One City. Three Oddballs. Stephen's dead father is threatening to destroy the world. If Stephen commits the ultimate sacrifice and throws himself into the harbour, he will save humanity. The last thing he needs is a Jehovah's witness masquerading as a school boy and an admission to a mental health facility. Jaanvi steals a life-like doll called James and cares for him as if he were her dead child. Her husband demands she return him. But she and James have already bonded, and it's nobody's business how she decides to grieve. Lucas, pharmacist and all-round nice guy, is having one of the worst weeks of his life. His employees forgot his birthday, his mother's gone manic, and now his favourite customer is in hospital because of a medication error he made. Can he make things right? Or is life all downhill after forty?

    To Nora, her daughter is an enigma -- at the same time wonderful and unfindable. Fern sees her mother as treacherous -- for busting up their family to move in with her lover, Jeanne. As their lives become complicated by the arrivals of a skateboarding boyfriend for Fern, a shadowy affair for Nora, a baby in need of a family, and by the failing health of Lucky, their beloved dog, this mother and daughter find their way onto a fresh footing with each other. "With sharp humor and perception" (O: The Oprah Magazine), Lucky in the Corner shows us the way a family reconfigures itself as unexpected changes come its way -- and how, no matter what shape it takes, it remains a family.

    As the long-time boyfriend of the handsome (but deeply closeted) movie star Ted Masterson, he lives rent-free in a beautiful apartment on the top floor of Ted's Manhattan brownstone and has an easy job that gives him plenty of time to read books and write his novel. When an influential gossip columnist overhears Jeremy talking about Ted, Jeremy's perfect world begins to crumble: in just a few hours Ted asks him to leave. Although Ted says he needs to spend more time with his wife and daughter, Jeremy suspects another man is involved. With little more than his books, his sprawling manuscript, and his fickle little bird Juanita, Jeremy finds that he needs to re-connect with the eccentric family whose love he has taken for granted, and determine which of his friends have his true well-being in mind. In a dizzying world of art galleries, rock clubs, trendy restaurants, casual sex, dry wit, and drier martinis, Jeremy Thrane must finally figure out what it means to grow up and fall in love.

    Until, on the very night of man's first moon landing, a precipitous passion alights on their middle-aged existence. Out for a stroll, Norris Lamb--postmaster, stamp collector, and church organist--spies spinster Vida Stephen dancing with glorious, uncharacteristic abandon by the moonlit fountain of the mansion where she tends the mute, retarded son of an absent employer. Norris senses a buried bravado and romance, a fragility and loneliness, that match his own. And he sets out, covertly, to woo her.But both Norris and Vida are innocents in this endeavor. His courtship blunders down many wrong turns before it finds its unlooked-for catalyst in Manford, the gentle young man who is Vida's charge...and blossoms as a force to change three lives.In luminous prose laced with quiet humor, Lamb in Love shows how love transforms the most ordinary and imperfect mortals.Vida, unaware that Norris is in the throes of a wild--but unvoiced--passion, must herself decide whether to remain in the small English village where she has lived her entire life, or strike out on her own in search of a grand adventure.Watching these two people surprised by love is Manford, the young disabled man who has been in Vida's charge for the last twenty years.  Possessed of a strange and gentle intelligence, it is through Manford that Norris and Vida finally come to recognize each other and themselves. Heartwarming, madcap, utterly beautiful, LAMB IN LOVE celebrates the strange and mysterious brilliance that is love.  And it confirms Carrie Brown's status as an important and luminous talent. -->

    Vincent is living in Los Angeles, trying to forget his own shattered marriage. They want to plan a future together—but first they have to stop running from their pasts. Eric Jerome Dickey, a rising star on the bestseller lists, delivers a boldly honest novel—about love that starts with a lie.

    Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord; and now that landlord’s son stands to make a killing on apartment 2B.Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during, and after the height of New York’s real estate boom, Ellington Boulevard’s characters include the Tenant and His Dog; the Landlord, a recovered alcoholic and womanizer who has newly found Judaism and a wife half his age; the Broker, an out-of-work actor whose new profession finally allows him to afford theater tickets he has no time to use; the Broker’s New Boyfriend, a second-rate actor who composes a musical about the sale of 2B (“Is there no one I can lien on if this boom goes bust?”). There’s also the Buyer, a trusting young editor at a dying cultural magazine, who falls in love with the Tenant; the Buyer’s Husband, a disaffected graduate student taken to writing bawdy faux-academic papers; and the Buyer’s Husband’s Girlfriend, a children’s book writer with a tragic past.With the humor and poignancy that made Langer’s first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics across the country, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. It’s the story of why people come to a city they can’t afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love, and eventually become the people they never thought they’d be—for better and for worse.

