This is not to say, however, that it is by any means quiet on the Row, a place where bathtubs double as lawn furniture and adultery, bribery and larceny are commonplace. From the quirky to the certifiable, it seems that everyone has something to hide -- from their cus- tomers, spouses and even themselves. But when a violent storm strikes, causing fire, a heart attack and grand theft, it stirs up more than just the earth it hits. Suddenly, long-buried truths are flowing faster than the flooding rains, and when the dust and smoke finally clear, everything is righted at last. With a strong, rich and uproariously funny voice, Joe Coomer resurrects the magic of his previous novels, Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God and The Loop, and turns the utterly ordinary into the stunningly extra-ordinary. With a splendid cast of characters and the cleverest canine in comedy, Apologizing to Dogs is a hilarious, heartwarming and wonderfully human tale, proving that no matter how old you get, there's always something worth holding on to, fighting for and loving with all your might.

    "Paul and Clare" introduces the heroine of her upcoming novel, Little Night, and offers a glimpse into how she met the love of her life—and the beginning of her life-long passion for birds and nature, even in New York City. "Miss Martha's Vineyard" is a snapshot of the quirky, unconditional friendship with larger-than-life blueblood Harrison Thaxter that has kept Rory McCarthy from The Silver Boat afloat even in rough romantic seas.

    

    It never happened to anyone I knew ... It happened over breakfast, or lunch. It happened to parents who were careless”Alice Winters is not a careless mother. Yet one awful day her two-year-old daughter is taken from her pushchair outside a village shop. Alice’s life becomes every parent’s worst nightmare as she begins questioning everything and everyone she knows, vowing to leave no stone unturned until Grace is found.Now, ten years later, Alice believes that the publication of her book recollecting the events surrounding Grace’s disappearance will be the final needle in the haystack needed to bring her home.Who had taken Grace and why? Will Alice ever be ready to accept the truth, no matter how difficult it is to hear? For fans of Diane Chamberlain, this is a must read.

    She grows up, living a sheltered life, thanks to her mother, being naïve to the ways of the world. Due to that, her eyes are closed to the fact that going to church doesn't make a person holy. She learns that from her own parents, then from members at the church she goes to. Raquel's life is nothing short of a roller coaster ride, filled with sadness, depression, but most of all, her desire to be loved. Things happen that could be detrimental to Raquel's future, but she refuses to give up. There is one particular person that needs her to keep her sanity. So, Raquel is determined to succeed, despite the circumstances. Will she be able to overcome adversity or will the people that's supposed to mean her the most good, contribute to her downfall?

    When a famous Hollywood director travels to post-Wall Germany to rekindle his genius, he is unexpectedly reunited with an actress who mysteriously disappeared from the set of his movie thirty years before. Masterly and atmospheric, The Weather in Berlin explores the subtleties of artistic inspiration, the nature of memory, and the pull of the past.

    But he has been watching Esther, too. And his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.The author of Here on Earth and The River King presents a "stunning and hypnotic" novel that "interweaves past and present with piercing images and unfailing energy" (Publishers Weekly).

    she has left it too late to ask the crucial questions about scenes confusedly remembered from her childhood, and above all about the identity of her own father, 'lost in the war'. Out of the hundreds of paintings in her mother's studio, one, a portrait of a young man, is inscribed 'For Marion'. Is this her father? And who was he?Marion's search takes her to the Cornish town of St Ives. In the remote and closeknit town where communities of fisherfolk and artists have coexisted for many years, she learns of a tragedy which is intrinsically tied up with her father's life. Over fifty years before, the St Ives lifeboat went down with all hands bar one. Marion must delve deep into the past to discover the identity of a man she never knew,a nd in so doing confront the demons which have tortured her own adult life.The Serpentine Cave is an imagined story containing a true one - a powerful novel about memory and loss, birth and rebirth, and past regrets which still have the power to plague the present.

