Turned out on the street by his fully employed, entirely fed up girlfriend, he goes on the hunt for cheap shared accommodation and stumbles upon the ideal set-up—a bedroom in the home of Amy, an attractive psychology student who has been abandoned by her condo-buying roommate. Not only does Amy have a surprisingly affordable penthouse apartment with rooftop patio and a fridge full of high-quality comestibles, but she also has a mysterious across-the-hall neighbour, Eldrich, who appears to be home all day, smoking weed and receiving an odd assortment of visitors. Before long, John is availing himself of Eldrich's pot, food and wine. He notices that these staples are provided gratis to Eldrich by friends and acquaintances who rely on him for spiritual guidance. That's when John, atheist and misanthrope, decides to start a New Age cult with Eldrich as guru. And so, as half art project, half money-making scheme, the Answer Institute is born. With Amy as a partner in the enterprise, the cult flourishes and grows exponentially, attracting a wide range of broken, strange and spiritually hungry individuals, including an obscenely wealthy Singaporean expat, a psilocybin-dealing hippie, a conservative mom mourning the death of her only child, and the star of a popular sci-fi TV show. Eldrich begins to embrace his role as Leader with a little too much zeal and introduces his followers to increasingly peculiar rituals. Amy becomes progressively more enamoured of the funds pouring into the coffers, and John lets sexual jealousy get the better of him. The more successful the Institute gets, the more it spirals out of control, culminating in a bizarre ayahuasca ceremony that ends in a way nobody could have expected. With humour and pathos, The Answer to Everything examines the gap between reason and faith, and the human need for connection, love and transcendence.

    With his skills as a lawyer and his position inside the biggest health insurance company in America—American True Care—he plans to bring down the system, from the inside.David begins to work his way up the company while recruiting a clandestine team to build a covert case against American True Care. But this is a dangerous game and the players have ties to the highest levels of government. Propped up by lobbyists, senators, congressmen, and even the White House, American True Care will do whatever it takes to keep hold of its power.As the web of deception and danger tightens around David and his team, they begin to realize that to win they have to risk it all—even their lives.

    A high altitude lake is the point of departure for these stories of dark adventure, in which fishing guides, amateur sportsmen, teenage misfits, scientists, mountaineers, and expatriates embark on disquieting journeys of self-discovery in far-flung places.

    What happens when the man interviewing you for a job takes you on a date to see a hypnotist? How do you get rid of a psychosomatic case of bedbugs? What’s the best way to get rid of a beaver dam? How do you tell someone you just started seeing that you didn’t know you had scabies when you hooked up? In the Cuffer Prize–winning story, “Skin and Mud,” two boys have an intimate encounter as they wander through the barrens one day after school.Barrelling Forward is packed with unforgettable characters, vibrant humour, and acute insight into the overwhelming anxieties of new adults living their lives in the midst of a crumbling old economy.

    Determined to find redemption in the midst of their derision and to find joy despite uncertainty, Moira faces impossible choices with consequences beyond anything she can imagine.Thrown into the purgatory of a bleak prairie landscape as unforgiving as her mother, twenty-year-old Newfoundlander Moira Burns is certain she will rise above the locals of Ibsen, Saskatchewan. Until the reasons for her flight west become clear. Until she is befriended by a prostitute and courted by a ‘half breed’. Until she becomes the “dolly-bird” of superstitious Irish Catholic homesteader, Dillan Flaherty.Scattered through with birth, death, and the violent potential of both man and the elements, Dollybird excavates the small mercies which come to mean more than they should on a prairie peopled with characters struggling under a huge sky that waits, not so quietly, for them to fail.

    One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.

    An emerging photographer, he’s running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known abstract expressionist painter. Even far from New York, her legacy haunts Lucien. Sophie has just been cast as a lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet. She still waitresses during her off-hours at the Chateau Marmont, witnessing the recreational use of Mem pills among the Hollywood elite—people consuming memories not their own. One controlling, powerful regular’s obsession with Sophie spurs a series of events that threatens to unravel the life she has so carefully built. When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by the ambitious yet conflicted Dr. Angelica Sloane as a way to treat patients who’ve abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there—or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to one another. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from “before”? Set in a city that seems to have no memory of its own, The Shimmering State is a graceful meditation on the power of story and its creation. It masterfully explores memory and how it can elude us, trap us, or set us free.

    A mysterious and elusive love affair haunts the lives of three women in Australia. Twenty years later, on the other side of the world, Charade Ryan sorts through story and counter-story for her father, the legendary Nicholas, and the truth about her origins.

    The RAF is on the verge of defeat, the Royal Navy near mutiny.In an underground bunker, Churchill and the British commanders await the onslaught. Their plan to throw back Hitler's army is about to be put to the test.Churchill is confident they can throw back the enemy.But not all his enemies are abroad.

    Written in a lean and muscular style and brimming with both violence and compassion, these stories unflinchingly explore the lives of those — MMA fighters, the institutionalized, small-town criminals — who exist on the fringes of society, unveiling the blood and guts and beauty of life in our flyover regions.

    Badge of Evil is the first novel in a bold new thriller series from the writing team of private investigator Bill Stanton and award-winning journalist Craig Horowitz.All eyes are on New York City’s police commissioner Lawrence Brock after his hands-on role in a raid on a potential terrorist cell that turns into a blazing shootout. There’s even talk that he may be headed to Washington to take over Homeland Security.Investigative journalist A. J. Ross wants to expose the ruthless opportunist behind Brock’s heroic image. Freewheeling private investigator Frank Bishop is hired by the family of the lone surviving suspect, desperate to prove the young man’s innocence. A. J. and Bishop hate each other at first sight, but they’ll need to learn to work together quickly if they want to take down the commissioner—because Lawrence Brock will do anything to ensure the dark secrets of his past remain hidden.Badge of Evil introduces a dynamic new voice in thriller fiction, in the spirit of such bestselling authors as Harlan Coben and David Baldacci. It is a novel of our times and for our times—an all too familiar story of corruption and abuse at the highest levels, and how the lust for power can drive men to commit the most shocking acts.

    Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

    He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.

    Upon recovering he meets Captain Horatio Nelson, newly appointed to command of the Northern Leeward Islands squadron and the Royal Navy Dockyard at English Harbour in Antigua. Nelson's primary task is stamping out rampant American smuggling activity. But to succeed, Nelson needs information.Lieutenant Ross serves as a spy for Nelson against the smugglers, but they aren't his only foe. French and American spies supporting the smugglers are playing for far higher stakes, sowing the seeds of violent unrest. Lieutenant Ross is soon in the midst of desperate action and working with a beautiful slave woman to gain information as he struggles to stop to their plot.Dockyard Dog is the first novel in the Evan Ross series. Fans of Julian Stockwin, Dewey Lambdin, and Alexander Kent will enjoy reading this series.

    A tragic love story buried for four generations. A quest to unravel the past.Corsica 2010The death of Rachel's mother leaves unsolved questions about her ancestors. Will Rachel find the answers she desperately seeks on the island of Corsica, where her grandmother was born?Corsica 1900sIn a remote Corsican village, a bundle of hidden letters from the 1900s comes to light more than a hundred years later. The tale unfolds of a passionate love affair between the village school master and Maria, the daughter of a wealthy family. But Maria's parents have other plans for her future.Must Maria see her dreams crumble, or can she escape her destiny? And does she hold the key to the enigma of Rachel's ancestors?The House at Zaronza is Book 1 of the Tales of Corsica series: historical novels set in the same house on this stunning Mediterranean island.*This edition is reissued with minor editorial changes and a new cover.*