" and where did he really come from? Why does he have the ability to cure severe mental cases? And to disappear at will? And to charm everyone he comes into contact with?Bizarre delusion or reality? Listen in as a psychiatrist who specializes in delusional behavior documents his sessions with the man from K-PAX.(P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

    His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao's regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man's days.

    Nozipo Maraire evokes the moving story of a mother reaching out to her daughter to share the lessons life has taught her and bring the two closer than ever before. Interweaving history and memories, disappointments and dreams, Zenzele tells the tales of Zimbabwe's struggle for independence and the men and women who shaped it: Zenzele's father, an outspoken activist lawyer; her aunt, a schoolteacher by day and secret guerrilla fighter by night; and her cousin, a maid and a spy.Rich with insight, history, and philosophy, Zenzele is a powerful and compelling story that is both revolutionary and revelatory--the story of one life that poignantly speaks of all lives.

    Based on the best-selling CD-ROM game, a fantasy novel fills out the lives of the game's characters, tracing the strange apprenticeship of Atrus to his father, Gehn, who wields the power to create worlds.

     In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl, and together they produce three children: Susan, an ambitious beauty, Billy, a brilliant homosexual, and Zoe, a wild child. Over the years, a web of tangled longings, love, inadequacies and unfulfilled dreams unfolds as Mary and Constantine's marriage fails and Susan, Billy, and Zoe leave to make families of their own. Zoe raises a child with the help of a transvestite, Billy makes a life with another man, and Susan raises a son conceived in secret, each extending the meaning of family and love. With the power of a Greek tragedy, the story builds to a heartbreaking crescendo, allowing a glimpse into contemporary life which will echo in one's heart for years to come.

    In a riveting new novel of wartime Cambodia and Vietnam--part thriller, part mystery, part heroic epic--the author of The Year of Living Dangerously offers the story of a likeable, brave, but ultimately mysterious war photographer who has disappeared into the jungles of Cambodia.

    Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

    This is a novel by the author of Hold Tight.

    Here, he confronts memories of his time at public school and relives the intense, passionate affair he shared with fellow student Stephen Walker. This forces him to come to terms with himself at last.

    People go shopping. To the movies. Everything is just as it should be. But not for long.By Sunday, civilization is in ruins. Adults have become murderously insane. One by one they become infected with a crazed, uncontrollable urge to slaughter the young—even their own children. Especially their own children.Will this be the way the world ends, in waves of madness and carnage? What will be left of our world as we know it? And who, if anyone, will survive?Terror follows terror in this apocalyptic nightmare vision by one of the most powerful talents in modern horror fiction. Prepare yourself for mankind’s final days of fear.

    Inspired by this gift, Thomas forms Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic band who find themselves on a magical tour that leads from reservation bars to Seattle and New York--and deep within their own souls.

    The Lost Scrapbook is a novel that passionately captures the contradictory richness of our historical slot, a time when feelings of belonging and exclusion can do bitter battle. Conjuring an unforgettable variety of voices, the book delves into lives touched by this tension, before it culminates in a confrontation between a trusting city and the local manufacturing company that both sustains and betrays it. Through the use of a prismatic storytelling form, The Lost Scrapbook finds a contemporary answer to the 19th century novel, evoking an entire world in all its richness and diversity. But by embodying the sense that we can best understand our world through witnessing the interworkings of whole communities, it is also something altogether new: The Lost Scrapbook may be the first "holistic" novel.

    In his final semester of law school Rudy Baylor is required to provide free legal advice to a group of senior citizens, and it is there that he meets his first "clients," Dot and Buddy Black. Their son, Donny Ray, is dying of leukemia, and their insurance company has flatly refused to pay for his medical treatments. While Rudy is at first skeptical, he soon realizes that the Blacks really have been shockingly mistreated by the huge company, and that he just may have stumbled upon one of the largest insurance frauds anyone's ever seen -- and one of the most lucrative and important cases in the history of civil litigation. The problem is, Rudy's flat broke, has no job, hasn't even passed the bar, and is about to go head-to-head with one of the best defense attorneys -- and powerful industries -- in America.

