What she is about to confess to him is profoundly shocking: All Magdalena wanted was to find true love. What she found instead was a string of lovers who each made the fatal mistake of disappointing her. From a Latin dance instructor who uses a metronome to help him keep his rhythm in bed to a Ukrainian who plays mental chess games at the gravesite of former grandmaster Alexander Alekhine, Magdalena's men all lost their lives when they no longer satisfied her; perishing by her hand through poison, drowning and incineration. A head-on collision between Church and sex, Magdalena the Sinner interweaves highly charged erotica with modern views on Catholicism, feminism and the tensions between men and women.

    It is here that Anna Kate has returned to bury her beloved Granny Zee, owner of the Blackbird Café.It was supposed to be a quick trip to close the café and settle her grandmother’s estate, but despite her best intentions to avoid forming ties or even getting to know her father’s side of the family, Anna Kate finds herself inexplicably drawn to the quirky Southern town her mother ran away from so many years ago, and the mysterious blackbird pie everybody can’t stop talking about.As the truth about her past slowly becomes clear, Anna Kate will need to decide if this lone blackbird will finally be able to take her broken wings and fly.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    Then she found her limits tested by a crisis no one could prevent. Now, as her neighborhood descends into panic, she must make tough choices to protect everyone she loves from a threat she cannot even see. In this chillingly urgent novel, Carla Buckley confronts us with the terrifying decisions we are forced to make when ordinary life changes overnight.A year ago, Ann and Peter Brooks were just another unhappily married couple trying–and failing–to keep their relationship together while they raised two young daughters. Now the world around them is about to be shaken as Peter, a university researcher, comes to a startling realization: A virulent pandemic has made the terrible leap across the ocean to America’s heartland.And it is killing fifty out of every hundred people it touches.As their town goes into lockdown, Peter is forced to return home–with his beautiful graduate assistant. But the Brookses’ safe suburban world is no longer the refuge it once was. Food grows scarce, and neighbor turns against neighbor in grocery stores and at gas pumps. And then a winter storm strikes, and the community is left huddling in the dark.Trapped inside the house she once called home, Ann Brooks must make life-or-death decisions in an environment where opening a door to a neighbor could threaten all the things she holds dear.Carla Buckley’s poignant debut raises important questions to which there are no easy answers, in an emotionally riveting tale of one family facing unimaginable stress.

    Coetzee ("dazzling"), Guy Davenport ("a very special kind of whimsical-serious-deep writer"), and Hermann Hesse ("If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place"). Charged with compassion, and an utterly unique radiance of vision, Walser is as Susan Sontag exclaimed "a truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer."The Assistant is his breathtaking 1908 novel, translated by award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Joseph, hired to become an inventor's new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Karl Tobler's splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures? The Assistant chronicles Joseph's inner life of cascading emotions as he attempts, both frantically and light-heartedly, to help the Tobler household, even as it slides toward financial ruin. Tobler demands of Joseph, "Do you have your wits about you?!" And Joseph's wits are in fact all around him, trembling like leaves in the breeze—he is full of exuberance and despair, all the raptures and panics of a person "drowning in obedience."

    Julia, a young and brilliant German designer, is about to launch the fashion show that could bring the breakthrough success she has sacrificed so much to achieve. All her dreams for the future are on the brink of reality—until an unknown past comes to find her. A grandfather she never knew existed approaches her with an astonishing claim. Julia’s father, believed dead for decades, is still alive. As a great lie is revealed, Julia embarks on a journey to uncover the lost pieces of her past. It takes her on a tour through Italy—from Milan to Naples to Sicily, back three generations to an immigrant heritage that struggled to build new roots in Germany after the war, and to secrets that have remained hidden for sixty years.Milan, 1954. Vincent, a handsome German engineer for BMW, arrives with the task of testing the Isetta, a revolutionary Italian car. His interpreter is the talented and enigmatic Giulietta, and the two soon fall passionately in love. Giulietta is full of life and dreams—she loves to design and sew clothes—but is held back by her family, who emigrated from Sicily, and by a promise that already binds her to another man. She will find herself forced to choose between love and duty, freedom and tradition—it is a choice that will mark the fate of generations to come.A saga of love and loss between two people and two countries, Anywhere But Home is a heartbreakingly beautiful story of forging new lives across foreign landscapes and cultures, of old wounds and forgiveness, and of the enduring bonds of family.

    But now, on the brink of menopause, Clea has become bored -- bored with her husband Turner and his endless business trips and dalliances; bored with the New York fast lane; bored with the games of adultery. Clea is ripe for a radical change of scene -- and she thinks she has found it in the seemingly idyllic town of Roches Ridge, Vermont. Falling in love with the town at first sight, Clea buys a decaying but atmospheric old stone house and prepares to embark on a different kind of dream life in the lush green countryside. Only this time her dream collides with a very strange -- and very funny -- dose of reality. Modulating between high comedy, social satire, and serious soul-searching, "Bedrock" is one of Lisa Alther's most engaging, most fully achieved novels. As Marilyn French puts it, " "Bedrock" is a hoot to read, but humor is only one of its graces. Lisa Alther writes with a profound acceptance of human variety and vagary that is rare in this mean age and that lifts the spirits."

