His love affair with punk comes full circle as he learns to hate it and then learns to love it again. The pieces in this book take us from his Southern roots, his brief stay in St. Louis, and his journey to California on a quest for punk bliss. Sinister finds himself in Oakland, where he gets exactly what he wanted, but it may just kill him. From recounts of specific shows to metaphorical dreams of Abraham Lincoln to the tragic stories of circus elephants, All Blacked Out & Nowhere to Go mixes tragedy and comedy into a book that's louder and faster than any book of its kind.

    One follows Joanna Aronson as she cares for her father, Clyde, during his latest struggle with cancer while butting heads with her stepmother, Brenda, a cold woman whom Joanna suspects of neglecting him and even trying to kill him. Interspersed are Joanna’s memories of growing up in suburban Baltimore with her sister and parents in the ’60s, a life that seems idyllic yet seethes with subterranean discontents. Clyde, an English teacher, dominates the family with his charisma but undermines it with his affairs, including a liaison with one of Joanna’s teenage acquaintances. Joanna’s mother, Evie, feels trapped in housewifery and longs for the fulfillment she felt as a Communist Party activist. Joanna, though drawn like Clyde to the life of the mind, feels slighted because of his wish that she had been a boy. A colleague of her father’s seduces her at age 14. Threading through the story is Clyde’s memoir of growing up with his brother, Harry, in New York’s National Hebrew Orphan Home after his father abandoned the family and his mother placed the two boys there in 1924. It’s a Dickensian story of cold, hunger, loneliness, frequent beatings, and sexual abuse, but it’s lit with friendships and intellectual ambitions. Cherubin’s bittersweet tale is an epic and indelible character study of Clyde from frightened cub to kvetching lion in winter, with overtones of King Lear and an occasional queasily incestuous vibe. She writes in evocative prose that mixes astringent reality with glowing reverie. (“I sized up the three agents,” recalls Evie of a visit from the FBI during the Joseph McCarthy era. “Cold, smug, and bored. They could not begin to understand how alive I was during the war, how urgent and meaningful my life was thanks to the CP. How engaged I was with the world… I still miss those days.”) As Joanna grapples with her clan’s vexed legacy, the author shows how both betrayal and forgiveness can propagate across generations.An alternately dark and luminous, wounded and affectionate portrait of a family in crisis.

    Author Storm Constantine was intrigued by this story and found herself thinking ‘What if...?’ Thin Air is the novel that sprang from her ideas. While the characters in this book are not based upon any existing people, alive, dead or missing, the mystery was enough to inspire a story.Dex is the front man of a successful band, and appears to have the perfect rock star life with his journalist partner, Jay. But Jay’s existence is shattered by Dex’s sudden disappearance. The mystery is never solved, and Dex is never found: alive or dead. Some years later, after Jay has got her life back together, strange events begin to unfold that suggest that Dex is still around. While it gradually becomes clear to Jay that there is more to the mystery than even she thought possible, malign forces begin to close in on her with the apparent intent of keeping the truth behind Dex’s disappearance forever hidden.Jay can only follow the clues where they lead her, and that is into territory beyond normal human perception. In the bizarre town of Lestholme, she comes upon a community of the lost, people whose lives have been ruined by media attention, and it is in this surreal place that Jay must penetrate to the heart of the mystery, and discover what really happened to the man she loves, who vanished into thin air.Capturing the ambience of the music scene of the 90s, Thin Air is one of Storm’s best-loved novels.

    In fact, he’s never met another human—or seen a sunrise, smelled a flower, or eaten a regular meal. All of that is about to change.It’s night in the desert, but he doesn’t feel the cold. The sky is clear, and the stars twinkle at him. He has never seen the sky from Earth before. Everything looks so strange. So . . . alien. He shakes his head in wonderment and laughs. He can’t stop smiling. This is Earth!There is a building ahead. Other people will be inside. His heart skips a beat as he takes a step forward, the rocks crunching under his bare feet. He has dreamed of this moment for as long as he can remember.But that which can be found can just as easily be lost again. It would have been better had Sam’s arrival gone unnoticed. But the artificial life form known only as the Authority is not one to miss such things. Nearly as old as time, and almost as powerful, the Authority was built by an ancient civilization as both an enforcer and a war machine, the destroyer of worlds. It has been watching Sam his entire life. Watching, and waiting, and judging. And now, it has decided that it’s time to act.