    Like the old master Henry James, Sheila Bosworth uses the chilling device of using the mirror of innocence to reflect evil. It is a lovely achievement, a superior one."-Walker Percy Clay-Lee Calvert is the love child of two people who are as beautiful as models in a magazine but whose similarity ends there. Her father, Rand, is an artist-easygoing, dreamy, principled, and chronically jobless. Her mother, Constance, is the blue-blooded, pampered, delicate but determined daughter of a state supreme court justice. How their intense passion for each other plays out against the sumptuousness and decay of 1950s New Orleans is something to which no innocent should be privy. In Sheila Bosworth's mesmerizing first novel, the era, the place, the people, of Clay-Lee's childhood all form an air as real as our own pasts, alternately dim and indelible, where everyone bears some guilt, and all are almost innocent.

    The family troupe's fame gathers momentum as they rise from open-mike nights, to small comedy clubs to late-night television spots, until it threatens them with unforeseen and new dangers. With compassion, warmth, and wit, Susan Richards Shreve has crafted a powerful story about family tragedy and one person's refusal to accept fate.

    He spends most of his time trying to divine the ideological climate of the school and obligingly adapting his beliefs to it. When Puttbutt's mysterious Japanese tutor, who promises to teach him Japanese by spring, suddenly becomes the school's new president and appoints Puttbutt as academic dean, the fun really begins—for Puttbutt sets out to stir things up and settle old scores.Turning every contemporary political and social movement on its head—from feminism to nationalism to jingoism—this boisterous and irreverent novel manages to be by turns hilarious and totally serious."One of the funniest satires of university politics I've ever read. Ishmael Reed is funnier than Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal." —Leslie Marmon Silko"Reed is, as always, an American original; a wiseguy whose wisdom is the real thing," —The Boston Sunday Globe

    Anxious to start a new life, Samantha decides to open up a business of her own, and throws herself into making the dream a reality. But along the way, there are plenty of obstacles popping up to make life a little more challenging than she expected - nosy neighbors and cranky in-laws, attractive men and pretentious sisters, a gossipy mother, mysterious hate mail, and ghosts from the past that threaten to destroy everything she's worked to achieve. And just when Sam thinks things couldn't possibly get worse, there's a murder on her property that the local detective seems mighty determined to pin on the newest resident of Peabody. Suddenly Sam is overwhelmed with troubles she never imagined, and she knows the only way to get through any of it is by keeping her sense of humor and trusting that God really does know exactly what He is doing.

    And when she falls victim to a diabolical scheme to steal her newborn baby from her, she is not about to give up her child without a fight, even if she has to take on the wealthiest and most powerful family in the country. But is Tamara fighting against her child's own best interests? Only she can decide. And it's a decision that she — and her child — will have to live with for the rest of their lives.If you value family, if you have ever yearned for unconditional love, if you want to experience a story whose themes will resonate long after you have turned the last page, then you will want to read this book.

    Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from "Gathering the Bones Together"A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."—The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr:Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 • CUSA

    Leaving behind a sad, silent childhood—which was spent living in two rooms above the family noodle shop on an isolated peninsula in the far north of Japan—Toshi moves to Tokyo to pursue his career. There he falls under the spell of three Americans: his best friend and confidante, the generous and extroverted Paul, a gay advertising copywriter who has plenty of his romantic mishaps with Japanese men; Jane, his glamorous but emotionally unstable teacher at the Very Romantic English Academy, with whom Toshi has a hazardous sexual affair; and, finally, the lovely and talented composer, Lucy, with whom Toshi falls in love. The novel deftly moves back and forth between present and past, as Toshi explores his unhappy childhood, the reasons behind his mother's unexplained abandonment when he was eight years old, and her move to a seaside inn across the peninsula. As the novel draws to a close, tragic events, both public and personal, bring past and present together, revealing the painful truth of Toshi's parents' lives during World War II, and a secret in Toshi's own past that, in the end, gives him the strength and knowledge to confront the future.