Nora Eldridge, a thirty-seven-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who long ago abandoned her ambition to be a successful artist, has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar and professor at the École Normale Supérleure; and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to Boston for Skandar to take up a fellowship at Harvard. When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who call him a "terrorist," Nora is drawn into the complex world of the Shahid family: she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries, until Sirena's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill--and the devastating cost--of giving in to one's passions.

    Unfortunately for her, she finds revenge brings more trouble than it's worth. Gretchen's accomplice in murder discovers her darkest secrets and uses them to force her into acting as his delivery girl, delivering packages with undetermined nefarious contents. Much to her dismay, he arrives at the funeral home in an official FBI capacity, asking questions about the murder. To make matters worse, he shows up as her Criminology professor. Each man professes a separate identity and a severe aversion to the others while flirting with her. Her only conclusion is that he suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, leading her to wonder: if a woman dates a man with multiple personalities, can she still call herself a one-man woman?

    Into her life drifts Norman Torkelson, a career con man charged with strangling to death his latest mark. At first, as Lee explains to us, the case seems routine, the evidence overwhelming. Norman--manly, magnetic and morally reprehensible--is a man who crisscrosses America looking for patsies for his cruel marriage scam: Love 'em, liquidate their assets, leave 'em. Clearly, he murdered Bobette Frisch, the dumpy, sour 50-something bar owner who had fallen madly in love with him. But just as Lee is resigning herself to the inevitable Guilty! verdict, she begins to have doubts. What, after all, was Norman's motive? Why not do what he had done for the last 20 years: run and leave behind a broke and brokenhearted victim? Lee starts to wonder if her client is not only not guilty but also covering for the real killer and, in doing so, performing the first selfless act of his life. As the Torkelson case unfolds, a second narrator chimes in to tell us the story behind the story: the tale of Lee's life. Born Lily White, Lee is a smart, pretty and privileged child coming of age on Long Island. Her parents have little time for her or her younger sister, devoted as they are to the pursuit of shallowness. Her mother, Sylvia, who looks like Lauren Bacall's twin sister with a mild eating disorder, is busy with the exhausting work of keeping up her wardrobe. Her father, Leonard Weissberg--Weiss--and finally White, is consumed by his chi-chi Manhattan fur salon, his model-bookkeeper mistress, and his obsession with the family next door, the old-money, oh-so-social Taylors. When Lee marries Jazz Taylor, the scion of these blue-bloods, her life seems blessed. Suddenly she has her mother's approval, her father's love--and a sublime husband. No matter that she has to give up her dream job in the Manhattan DA's Office to move back to Long Island with him; that's what marriage is, a series of compromises made in the name of love. Isn't it? Lily White masterfully interweaves the depths of deception surrounding the twisted Torkelson case with the stunning betrayals that devastate Lee's own life. With the characteristic intelligence and delicious, razor-sharp wit displayed in her previous bestsellers, such as After All These Years and Compromising Positions, Susan Isaacs has crafted an extraordinary novel about social mobility -- about what is phony and what is real. Lily White is the seamlessly executed story of the crimes committed in the name of the good life and the victims of these violations: Those like Bobette, who do not survive, those whose spirits are crushed, and the few, like Lee, who fight back--and find something better

    The high always comes before the fall…Sadie would do anything not to end up on the streets again.  Even come up with the crazy idea of selling marijuana to cancer patients struggling through chemo. Before they know it Sadie and her friends are over-run with orders, have a sexy detective on their trail, suspicious neighbours and drug dealers angry they’re working on their patch. Can Sadie pull them out of this dangerous world they’ve found themselves in, all while ignoring the attraction between her and sexy detective Harry? And can she do it before they end up in prison?

    His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

    Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa’s “Death on a Leipzig Balcony.” Jacob’s police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation. In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacob’s understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945. The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery—it’s the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library in a span of three decades—is Howard Norman at his “provocative . . . haunting”* and uncannily moving best.- Janet Maslin, New York Times

    In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

    She’s finally created a life with her daughter and is a well-respected attorney. She’s moving on. But when a new rash of homicides has her ex-husband, Eddie, written all over them—the nightmares of her past come back to life.The FBI asks Jessica to get involved in the hunt for this copycat killer—which means visiting her ex and collaborating with the man who tore her life apart.As the copycat’s motives become clearer, the new life Jessica created for herself gets darker. She must ask herself who she can trust and if she’s capable of stopping the killer—a man whose every crime is a bloody valentine from a twisted mastermind she’s afraid she may never escape.

    According to their father, it's the devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water. Until the day six-year-old Pansy disappears. Not drowned, not lost . . . simply gone.After years with no sign, no hope of ever finding Pansy alive, Bert and Willet have tried to move on. But as surely as their mother died of a broken heart, they can't let go. So when clues surface drawing them to the remote tip of Florida, they drop everything and drive south. Deep in the murky depths of the Florida Everglades they may find the answer to Pansy's mysterious disappearance . . . but truth, like the past, is sometimes better left where it lies.Perfect for fans of Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Allison, The Past Is Never is an atmospheric, haunting story of myths, legends, and the good and evil we carry in our hearts.

    edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

    Now, mostly estranged from one another, the remaining five reluctantly gather at that same house on the eve of what would have been Bea’s fortieth birthday.But along with the return of the friends come old grudges, unrequited feelings, and buried secrets. Catherine, the CEO of a domestic empire, and Owen, a stay-at-home dad, were picture-perfect college sweethearts—but now teeter on the brink of disaster. Lindy, a well-known musician, is pushing middle age in an industry that’s all about youth and slowly self-destructing as she grapples with her own identity. Behind his smile, handsome plastic surgeon Colin harbors the heartbreaking truth about his own history with Bea. And Annie carefully curates her life on Instagram and Facebook, keeping up appearances so she doesn’t have to face the truth about her own empty reality.Reunited in the place where so many dreams began, and bolstered by the hope of healing, each of them is forced to confront the past.

    See You is not a romance, but it is a love story; one filled with the rawness of and risk and redemption and the dry humor that is the backbone of the South.Emma has loved Jack since she was a little girl. But he was more than 20 years older and was raised by her grandmother, Miss Margret, so he's always been more of an uncle than anything else. He's never seen Emma as anything but a child.Jack's been gone since Miss Margret died ten years ago, and Emma has become content with her small life in her small Alabama town, raising her daughter in the same house where both she and Jack were raised. She tells herself that nothing is missing, but she's never been able to love anyone other than Jack.Now Jack has come home and he has a plan. If Emma agrees to it, she knows she'll be volunteering for a pain she can't prepare for. Jack has made no secret of the fact that he'll be dead within a year. He does have one secret though, a secret he's protected for years; and that secret could change everything. Can something be so good that it's worth allowing it to break your heart? Emma and Jack are about to find out, because this homecoming won't be anything either of them expected. You will laugh loudly. You will cry ugly. But you will find it hard to forget Jack and Emma.

    Jackson, Vivvie’s husband, was shot and killed 30 years ago, and the ramifications have splintered the family into their own isolated remembrances and recriminations.This deeply personal, hauntingly melancholy look at the damages families inflict on each other – and the healing that only they can provide – is filled with flinty, flawed and complex people stumbling towards some kind of peace. Like Elizabeth Strout and Kazuo Isiguro, Deborah Reed understands a story and its inhabitants reveal themselves in the subtleties: the space between the thoughts, the sigh behind the smile, and the unreliable lies people tell themselves that ultimately reveal the deepest truths.

    Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall.The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Orringer's gifts as a novelist.

    Picasso, as she calls herself, is a young artist who has been sexually abused by her brother but whose family thinks she is at fault for her dark moods. Sappho is, indeed, Sappho, the lesbian poet of ancient Greece, who here proclaims herself a sensualist and then proceeds to dissect "the union of language and lust." The three converge in a place that may be England in a not-too-distant future made ugly by pollution and even uglier by greed. This is not a novel but an extended rift on art, sex, religion, social repression, the dangers of patriarchy, and everything that is wrong with the contemporary drift to the right. As such, it will be hard going for most readers, but those with some patience will discover exceptionally evocative writing and a vivifying review of some much-discussed contemporary issues.