     READERS ARE LOVING THE MOUNTAIN! "Really enjoyed this book. Right from the start, it gripped your interest. Couldn't wait for times to get back to reading it!" - 5 STARS"Couldn't put this book down." - 5 STARS"Excellent story enjoyed reading it the twists and turns of the main characters keeping you entertained and wanting more thank you " - 5 STARS"Another brilliant book by this author based in Yorkshire again. Family saga at its best. Will definitely read more by this author" - 5 STARS****************************************************PASSIONS IGNITE AMIDST THE HARSH AND RUGGED HILLS OF YORKSHIRE...When Jake Tempest hears of jobs going building the new railway lines, he is drawn to Whernside in the Yorkshire countryside, and the mountain through which a tunnel is being carved.Beth Seymour is the one thing that lightens his harsh new life - but she has a husband and is trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage.As the construction of the railway progresses in the shadow of the mountain, complex passions play out...

    An English teacher at the naval academy, he is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and has a little son whom he loves. He sits in a mountain garden in Niterói, overlooking the ocean.As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee.Mark Helprin combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy in this "memoir" of a man whose life reads like the song of the twentieth century.

    There he meets the world-wise Lord Henry Wotton, whose hedonistic and cynical view of life is dramatically different from that of the more earnest Hallward. The two men spar in a witty war of words, and Dorian feels inexorably drawn to Wotton's philosophy of youthful pleasure and amorality. As Hallward completes his portrait, Dorian wishes that he could always remain youthful-and that the painting could bear the burdens of the advancing years. Wilde's tale takes the reader into a world in which such things are possible. We meet the unaging Dorian Gray at his leisure, taking advantage of his ability to charm all those around him, and taking his pleasures without heed of the consequences. But one day, after a rash act of cruelty to the woman who loves him, Dorian notices that something in his portrait has changed--a cruel smile has twisted its once-perfect lips. Adding touches of the gothic and the supernatural to his satiric depiction of upper-class British life, Wilde creates a classic modern myth: the handsome young aristocrat, who remains beautiful while his portrait, the mirror of his soul, withers.Also included in this volume are "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," "The Canterville Ghost," "The Sphinx Without a Secret," and "The Model Millionaire," which together comprise the most important of Wilde's short fiction.

    A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

    

    Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

    On a snowy road in a German forest, Ernest Helms sees a man trying to break into his car. After a scuffle, Helms escapes with only a cut on his hand. Hours later, he collapses aboard a flight from Frankfurt to New York. The pilot, Capt. James Holland, radios London to plan an emergency landing to save Helms—and then the nightmare begins. Heathrow denies Holland permission to land: Helms has been stricken with an ultracontagious pathogen that threatens the entire planet. When Germany also refuses to let him land, Holland and his passengers are prisoners of the sky, caught between a deadly disease and a world that would rather shoot them down than risk contamination. Written by a former aviator known as the master of mile-high suspense, this is a pulse-pounding thriller about infectious disease in the tradition of Outbreak and The Andromeda Strain. Threatened by hostile governments on the ground and disease in the sky, Captain Holland is in for the flight of his life.

    Mara is an angry and intelligent young woman who undertakes a theology degree to explore her unresolved relationship with her vicar father and deceased sister, who died mysteriously in an extreme religious community.

    As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

    This heartbreaking novel from award-winning Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan is a meditation upon guns and love, all kinds of love -between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, gay lovers, friends.

    The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.

    Seeking vengeance on the rebel renegades who murdered his family, Civil War veteran Nathan Stone sets out on an odyssey that will take him throughout the United States and across the paths of the West's most famous--and infamous--characters, including Jesse James, "Wild" Bill Hickok, and John Wesley Hardin.

    Annie Proulx) whose “melancholy beauty resonates with the deepest truths” (Boston Globe).

    In his first novel since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work—the story of the friendship between the "wonder boys"—Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Crabtree, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.

    The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world’s first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture–a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant–emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality. Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved. Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul’s Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution.

    The story told is of an expedition to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey, eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious age. Freed by her mother's quixotic and frightening sacrifice and the generosity of a hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets out to fulfil her own dream - to vindicate Scott by recreating his historic polar expedition.

    But when Lady Clifton dies soon after giving birth, Sir George hands the child over to be brought up on Beeswing Farm. John Hoverton and Laurie Clifton are raised as brothers.

