He's living on New York's Washington Square, struggling with his follow-up, and floundering within his pseudointellectual coterie when his college love, Sophie Wilder, returns to his life. Sophie is also struggling, though Charlie isn't sure why, since they've barely spoke, after falling out a decade before. Now Sophie begins to tell Charlie the story of her life since then, particularly the story of the days she spent taking care of a dying man with his own terrible past and of the difficult decision he forced her to make. When she disappears once again, Charlie sets out to discover what happened to Sophie Wilder. Christopher Beha's debut novel explores faith, love, friendship, and, ultimately, the redemptive power of storytelling.

    Davis Prize for Fiction "Storm Riders examines the conflicted love of a single father struggling to raise his adopted Native American son, who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. When a small girl mysteriously drowns near a student-housing complex, the boy is implicated and the father wrestles with his own doubt, guilt, and responsibility. Bringing to life the austere beauty of the Tlingit Alaskan village of the boy's family, as well as the highly educated pockets of the East Coast, Lesley vividly portrays a father and a son struggling to come to terms with each other and above all, with the truth. This novel, as "The Chicago Tribune noted, is "a powerful tale with a strong emotional core."

    The smoke-spewing, banshee-wailing, fearsome black thing hisses like a thousand cobras... and the villagers declare that this Thing is an Iron Demon—a yakada yaka.The Burghers who drive these Iron Demons have a penchant for challenging authority and courting trouble, sometimes just to liven things up in the railway outposts... and so it is that Sonnaboy and Meerwald chase a large group of villagers all across Anuradhapura, mother-naked but not much bothered by it, Ben Godlieb conjures up a corpse in his cowcatcher, Dickie Byrd single-handedly demolishes a Pentecostal Mission and is hailed as the messiah of the Railway fraternity, and Basil Van der Smaght filches a human heart and feeds it to the Nawalapitiya railway staff ...and to cap it all, Sonnaboy takes French Leave to act in The Bridge on the River Kwai!

    In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown. When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon. On these nights, adolescents run wild, destroying everything in their path.Lumen resists. Promising her father she will never breach, she investigates the mystery of her community's traditions and the stories erased from the town record. But the more we learn about the town's past, the more we realize that Lumen's memories are harboring secrets of their own.A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey into the American heartland.

    Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet. He's writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself - Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Modern Literature, an award worth half a million pounds. But it does not come without a price: he must spend a year teaching at the English university where his ex-wife and estranged daughter now reside.As Kennedy acclimatises to the sleepy campus, inspiring revulsion and worship in equal measure, he's forced to reconsider his precarious lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this 'preening, narcissistic, priapic, sociopath'. Or is there.Straight White Male is a no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche. It is a brilliant new satire from one of Britain's sharpest writers.

    It plunges the reader into the subculture of addicts, dealers, and corrupt cops as Lonnie Jack's bold and methodical challenge builds to a frightening climax.

    With his family, Rafael lives on the edge of the refuse heap in a forgotten corner of America's Southwest. Desperately poor, he is determined to give his family some respite from their dire poverty, even if it means trading his own life to do it.Rafael finds a man who says he will pay many thousands of dollars in exchange for his life: and so he agrees to "star" in a snuff film.

    But the Rider, the most successful highwayman ever to plague the two countries, secretly became part of the royal wedding plans. From the non, nothing went according to schedule.Who was this mysterious brigand? What could he gain by sabotaging the two nations' only chance for peace?

    We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

    But less obvious is the connection with the rambling Padre Constantine, a priest interned in a local mental asylum who seems to hold the key to the puzzle.This short novel brims with dark humour and Irish wit. It is a fun read that all the family will enjoy.Pete Brassett is the author of several books available on kindle, including the best-selling crime novel Kiss The Girls. http://www.amazon.com/PRAYER-DYING-cl...http://www.amazon.co.uk/PRAYER-DYING-...

    Librarian Note: Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN-10: 0989572935 / ISBN-13: 9780989572934.In her latest novel, Blessed Are the Wholly Broken, the award-winning author of Appalachian Justice weaves a harrowing tale of a family in the midst of self-destruction.After the heartbreak of losing their newborn son to a previously undiagnosed genetic condition, Phillip and Anna Lewinsky managed to patch their lives back together and move forward, filling the emptiness with friends, work, and travel.When Anna unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again at the age of forty-three, Phillip is thrilled to have a second chance at fatherhood in spite of Anna’s objections.As desires clash, misunderstandings abound, and decisions are irrevocably made, the foundation of their marriage begins to crumble until only tragedy remains.

    Written flawlessly with tenderness and fury, heartbreak and acceptance, give your heart a break is the story of Addya, a flamboyant, confident woman, leading a carefree life. That is, until the day she gets married, and her life suddenly takes a turn for the worse. Caught in a steadily deteriorating relationship, Addya is stretched to her limits as she tries to cope. Through it all, she has her brother Agastya standing by her side like a rock, vowing to avenge his sister. Will Addya be able to survive unscathed? Will Agastya succeed in seeking justice? Or will he succumb to the wounds of his past? Can the love of his life, Tarjani, provide him succour? Inspired by a true story, this is an incredible tale of abuse and vulnerability, of the exhilaration of romance, of an unshakeable sibling bond that is at once unique and universal. Above all, this is Anuj Tiwari’s unsparing account of love and loss, capturing the grit and courage of a woman trapped in a loveless relationship.

    Its disillusioned and darkly funny narrator is an Irish oncologist, who is searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital while struggling with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city's urban spaces. Tending to the health of his laboratory mice, he finds comfort in work that is measurable, results that are quantifiable.But life is every bit as persistent as the illness he studies. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, his estranged wife begins to call, his neighbours are acting strangely and his supervisor pressures him to push ahead professionally. And always there is the pull of family; of the place he considers home.Shot through with Duffy's haunting, beautiful descriptions of the science underlying cancer, which starkly illustrate the paradox of an illness at whose heart is a persistent and deadly life force, This Living and Immortal Thing shows how the cruelty of the disease is a price we pay for the joy and complexity of being in the world.

    PAUL PIONEER PRESS & DISPATCHBeautiful, but poor, Lisa Sarr, has always dreamed of making a splash in Palm Beach. With the aid of the gang queen of Palm Beach society, she may finally make it. And Lisa will show the rich, handsome, and powerful that they are no match for her guts street smarts, and determination to win--no matter what.

    But this summer, something's changed, and if there's anything Nantucket likes better than cocktails on the beach at sunset, it's a good rumor.And rumor has it......that Madeline, a novelist, is battling writer's block, with a deadline looming, bills piling up, and blank pages driving her to desperation--and a desperately bad decision;...that Grace, hard at work to transform her backyard into a garden paradise, has been collaborating a bit more closely that necessary with her ruggedly handsome landscape architect;...that Grace's husband, successful island real estate developer "Fast Eddie" Pancik, has embarked on quite an unusual side project;...that the storybook romance between Madeline's son, Brick, and Grace's daughter Allegra is on the rocks, heading for disaster.As the gossip escalates, and they face the possible loss of the happy lives they've worked so hard to create, Grace and Madeline try mightily to set the record straight--but the truth might be even worse than rumor has it.