    During the grand opening of the towering building, a scientific experiment with radiumite explodes killing everybody throughout the world except eleven of the people at the Pleasure Palace. They escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a revolutionary 1000-mph airplane called "The Monarch of the Air!" The fortunate eleven survivors struggle to rebuild their lives by creating a capitalistic society. After that fails, along with several other inept efforts, they create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River. Sinclair's life-long vision, "The Cooperative Commonwealth," reigns happily forever after, in this classic of the literature of political imagination.

    The Last World is the story of a young man's quest for the exiled poet Ovid and the masterwork he has consigned to the flames. Ransmayr has created a visionary landscape, a transformed place where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. A metaphysical thriller both compelling and profound. The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse. A novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet, this is a cultural and political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.

    When Lucy married Len on a golden July day, Martha tried hard to make the best of things. Len was a good man who would make Lucy happy. They wouldn't be living far away. And the arrival of grandchildren was something she anticipated eagerly. Unexpectedly, Len's job took the newly married couple overseas, where their first child was born. But sorrow, not joy, came with Dominic's birth. On their return, Lucy's best friend, Jennifer, as flighty as Lucy was conventional, was anxious to provide her own kind of consolation... Martha, who was experiencing unlooked-for and at first unwelcome changes in her own life, clung fast to the maternal bond that meant so much to herself and Lucy. Everything she had come to depend on was overturned, however, before Martha was able to find her own kind of happiness in a very different existence. One of Susan Sallis's most poignant and involving novels, The Keys to the Garden explores the mother-daughter relationship with a rare insight.

    But this is the longest he’s ever been gone and the pressure of the unknown weighs heavily upon Marnie’s mind. Her younger sister Jess’s response is to spend her days sitting on the sofa obsessively plucking out her eyelashes one by one; on top of that something ominous appears to have scared away all the neighbourhood cats, including Marnie’s loyal tom, Mr Knuckles, and Marnie herself, a copywriter, is plagued by insomnia and literally at a loss for words.In the midst of the disorder, and of all the aid that could arrive, it is Jericho who returns to Marnie’s doorstep. Is he the playful imaginary companion of her childhood or the misanthropic, possibly homicidal, but undeniably real manifestation of her despair? Whatever he is, Jericho is angry. He doesn’t want to be here but in order to be free of the ties that bind him to Marnie, he has to find out what is wrong with her and fix it before irreparable damage is done.An utterly original and hugely imaginative debut, ADVICE FOR STRAYS is a novel about love, loss and a very unusual friendship.

    Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry - and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They are the best of friends.Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life?The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year, EXPECTATION is a novel about finding your way: as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a rebel.

    Strikingly beautiful she has an extraordinary talent for mimicry, like the famous Australian Lyrebird. The crew, fascinated, make her the subject of her story, and bestow the nickname upon her.When they leave, they take Lyrebird with them back to the city. But as she leaves behind her peaceful life to learn about a new world, is she also leaving behind a part of herself? For her new friend Solomon the answer isn’t clear. When you find a rare and precious thing, should you share it – or protect it…

     In the aftermath of a devastating wedding day, two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, find their lives unraveled by unthinkable loss. Over the course of the next four summers in Red Hook, Maine, they struggle to bridge differences of class and background to honor the memory of the couple, Becca and John. As Waldman explores the unique and personal ways in which each character responds to the tragedy—from the budding romance between the two surviving children, Ruthie and Matt, to the struggling marriage between Iris, a high strung professor in New York, and her husband Daniel—she creates a powerful family portrait and a beautiful reminder of the joys of life.  Elegantly written and emotionally gripping, Red Hook Road affirms Waldman’s place among today’s most talented authors.

    Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage—a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there, she begins to put together the pieces of her story and its beginnings.Eighty years earlier in Rio’s Belle Epoque of the 1920s, Izabela Bonifacio’s father has aspirations for his daughter to marry into the aristocracy. Meanwhile, architect Heitor da Silva Costa is devising plans for an enormous statue, to be called Christ the Redeemer, and will soon travel to Paris to find the right sculptor to complete his vision. Izabela—passionate and longing to see the world—convinces her father to allow her to accompany him and his family to Europe before she is married. There, at Paul Landowski’s studio and in the heady, vibrant cafes of Montparnasse, she meets ambitious young sculptor Laurent Brouilly, and knows at once that her life will never be the same again.In this sweeping, epic tale of love and loss—the first in a unique, spellbinding series of seven novels—Lucinda Riley showcases her storytelling talent like never before.

    As their lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive.In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie's doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger. Sixty years later, in El Paso, Texas, Reba Adams is trying to file a feel-good Christmas piece for the local magazine. Reba is perpetually on the run from memories of a turbulent childhood, but she's been in El Paso long enough to get a full-time job and a fiancé, Riki Chavez. Riki, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, finds comfort in strict rules and regulations, whereas Reba feels that lines are often blurred. Reba's latest assignment has brought her to the shop of an elderly baker across town. The interview should take a few hours at most, but the owner of Elsie's German Bakery is no easy subject. Reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again, anxious to find the heart of the story. For Elsie, Reba's questions are a stinging reminder of darker times: her life in Germany during that last bleak year of WWII. And as Elsie, Reba, and Riki's lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive.