When Dennis Collins arrives at Madison Square Garden for the Friday night fights, he is on top of the world. His career as the man-about-town columnist of the New York Sentinel is on the upswing; his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers are contending for the pennant; and a lover who had jilted him years ago has unexpectedly agreed to drinks and dinner at the Stork Club. Collins is sure that his luck has turned for the better.But at the Garden his closest childhood friend, Morris Rose, approaches him for help. Rose asks Collins to safeguard microfilmed documents that he says will prove his innocence in a State Department loyalty investigation. Out of friendship, Collins reluctantly agrees to hold the microfilm for a week.When Rose disappears from the scene, and FBI agents begin asking hard questions, Collins must solve a puzzle that somehow involves his friend, a shadowy former OSS officer, and a beautiful refugee, Karina, with a troubled past.When Collins discovers that both American and Soviet operatives desperately want the documents he is holding, he is drawn into a twilight struggle between intelligence agencies that will challenge his loyalties and test his courage.Rich with historical detail, Herald Square tells a story of intrigue and deception, of ordinary people propelled into a dangerous, clandestine world where duplicity reigns and any misstep can have dire consequences.

    But as she and her husband raise children and establish their own rituals on the island, Shay finds herself drawn ever deeper into an extraordinary place with its own laws and logic, a provocative paradise full of magic and myth whose fraught colonial legacy continues to reverberate. Soon the collision of cultures comes right to Shay’s door, forcing her to make a life-altering decision.A sweeping novel about marriage and loyalty, identity and heritage, fate and freedom, Red Island House reintroduces readers to a powerhouse literary voice and an extravagantly lush, enchanted world.

     Two Lives… separated by millennia but nevertheless linked irrevocably. What possible link could Mark Hayek, an introverted twenty-first century research scientist, have to Raven, a young healer who lived during the late Pleistocene? It has everything to do with an injured Neanderthal man taken captive by Raven’s band while he and his brothers were hunting bison. After Raven heals the captive, he leaves for his tribe, and she tries to forget him as she struggles to remain within the band. But it’s not possible to stay when several band members make her life with the group untenable. Seeking the Neanderthal man she’d helped and facing her fear of being alone on the dangerous steppes, she begins crossing that grassy land—but a woman like Raven isn’t destined to be by herself for long. In the future, Mark Hayek is forced into making his own journey when his uncle dies in the Levant. His travels place him firmly in the footsteps of his Neanderthal and Early Modern Human ancestors, crossing the same ancient lands as he struggles against the fate a wayward kinsman has imposed. He’s been made a pawn in a cruel game, but when he encounters a woman being held prisoner in a cave, he seeks a way to save her. Help arrives for the pair, flowing from an unexpected, ancient source, igniting a struggle deep within Mark to accept that the illogical as well as the logical make up existence. Peoples come and go, one group replacing another over time, and echoes from ancient events have always affected the future, but Mark and Raven discover that in certain environments echoes are able to bounce back and forth, blurring their origins.

    A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.

    Buried for nearly three hundred years and now brought triumphantly to light by Dr Livesey, this is, at last, the true story of what happened on the fateful Treasure Island…The truth about Captain Flint and his fabled death.The truth about Long John Silver and his coveted wife.And the truth about Jim Hawkins, that double-dealing turncoat of the first order: the traitor of Treasure Island.

    Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth an artistic pioneer, a creator of groundbreaking documentary photographs. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain in the British army is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. When his mission goes horribly wrong, he ultimately comes face to face with questions of loyalty and moral responsibility that will continue to haunt him. Once Luke returns home to Scotland, Anne's secret story begins to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room. There they witness the annual illuminations--the dazzling artificial lights that brighten the seaside resort town as the season turns to winter. The Illuminations is a beautiful and highly charged novel that reveals, among other things, that no matter how we look at it, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.

    Bold Connie and mild-mannered Henry might be different as night and day, but she’s determined to be the best wife she can be and prove the village gossips wrong! Only Connie knows she doesn’t fit into Henry’s genteel world of tea-drinking and jam-making, and the cracks are already starting to show.When Connie’s heroism makes her front page news, her past comes back to haunt her in a terrifying way. A different kind of war has come to Helmstead, and soon it’s a fight for both their marriage and their lives…

    But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq. The parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief. Their forty-year marriage is falling apart. Clarissa, the eldest sibling and a former cello prodigy, has settled into an ambivalent domesticity and is struggling at age thirty-nine to become pregnant. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer and the family contrarian, is angry at everyone. And Noelle, whose teenage years were shadowed by promiscuity and school expulsions, has moved to Jerusalem and become a born-again Orthodox Jew. The last person to see Leo alive, Noelle has flown back for the memorial with her husband and four children, but she feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe? - Leo's widow and mother of their three-year-old son - has come from California bearing her own secret. Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family.

    But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.In Kabul, we meet Fereiba, a schoolteacher who puts her troubled childhood behind her when she finds love in an arranged marriage. But Fereiba's comfortable life implodes when the Taliban rises to power and her family becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime. Forced to flee with her three children, Fereiba has one hope for survival: to seek refuge with her sister's family in London. Traveling with forged papers and depending on the kindness of strangers, Fereiba and the children make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness, the start of a harrowing journey that reduces her from a respected wife and mother to a desperate refugee. Eventually they fall into the shadowy underground network of the undocumented who haunt the streets of Europe's cities. And then, in a busy market square in Athens, their fate takes a frightening turn when Fereiba's teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family. Without his mother, Saleem is forced, abruptly and unforgivingly, to come of age in a world of human trafficking and squalid refugee camps. Heartbroken, Fereiba has no choice but to continue on with only her daughter and baby. Mother and son cross border after perilous border, risking their lives in the hope of finding a place where they can be reunited.

    The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence.From these vastly different lives Nathan Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined--a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong--who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner?

    Collette's suspicions and jealousies arise, but are tempered from the guilt of her own infidelity. The field slave, Tabari, finally escapes but is hunted by two saddle tramps and the law. Throughout it all, the scalawag Doctor disrupts everyone's lives, managing to line his own pockets all the while. Set in and around New Orleans, this deeply moving tale of scandal, sex, and suspense follows the voyages of these very different characters in the 1850s.

    Kate is in the middle of a two week quarantine period, but she just can't take it anymore - the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know.But Kate's neighbour Alice sees her leaving and Matt, Kate's son, soon realizes she's missing. And Kate, who planned only a quick solitary walk - a breath of open air - falls and badly injures herself. What began as a furtive walk has turned into a mountain rescue operation . . . Unbearably suspenseful, witty and wise, The Fell asks probing questions about the place the world has become since March 2020, and the place it was before. Sarah Moss's novel is a story about compassion and kindness and what we must do to survive, and it will move you to tears.

    When the rain finally comes, it’s a miracle. For a moment, the scrubland flourishes and the remote swimming hole fills. Returning home from an afternoon swim, fourteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Billy McBride discover a scene of heartbreaking carnage: their dogs dead in the yard, their hardworking father and mother shot to death, and their precocious younger sister unconscious and severely bleeding from a wound to her gut. The boys believe the killer is their former Aboriginal stockman, and, desperate to save Mary, they rush her to John Sullivan, the wealthiest landowner in the region and their father’s former employer, who promises to take care of them.Eager for retribution, the distraught brothers fall sway to Sullivan, who persuades them to join his posse led by the Queensland Native Police, an infamous arm of British colonial power whose sole purpose is the “dispersal” of indigenous Australians to “protect” settler rights. The group is led by the intimidating inspector Edmund Noone, a dangerous and pragmatic officer whose intellect and ruthlessness both fascinates and unnerves the watchful Tommy. Riding for days across the barren outback, the group is determined to find the perpetrators they insist are guilty, for reasons neither of the brothers truly understands. It is a harsh and horrifying journey that will have a devastating impact on Tommy, tormenting him for the rest of his life—and hold enduring consequences for a young country struggling to come into its own.Set in a period of Australian and British history as raw and relevant as that of the wild frontier of nineteenth-century America, Only Killers and Thieves is an unforgettable story of family, guilt, empire, race, manhood, and faith that combines the insightfulness of Philipp Meyer’s The Son with the atmospheric beauty of Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist and the raw storytelling power of Ian McGuire’s The North Water.

    Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But behind the crumbling facades of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly, its economy compromised by corruption and wartime spoils. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a child’s kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.Joanna’s subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into The Alliance, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro—where the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger.

    Single and feeling there is nothing left for her in small-town England, Anna embarks on an adventure as a volunteer with the Medical Missionaries of Mary to teach the leper children in Africa. Life as Anna has known it, is forever changed as she learns the culture that would banish its sick, disfigured, and crippled to the jungles. Babies are left to die on roadsides, children are chased away to live by whatever means they can find. The aged are abandoned. Anna’s daily life is an adventure as she travels from one village to another across a hostile land with few passable roads, rickety bridges threatening to fall apart and cast its occupants on the jagged rocks far below, and weather that turns a calm river into a roiling death trap. In spite of the trials, Anna also manages to find love and family in this godforsaken land. Follow this adventure through disease, weather, strife, death and determination to turn a few acres of land into a loving home for the outcast lepers of Nigeria.