    Impassioned in its anger, lethal in its aim, American Hero paints a scathing portrait of the strange place this country had become in the Reagan-Bush years--and shows how only Hollywood could have taken full advantage of the demise of the Old World Order.

    Only Matthew came home safely. Ten years later, Matthew tells us, he has found a way to bring his brother back... Unafraid to look at the shadows of our hearts, Nathan Filer's rare and brilliant debut shows us the strength that is rooted in resilience and love. Editor's Note Feb 10, 2014: St Martin's Press have just announced that Where The Moon Isn't will be republished under the UK title, The Shock of the Fall this week in digital format and later this fall in paperback. They said that the title change was necessary "because otherwise there's a lot of confusion" - The Shock of the Fall recently won the Costa Book of the Year award, which is UK based but has international renown.

    They have mortgaged, sold, borrowed, left friends and country, to settle in this remote spot; their plan is to live out their lives here, connected to the place and to each other. The two Americans, the only foreigners in Ibarra, live among people who both respect and misunderstand them. And gradually the villagers--at first enigmas to the Evertons--come to teach them much about life and the relentless tide of fate.There is an alternate cover edition of this book with the same ISBN here.

    In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother’s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind.First time in Penguin ClassicsWinner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

    A much-anticipated letter from Korea fails to satisfy them but sparks memories in the eldest. So begins the heartbreaking and inspiring tale of their birth mother's life as their adoptive mother imagines it. Abandoned as a baby and then again and again, Mi Sook is raised in a Korean coffee shop by its string of owner-mothers. She grows to adulthood fiercely independent and eventually comes to manage the shop. But her marriage to Kun Soo, with whom she has three children, begins a series of events that ultimately wrench her babies from her arms. Deceived by Kun Soo and his well-intentioned mother, and unsupported by a rigidly Confucian culture, Mi Sook emerges as a tragic and heroic figure who embodies the rich complexities of a nation -- and of the heart.

    It is 1989 and Community Care is about to reboot the industry of psychiatry. In a soon-to-be-closed asylum a bruised nurse, Adam Sands, is feeling less like a purveyor of kindness and more like a concentration camp guard with every passing drink. Many years later Adam has got used to the quiet life when his past finds him. Maybe this time he can do some good. Even make a diference. But redemption, like magic, can come from the strangest of places.

    Rare & Endangered Species demonstrates how a wife and mother's suicide reverberates in the small community where she lived, and affects the lives of people who don't even know her. Finally, Spirits is about the pain that men and women can -- and do -- inflict upon each other. These three very different works illuminate the unadorned core of love -- not the showy, more celebrated sort but what remains when lust, jealousy, and passion have been stripped away.

    For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict. Unable to find work in the depressed times after World War I, Eneas joins the British-led police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary—a decision that alters the course of his life. Branded a traitor by Irish nationalists and pursued by IRA hitmen, Eneas is forced to flee his homeland, his family, and Viv, the woman he loves. His wandering terminates on the Isle of Dogs, a haven for sailors, where a lifetime of loss is redeemed by a final act of generosity. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is the story of a lost man and a compelling saga that illuminates Ireland's complex history.

    Eggers’ irreverent approach included a pioneering design that incorporated chapbooks, drawings, and all manner of cultural confetti previously unseen in the lit-mag format. McSweeney’s became an instant hit, showcasing the work of major new voices as well as literary luminaries such as William T. Vollman and Joyce Carol Oates. Long out of print and available only in the pricey collectors’ market, the first three issues appear in this omnibus, reproduced precisely as they first appeared. Longtime fans can revisit some of the best of the early McSweeney’s, while those new to the journal will see what all the fuss was about. A bracing range of topics include John Hodgman writing on the topic of cavemen, Jon Langford on Lester Bangs, Gary Greenberg on the Unabomber, and much more.