TROPIC OF RUISLIP is a sage for life on a modern executive housing estate, seething with the fears, snobbereis, frustrations and lusts of well-heeled young couples trundling uneasily towards middle age.

    Police sub-inspector Swami has lost his job after suffering a stroke while beating up a Very Guilty Suspect. He can no longer talk properly, command the respect of his community, or give his six daughters the bankrupting dowries they deserve--and his wife is obsessed with securing the Most Expensive Husbands in India. No wonder Swami has lost his pride and wants to kill himself using only a puncture repair kit. Surely a man in these circumstances has good reason to feel cursed when a white man falls out of the sky and lands on him in a busy street, dying in front of his eyes and making him a laughing stock. But as further strange incidents occur, Swami's hometown starts to believe he is walking with God, and life becomes easier...

    Elliott Wiener, an unscrupulous historian, tracks down Warren Harding's ancient mistress in a crumbling Los Angeles mansion and schemes to get the president's love letters.

    But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle. Ron Butlin's tale of one man's inner turmoil is haunting, harrowing, yet strangely uplifting; a masterpiece from a neglected Scottish writer.

    With a glee in upending pretense that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell attacks artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the glamorous life.Afternoon Men provides an important perspective on the development of one of this century's great satirists.

    Battling the sea and struggling against each other as the dreaded williwaw approaches, strikes, and subsides, the men reveal the storms within their souls, stark, fierce, and compelling. And pervading all is the grim atmosphere, set down with a mastery of description, of the desolate Arctic and the harsh destructive storm.

    Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice of his gifts as a naturalist. But power is more than just the complicated game played by the old men at the zoo in the satirical first half of this novel: it lies very near to violence, and in the second half real life inexorably turns to fantasy – the fantasy of war. This tense and at times brutal story offers the healing relationship between man and the natural world as a solution for the power dilemma.

    When her amazing singing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom. But even as Maria is celebrating her greatest success, she is waging a hidden battle against her own body, and becoming in the process a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity. Can she be saved by love? Or will she be consumed by an obsessive celebrity culture, family lies, and by her number-one fan? This stunning novel is a rich portrait of an immigrant community and a tragic tale of the hidden costs of celebrity.

    From the author of "Witchcraft" and "Buttons in the Marsh" comes this black comedy about an unsuccessful solicitor who decides to murder his wife, with devastating results.

    Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony's restless adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries's blend of erudite wit and silliness—not to mention his fascination with both language and female anatomy—and it propels Slouching Towards Kalamazoo through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical, while soaring on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.

    Bill Sarratt, a civil servant, spends the war wining, dining, and wittily commenting on London's shattered nightlife. But, as the bombs begin to fall closer and closer, Sarratt's wife takes on a lover—and his life literally begins to crumble around him.

    He has everything life could offer -- a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful young wife, Imogen, who is devoted to him, and their 11-year-old son, a replica of his father.Their nearest neighbor is Blanche Silcox, a plain, tweed-wearing woman of 50 who rides, shoots, fishes, and drives a Rolls Royce -- in every way the opposite of the domestic, loving Imogen. Their world is conventional country life at its most idyllic: how can its gentle surfaces be disturbed?

     There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, sudden and quite unexpected, leaving her husband, Thaddeus, haunted by the details of her last afternoon. The next death came some weeks later, after Thaddeus's mother-in-law helped him to interview for a nanny to bring up their baby. None of the applicants were suitable--least of all the last one, with her sharp features, her shabby clothes that reeked of cigarettes, her badly typed references--so Letitia's mother moved herself in. But then, just as the household was beginning to settle down, the last of the nannies surprisingly returned, her unwelcome arrival heralding the third of the summer tragedies. "William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence. . . . His skill is very real, and equals his great compassion. With Death in Summer, these two qualities combine in a beautiful and resonant way."--The New York Time Book Review "Possibly the most perfect of Trevor's novels . . . Astonishing."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "Beautifully paced and mesmerizing . . . Offering us a compelling mystery on many levels through . . . finely drawn, perfect glimpses of touchingly imperfect lives."--The Washington Post Book World Nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize

    With extraordinary insight, Lehmann explores the sublimity and the pain of these fatally interrelated lives in a novel which carefully fictionalises the fracturing of the human personality under the pressure of irreconcilable emotional commitments.

    But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?