When her every attempt to rekindle romance and affection with her husband--a prominent local doctor--fails, she finds herself turning to the friendship of Charlie Cobb, a new man in town. But as their relationship becomes more intimate, smalltown tongues start wagging, and their starcrossed affair leads to a shocking public murder.

    When the events around the seemingly accidental death of her estranged godfather don’t add up, Nadia is determined to discover the truth—even if she attracts the attention of dangerous men intent on finding out what she knows through any means possible.Her investigation leads her to her hometown and to the people least likely to welcome her back: her family.In this thrilling prequel to the Nadia Tesla series, Nadia must try to solve the mystery surrounding her godfather’s death—and his life. The answers to her questions are buried with the secrets of her youth and in post–World War II refugee camps. What Nadia learns will change her life forever.

    The story is complete with twenty-seven recipes from the life and tumultuous times of Eden Douglass. Eden was born in 1920 into a contentious California tribe, and the ingredients of her life include her grandmother's reserve, her aunt's instinct for action, and her mother's foggy warmth.  Seasoned with spicy herbs, and a few bitter ones, simmered and stirred over time, these instincts shape her destiny. Two strong-willed women--her grandmother Ruth Douglass and her aunt Afton Lance--struggle to pull Eden from the comfy sloth of her parents' home.  Her ill-matched parents drift toward financial collapse, and her father, pursuing phantom wealth, takes the family to an Idaho mining town.  He finds fulfillment in Idaho, but Eden's mother breaks down, and Eden must shoulder the household drudgery, burdens not in keeping with her aspirations to be a journalist.Eden's adventurous spirit takes her far from her faith and family.  She falls in love in wartime London and rides a motorcycle across war-torn Belgium.  After the war, still reeling from a devastating loss, Eden returns to Southern California and is hired by a newspaper, only to confront insidious opposition, yet find an unexpected ally. Then, in 1952, fate puts Eden Douglass in the path of a runaway horse at Greenwater Movie Ranch, where they're filing a B-movie Western.  She falls flat on her face, and Matt March lifts her from the dust.  Charming and charismatic, with good looks, cowboy boots, and appetite for life, and his VistaVision of the Western, Matt ignites Eden's passion.  Three months later, they elope to Mexico. In these exuberant California boom years, Eden nourishes Matt's dreams, even though they are sauced with secrets and larded with debt.  He tests Eden's strengths and his children's love. A big-cast book, American Cookery fulfills the wide embrace of its title.  The novel chronicles the stories behind family recipes and the lives that touch Eden's--lives of horse thieves, ranchers, railroad men, developers, dreamers, migrants, immigrants, natives, Latter-Day Saints, sinners, silent-film stars, sidekicks, and stunt people. The good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful emerge in these pages as American Cookery serves up the whole gorgeous banquet of life.

    These judges held a unique position. As "fathers to the people" they were at once judge and detective, responsible for all aspects of keeping the peace and for discovering, capturing, and punishing criminals.One of the most celebrated historical magistrates was Judge Dee, who lived in the seventh century A.D. This book, written in the eighteenth century by a person well versed in the Chinese legal code, chronicles three of Judge Dee's most celebrated cases, interwoven to form a novel. A double murder among traveling merchants, the fatal poisoning of a bride on her wedding night, and an unsolved murder in a small town under Judge Dee's jurisdiction — these are the crimes. They take Judge Dee up and down the great silk routes, through clever disguises, into ancient graveyards where he consults the spirits of the dead, and through some clever deduction.After translating Dee Goong An, Robert Van Gulik continued the adventures of Judge Dee in fiction he wrote himself. This, however is the only place where you can find the originals of Judge Dee, the venerable Sergeant Hoong, the treacherous Ma Joong, and the other members of Dee's detective force. As the first publication of Dee Goong An in the United States, this edition makes these cases accessible for the first time.While the cases are superb for reading, they also show the Chinese system of law enforcement and legal proceedings (which are quite different from Western forms). Van Gulik has provided a thorough introduction and appendix with much information on Chinese detective novels, the Chinese system of justice, and particularly relevant aspects of Chinese law that play a part in these stories.

    Southern civility turns savage when Hank Whitaker’s dying words reveal the unimaginable. No one—not his socialite wife, Maggie, or young son, Lance—ever suspected the successful businessman, husband and father they loved, and thought they knew, was a black man passing for white. In 1931, in the segregated South, marriage between whites and blacks is illegal. Maggie faces jail for her crime of interracial marriage, but when Lance receives death threats to atone for his father’s betrayal, the family decides to flee the U.S. for freedom in racially and socially liberal society in Paris, France.Still grieving Hank’s death and fearful of their uncertain future as Europe marches toward war, Lance and Maggie mourn the lives they loved but lost. As they struggle to create new identities for themselves, they find a surprising community of artists and American expats that are on the same journey. In a new city, with new friends, new loves and exciting possibilities, they start to believe that it might be possible to change everything, even the past.Provenance is a sweeping historical saga about love, betrayal, tragedy, triumph, passion, privilege and the universal desire for acceptance—regardless of who you are or where you’re from.

      Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.   With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.Lulu --Hotline girl --New fruit --Field notes on a marriage --Flying machine --On the street where you live --Shanghai murmur --Land of big numbers --Beautiful country --Gubeikou spirit

    

    Kiril Andreyev plans his desperate escape from Soviet tyranny to freedom in the West. But when his friend's escape attempt ends in flames, Kiril finds his life threatened by a ruthless KGB officer. Kiril's last chance rests on a visiting American heart surgeon and his journalist wife. But even as Kiril plots his escape, he finds that his life depends on his materialistic mistress, on the rivalries of Soviet and East German intelligence agents, and on accidental betrayals by those he trusts most. The story builds to a climax in a deadly confrontation on Glienicker Bridge, linking East Germany and West Berlin. Will Dr. Kiril Andreyev succeed in his lifelong quest for freedom--and at what cost?

    A Shadow Beyond is a heart-rending and chilling tale of sacrifice, love, obsession and tragedy. Lost in the folds of time, behind one village's brave sacrifice, is the tragic and chilling secret of Thornycroft Hall.... Locked away in the top quarters of Thornycroft, a large house on the edge of the historic village of Eyam, is a centuries old secret. Escaping the chaos of a complicated break up, Kate Saunders travels to the Peak District to stay with her Great Aunt Edie who has suffered a fall. Thornycroft is the perfect bolthole for Kate, peaceful and providing plenty of distance from her obsessive ex. But when Kate stumbles across a diary and an ancient bogwood jewellery box in the top of the house, the tranquillity she had expected is shattered. She is shocked to discover that Edie has been tampering with the supernatural and as Kate reads the contents of the diary, the shadows of Thornycroft’s past begin to stir. Kate becomes fascinated by the history of the house and the legacy of the villagers who made a brave yet devastating decision during the outbreak of plague. The more she discovers, the more she realises that, hidden behind Eyam’s tragic story, is a dreadful family secret. Stalked by her ex and restless spirits who harbour a dark secret, Kate realises she’s in danger - not only from the living, but from the dead. As the haunting intensifies and layers of time peel away, Kate starts to uncover a chilling truth that has remained buried for centuries…

    In June 1989, the world watched in horror as China's military was mobilized to suppress a student movement that stood for peaceful democracy. Hundreds were killed; others say thousands. No one knows for sure. But the image that remains most powerful is that of a lone young man, looking confused yet terribly brave, as he held his ground before a rolling line of tanks. Who was he, and why did he do what he did? No one has ever been able to determine his identity or fate. Within the pages of "Sons of Heaven, in a stunning blend of history and fiction, Terrence Cheng has vividly created a life for this young hero and given him a voice.

    With the support of a young man who is just venturing into the burgeoning trade of news photography, Emily soon finds herself in a race against time to save Anna's life and to bring her story back to New York before Pulitzer's tough deadline expires.Chicago is a place of dangerous contrasts. Among all the glitz and razzmatazz of the Fair itself and the spectacular wealth and influence of a new middle class elite, Emily comes face to face with rival ethnic groups, the sinister underworld of pornography and prostitution, as well as the ruthless meatpacking giants of the Union Stock Yard, who control the lives and destinies of so many of Chicago's immigrant poor.

    A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life.One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese literature, Rickshaw Boy is an unflinchingly honest, darkly comic look at a life on the margins of society and a searing indictment of the philosophy of individualism.

    Gianluca Brasolin, fluent in Italian, to tend the Italian ambassador, at the Summer Palace of Empress Dowager, where she meets and falls in love with Giacomo.Through voyage and adventure, their love intensifies, but soon is severed by Lian’s dutiful promise as the wife to another. Forbidden from pursuing her chosen profession as a healer, and despised because she does not have bound feet, she is forced to work in a cloisonné factory while her in-laws raise her daughter, Ya Chen. It is in Nushu, the women’s secret writing, that she chronicles her life and her hopes for the future.Rebelling against the life forced upon her, she empowers herself to act out against the injustice and becomes the master of her own destiny. But her quest for freedom comes at a costly price: The life of someone close to her, lost in a raging typhoon, a grueling journey to the Yun-kang Caves, and a desperate search for beauty and love in the midst of brutality.

    The story is wryly narrated by the chieftain's son, a self-professed "idiot" who reveals the bloody feuds, seductions, secrets, and scheming behind his family's struggles for power. When the chieftain agrees to grow opium poppies with seeds supplied by the Chinese Nationalists in exchange for modern weapons, he draws Tibet into the opium trade -- and unwittingly plants the seeds for a downfall. Red Poppies is at once a political parable and a moving elegy to the lost kingdom of Tibet in all its cruelty, beauty, and romance.

    On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.