     When the beautiful Sybilia is married off to the son of her town’s leader, she soon discovers that being a woman in 1940s Corisca comes with few freedoms. But when the Second World War reaches the remote island, Sybilia is pressed into service for her country as a spy and as an assistant to a new arrival in town: the American captain Robin Moore. The two fall into a passionate love, much to the anger of her cruel father-in-law. Pregnant with Moore’s child, she is left a pariah when her lover is posted abroad, never to return again. Sybilia lives out the next twenty-five years alone, burdened with a deep sadness at the betrayal and loss of her lover. It isn’t until long after the war ends when she discovers the true fate of Robin Moore. A fate that sets her on the path to vengeance…

    1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

    Many years later, a couple sailing around the world take refuge on an uncharted island. Although they believe the tiny atoll to be uninhabited, it is actually home to a mysterious woman who has been stranded there for more than forty years. As that woman ponders whether to stay hidden or step back into society, a tempestuous storm threatens to change the course of all their lives.

    For each craves a change in her life: Devera desires a break from her humdrum marital routine; BiDi longs to reconnect with her distant fourteen-year-old daughter (the only girl on the high school hockey team), not to mention jump-start a sex drive stuck in neutral. So when Devera’s husband decides to fulfill his longtime dream of opening a nightclub in his basement, Your Oasis on Flame Lake arrives not a moment too soon. Nothing fancy, it’s just a BYOB joint where you can hang out, sing, dance, tell jokes, and be yourself. But then an unexpected crisis throws both families into chaos, forcing them all to take stock of their lives—and learn the power of forgiveness.

    Sarah has married and settled contentedly into small-town life. Maggie has spent fifteen years drifting around the world with a backpack. Now Maggie has come home to a dank, dull British winter, supposedly for just a few months. The Penn children are delighted to have their exciting aunt stay with them, but fate has an unexpected adventure in store. It rocks the whole family, bringing up dark shadows from their common past, and confronts Maggie with the hardest decision of her life.

    On the run, he holes up in a sheltered barrio on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean owned by his wealthy but unsympathetic father. Here he meets Sweets, the telepathic dog, laments the loss of Sofia, his madhouse lover, and plays the horses at the Del Mar Racetrack. Eventually he meets up with an old friend, Shelly Hubbard, a fellow horseplayer, record collector/dealer, and hardcore loner, who tells him about his brother, Donny, dead at the age of eighteen from a tragic dive off a thirty-foot La Jolla sea cliff known as the Clam. Eddie discovers a family secret and wants to help, but by then he's already embroiled in the psychotic incident with the Tijuana prostitutes, the madhouse lover, and the police, who are hot on his tail. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride has nothing on Whirlaway, a hilarious novel of escaped mental patients, horseplayers, and record collectors.

    Told in a voice that reads like the intimate diary of a young woman about to take life on full throttle, this wonderful debut novel chronicles Andrea's jittery journey from suburban mall to Portland's thriving underground rock scene - and back again, as she discovers sex, betrayal, and even love. A Catcher in the Rye for the "Grunge" generation, this instant classic will speak to anyone who has ever had to choose between the suffocation of conformity and the perils of rebellion.

    But they can’t tell anyone they’re doing so.As their trips to the past continue, they begin to realise how it could change a devastating moment from their own past. But for Caroline, it’s clear they don’t want the same outcome.Until, on one trip, one of them does something unthinkable which will change both their lives forever.For fans of Matt Haig, Claire North and Audrey Niffenegger.

    But Rosemary has a secret, and he’s lying comatose in a hospital only a few miles away. Should she let him live, or let him go? Into the midst of Rosemary’s dilemma comes bohemian artist, Ben. His abstract pictures and fixation with painting God disturb Rosemary, and yet she finds herself unable to keep away. As summer passes and an unlikely friendship develops, it becomes clear that Rosemary is not the only one with something to hide. Nor is she the only one battling the ghosts of the past. Rosemary and Ben must decide whether to trust each other, choosing between the madness of admitting the truth and the insanity of maintaining their lies. With their lives unravelling around them, can they help each other to confront the past, or are there some secrets too terrible to be told?

    It's been five years since the idyllic oceanside town of Port Elspeth was rocked by tragedy. Shortly after their high school graduation, Evangeline Maddingly, daughter of one of the town's wealthiest old-money families, and Oliver Prescott, son of one of the town's wealthiest new-money families, were found dead in an isolated cabin in the woods outside of town. The circumstances surrounding their untimely deaths are murky at best, thanks in large part to a coroner with connections to the town's founding families and a sweeping effort from those in power to shut down any negative publicity that could harm the reputation of their pristine community.Five years later, a small group of strangers gather to create jewelry for one of Port Elspeth's many fundraisers. Before long, friendships are forming and old secrets are being revealed. Along with solving the mystery of how to make a perfect pair of chandelier earrings or cabochon necklace, these unlikely friends find themselves at the heart of solving the murders that took place half a decade earlier.

    But patriotism trumps passion, leaving La to worry if her life will always be "a play in which I have no real part." In McCall-Smith's quintessentially English world, perserverance, pots of tea and the power of music will show the way.(Ellen Shapiro for People magazine)