    Written and illustrated (in stunning full color) by Lewis Trondheim, the hottest European cartooning talent to emerge in the 1990s, Harum Scarum mixes sardonic wit with a genuinely thrilling story that involves a plague of monsters, a fake paleontologist, a secret formula, the search for a perfect headline, and more The second book, The Hoodoodad, continues in this farcical vein, mixing elements of Tintin and The Three Stooges in a way that will thrill children and adults alike.

    He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to whatever music he likes, look up the girls that are on his list, and generally behaves as if Laura never mattered. But Rob finds he can't move on. He's stuck in a really deep groove - and it's called Laura. Soon, Rob's asking himself some big questions: about love, about life - and about why we choose to share ours with the people we do.

    Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the "I-novel," a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English--and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.

    He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. The Moor's Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate novel. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.~from the back cover

    Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer's Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles - from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.

    The author explores the imagination's twilit terrain in which love, lust and loss reside.

    

    But the real challenge is the cowboy who's guiding her to it.

    Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

    A sensitive illumination of the realities of war, depicting not only the Filipinos’ fervent nationalism but also the protagonists’ inhumanity, treachery, and opportunism.

    This will bring me luck, he said to Mr Balicki. And it will bring you luck because you gave it to me.The silver sword is only a paper knife but it gives Jan and his friends hope. Hungry, cold, and afraid, the four children try to stay alive among the ruins of bombed cities in war-torn Europe. Soon they will begin the long and dangerous journey south, from Poland to Switzerland, where they hope to find their parents again.

    Twenty-five million blacks live under the domination of a white minority. Under the brutal regime of apartheid, blacks do not have the right to vote, freedom of movement, access to education or the right to own land, businesses or even housing. Determined to not let go of power, this white minority imprisons black leaders on Robben Island.James Gregory, a typical Afrikaner, racist and believer in the virtues of apartheid, grew up on a farm in the Transkei where he learned to speak Xhosa and Zulu languages​​. This characteristic made ​​him the ideal man for the job of prison guard on Robben Island, and was responsible for monitoring the prisoner Nelson Mandela and his comrades. This plan will, however, has twist. To learn more about Nelson Mandela, Gregory starts to question the system of apartheid and becomes progressively advocate of a free South Africa and democratic.Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend, tells us, in the first person, the relationship as surprising as deep linking these two men and, through their unique friendship, we discover the awakening of a conscience.

    Now three of her finest, most memorable works have been brought together for the first time in an outstanding collection that shines with the luminescent storytelling that has earned the author international renown.THE LILAC BUSFeaturing two novellas, "The Lilac Bus" and "Dublin 4," this national bestseller showcases Binchy's talents at their finest. In "The Lilac Bus, " Binchy masterfully and poignantly interweaves the lives and fates of eight very different individuals who travel from Dublin to the Irish country town of Rathdoon every Friday night in a lilac-colored minibus. In "Dublin 4," a quartet of stories vividly portrays the quiet desperation and everyday heroism of ordinary people living ordinary lives in contemporary Ireland.FIREFLY SUMMERWhen American millionaire Patrick O'Neill comes to Mountfern in the fateful summer of 1962 to convert a dilapidated manor house into a luxury hotel, his intrusion turns life in the small Irish village upside down. The ensuing conflict between new money and old traditions, which strains families and friendships to the breaking point, is brilliantly explored in this truly unforgettable family drama that will live in your heart long after the last page is turned.SILVER WEDDINGGuilty secrets from the past and plaguing fears in the present surface when sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, and friends and lovers reunite to celebrate Desmond and Deirdre Doyle's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Among the difficulties the Doyles must come to terms with: the daughter struggling to become a nun, the son who prefers the dreary farm in Ireland to life in London, and the enviable successes of their best man and bridesmaid.

    Carrie Mullins a Kentucky bluegrass fiddler, falls for a heartbreaking man, loses her daughter in a senseless accident, and learns the healing power of music and daily routine from two caring, older women living on a drought-struck farm.

    With illustrations, and a twelve-page color photo section, Bittersweet will be one of the most informative, interesting, and controversial books Mary Summer Rain has ever written.

    Set in the turbulent Three Kingdoms Period, the novel relates the clever political manoeuvres and brilliant battle strategies used by the ambitious rulers as they fought one another for supremacy.

    But for young shipmaster Nils Thorsson and his fellow Norsemen the real journey begins when they push on into the uncharted continent of Vinland.There the explorers revel in the chance to penetrate a virgin land -until they trespass on the grounds of a primitive people who have seen enough of the light-hairs' cruelty to believe they are too dangerous to ignore. In one swift dawn raid, they deal with the invaders by letting go a swarm of fiery arrows Only three men from the sailing party escape: the intrepid Nils Thorsson, the hardened seaman Svenson, and an enigmatic native guide called Odin. Now. stranded in the wilderness with their one-eyed guide, Thomson and Svenson know that to survive they must master the ways of war, of the hunt -- and of a proud and fearless people.

    From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose one another.Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other's ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magicians' craft can command--the highest misdirection and the darkest science.Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations...to descendants who must, for their sanity's sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

    Wandering away into the night, with no memory, she can only utter the words, "I am". She ultimately arrives at the home of a couple whose only daughter has disappeared, setting in motion a tale of loss and redemption.

    He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

    He is a peculiar hero—bald since birth, intellectually and sexually precocious as a child, as a man passionate and warmhearted. He is also orgasmically clairvoyant, given at the moment of carnal release to apocalyptic visions of a world that he comes to recognize as the future. As he tries to reconcile the sanguine promises of the Enlightenment with the chilling prophecies of his visions, he comes to know virtually every important figure of his time: Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher, Lavoisier, the young Mozart, Hume, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Goya. But it is his love for a beautiful young widow from Mexico that transforms him and ultimately moves Rasero toward the wisdom he has long sought. In his prodigious first novel, Francisco Rebolledo brings to life a heady mix of eighteenth-century politics, desire, philosophy, science, and art, showing us in this vanished world, with all its contradictions and sorrows, a troubled counterpart to our own.

    . . . Gamblers stake their fortunes and their lives on a deck of cards. . . . Strong-willed señoritas seek independence through an enticing combination of beauty, audacity, and spirit. . . . Lawmen and outlaws walk the same dusty streets and speak a common language: Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson. Gritty, tough, and unflinchingly authentic, here is the West as it really was: a land where for every friend there is an enemy, for every handshake a fist, for every dispute a resolution—usually in an explosive showdown of blood and bullets. In these remarkable tales, Louis L’Amour—like the very heroes he depicts—blazes a trail across the American frontier and takes us on an unforgettable journey into the heart of our western heritage.

    She tells nobody about the incident but her guilt manifests itself in the frequent nosebleeds she has at awkward moments. Fifty years later, she is still living her life sentence.

    Lovecraft's fiction go with him.Philip's first confrontation with the monsters set in motion a bizarre chain of events that finally sent his girlfriend Amelia packing. Now the battle rages from the dank, cramped sweatshop of Philip's former place of employment, Ralph's One Day Résumés, to the gleaming, deadly corridors of corporate giant Pelidyne. Can he save Amelia this time, or will the monsters triumph and consign all humanity to an existence of grim servitude?

    Viewed in the North as a saint of freedom and in the South as the devil incarnate, Brown was a visionary who not only foretold but made inevitable the bloody apocalypse of the Civil War. An intricate mosaic of alternating narrative voices, Bruce Old's Raising Holy Hell is an explosive, multitextured evocation of the prophetic madness of the man who saw an America damned by the sin of slavery.

    And, as in any good mosaic, every piece reflects light at different angles, giving this self-portrait its living complexity. Tesserae differs for the first time the unique memoirs or "a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today" (Kirkus Reviews).

    This audacious novel is a brilliant (and literal) head trip of a book that brings us into the wildly active, albeit coma-beset, mind of Roy Strang, whose hallucinatory quest to eradicate the evil predator/scavenger marabou stork keeps being interrupted by grisly memories of the social and family dysfunction that brought him to this state. It is the sort of lethally funny cocktail of pathos, violence, and outrageous hilarity that only Irvine Welsh can pull off.

    

    But in Agustn Rejas he has an indefatigable pursuer. From secluded city streets to the paths of a mountain village the policeman persists, tracking and anticipating Ezequiel's every move. Rejas' only reprieve is his love for his daughter's beautiful dance teacher--until he begins to pick up unmistakable signals that her circles--and Ezequiel's--intersect.Based on the extraordinary manhunt for the leader of Peru's notorious guerilla organization, The Shining Path, The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarr--tense, intricate, and heartbreaking.

    Though he is an aid worker, the secret service minders who have protected him for twenty years have reactivated him: they want information about the man who perpetrated a massacre in a Muslim village in Bosnia. His target is the most ruthless killer in the whole war zone: Milan Pravic, codename the Scorpion. And the only eyewitness to the massacre is a twelve-year-old girl whom Pravic will do anything to silence-

    A terrifying and brutal narrative, the novel tracks his lawless spree in the company of two other reform school alumni, Diesel Carson and Mad Dog Cain. Dog Eat Dog is a novel of excruciating authenticity, with great moral and social resonance, and it could only have been written by Edward Bunker, who has been there.

    When other such murders follow, Dr. Katherine O'Keefe and her ex-lover, Detective Merrick Chapman are assigned to track down the "vampire" killer. They discover a bizarre abnormality in the killer's blood. The man is stricken with a rare disease whereby the blood genetically craves infusions of fresh blood. It is a condition Merrick knows well--because he too has it. And as O'Keefe and Chapman draw closer to the killer, they may find a truth more horrific than the murders themselves. Martin's Press.

    At thirty-seven, Christine Moore had a world-class case of burnout: career blues, no husband, no children, an imperfect figure, and dimming expectations. "I'm going to show you a peace so beautiful, you'll probably forget what your life has been like up until now," he said. Who was this guy? "My friends call me Joe. Others call me 'God' or 'Higher Power.' You can call me whatever you're most comfortable with." Right. But he knows everything about her, every one of her heart's desires. A sweet serenity settles over Christine. And so the journey begins, a triumphant odyssey of self-discovery that illuminates our souls. As we join one woman's inspiring quest for healing and life-changing truths, we discover six powerful precepts that offer the deepest peace and fulfillment we can ever know. Every woman longing to experience the joy of loving and of respecting her true self will find comfort, guidance and hope in the simple, profound secrets to an enlightened and enriched new life that Christine learns. In the life-affirming tradition of The Celestine Prophecy, God on a Harley lights the way to a much-needed spiritual home.

    They're baby-sitters and best friends. And this summer is full of surprises. Kristy's father, whom she hasn't seen since she was little, shows up. He asks Kristy to keep it all a secret, which forces her to lie to everyone--her family and her friends. Meanwhile, the Baby-Sitters Club has problems of its own. A neighbor is threatening to shut down the BSC's day camp for kids. This is one summer the Baby-sitters Club will never forget--especially Kristy. But no matter what happens, the Baby-sitters know they will always be friends.This book comes with a special Baby-sitters Club charm--so you can be a part of the BSC, too.

    As companion to Miriam, a Half-Horse damsel in distress, Mus must protect his lady fair from sorcery and battle, facing sinister intrigues that seek to overthrow the very throne.When the world seems all but over run by war, Mus proves that a tiny body can hold a lion's heart…

    The most comprehensive and authoritative representation in English of the remarkable Shen Congwen canon, ranging from the polished stories that made him a serious contender for the Nobel literary prize in the 1980s to lesser known, extravagant experimental pieces.

    Finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award.

    Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them. Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.

    With a compelling, off-beat protagonist evocative of Holden Caulfield and Quentin Coldwater, and a narrative voice that masterfully and naturally captures the nuances of a modern vernacular, Banks’s haunting and powerful novel is an indisputable—and unforgettable—modern classic.

    Their mother is seriously injured and their Dad is away fighting, so the children are sent to their grandfather in Ireland. Sophie is scared - they have never met grandfather but his letters cause such trouble in the house, and their Dad never speaks of him.How will they live in a strange country, with a man who probably hates them - and will the family ever be together again?

    With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and widen to reflect the hardships of Depression-era life.

    In the mid-l960s, in a rambling apartment overlooking Central Park West, they raise their son Willy with enthusiasm, encouragement, and with what might today be called unconditional love. It might also be called unconventional love, for both Claire and Theo are women. They are Willy’s mothers and until a mistrustful outside world intrudes to try to tear them apart, they are the best family a boy could want. In an enchanting, moving novel, Jax Peters Lowell explores the powerful bonds of love and family and gives us a cautionary tale for our own times.

    So when Allison discovers her blackjack dealer boyfriend has a cheatin’ heart, “hit me” takes on a whole new meaning. She clobbers Boyd with a cactus. Then she trashes his prized money-skimming scam, swipes his only records of an off-shore bank account (the key to a fortune) without realizing it, and blows town. Big mistake. Because Boyd has a partner: an aging showgirl still young enough to scheme. Not happy with her cut, this redhead wants revenge–and she knows a cold-blooded killer who will help her get it. Meanwhile, Boyd has found solace with a new-age hooker who cares about Boyd’s karma more than his money. Now the whole brawling, balling, hurting tangle of friends, traitors, and lovers is going on the road. In separate cars. Leaving behind a trail of broken bodies and broken laws, they’re all following Allison. And she’s following a devious plan of her own. . . .

    Jones has been honored with the Golden Spur Award three times for best western historical novel. In this dramatic work, he gives readers a heroic saga of the founding of our nation, from the American Revolution to the tremors of pre-Civil War discontent.

    Her mother has just married the hired man, Ledoyt (or "Old Him," as Lotti likes to say), and Lotti is terribly confused, as only an adolescent can be. Frustrated beyond endurance, she dresses as a boy and runs away, taking her younger brother, Fay, with her. A traumatic attack while on the trail brings certain benefits: Lotti begins to put the facts of her life together and comes to realize that she was the result of a rape. Lotti returns to her home and, bolstered by a new understanding of her mother and an uneasy truce with Ledoyt, finds comfort in her drawings and newfound identity. The narrative shifts between Lotti's first-person accounts and those of her family, a technique that, if sometimes distracting, does create an intimate acquaintance with each character and with family relationships. More important is Emshwiller's verbal portrait of Lotti (cleverly augmented by Lotti's journal drawings of horses and people--many engulfed in flames) and of adolescent resentment and angst. .

    Movie tie-in.

    Indeed it was the only path to freedom. That path led her to a Season in London and, the ultimate goal, Coming Out as a debutante. But along the way she had to survive a terrifying few months, a make-or-break time in which her family's hopes for her could only be fulfilled through a proposal of marriage. For Lady Emily Persse, Coming Out means leaving her beloved Ireland and its informalities for England and its stricter codes. For Portia Tradescant, released from the boredom of life in the English countryside, it means trying to get through the Season despite the best efforts of her eccentric Aunt Tattie. For beautiful May Danby, the Season is an entrée to a whole other life, worlds away from her strict convent upbringing in Yorkshire. Debutantes, Charlotte Bingham's delightful and stylish new saga, centres around a single London Season in the 1890s. But it is not just about the debutantes themselves. It is as much about the women who launch them, and the Society which supports their way of life. It is also about the battle for power, privilege and money, fought, not in the male tradition upon the battlefield, but in the female tradition...in the ballroom.

    Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances this elegant short novel provides a magical and painful picture of South Africa today.

    

    To think now that we were just six years old.”Sly Fox lives with his one-legged alcoholic father, incontinent Communist grandfather and his dog, Comrade, in a run-down beach shack filled with history you can touch. Intrigued by Sly and his fascinating family history, new boy in town Brett 'Harry' Harrison strikes up an unlikely and forbidden friendship with him.Growing up together in a small coastal town of Little Bulli in the early 1970's, the boys discover the delights of sex, drugs and Brandivino. But their great passion is the compelling story of Sly's pioneering ancestors, as revealed by the Fox family chronicles. Their friendship is inviolable, or so they think, until a shocking act of betrayal alters the course of their lives...

    Vietnam veteran presents the war from his enemy's perspective: a platoon of 15-year-old boys ordered to carry a ton of cargo 650 miles along a primitive network of trails.

    Written with extraordinary insight, honesty, and a master writer's creative sensibility.

    Following his extraordinary debut in The Pugilist at Rest, Thom Jones returned with a collection of unparalleled fire and vision. Jones takes us from down-and-out in America to death and disease in Rwanda, introducing us to hard-luck fighters steeling themselves for battles they've already lost, doctors who fall in love with their illnesses, and a strung-out advertising writer who uses the hand of the devil to do the work of God.