Freda Lippi comes home one afternoon to find her apartment overrun by the police and her ventriloquist husband, Alberto, his dummy, and her parrot, Pierino, gone without trace.Though distraught about Pierino, her true soul mate, Freda feels nothing short of exaltation at the thought that the husband she despises may never return.From there, she chronicles the surreal events of the days that follow with flashbacks to her own tragic life that explain why she married Alberto; from the horrific accident that devastated her world as a teenager, to the life-changing cruise around the Mediterranean with a sinister but hilarious one-armed companion; from the funeral parlor where Freda works by day as an embalmer, to the seedy cabaret where she performs at night, unleashing her repressed passions.

    In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and so much more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot.His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia’s heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone.Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux at his very best.

    His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive--first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

    Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.

    Using the lyrical magic realism style of classical Persian storytelling, Azar draws the reader deep into the heart of a family caught in the maelstrom of post-revolutionary chaos and brutality that sweeps across an ancient land and its people. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is really an embodiment of Iranian life in constant oscillation, struggle and play between four opposing poles: life and death; politics and religion. The sorrow residing in the depths of our joy is the product of a life between these four poles.

    She’s fell for veterinarian Cameron McKenzie’s good looks, caring nature and especially his devotion to his young daughter. For months Cameron’s pushed away all thoughts of taking Rina in his arms and kissing her, unwilling to risk their friendship. But when a kiss under the mistletoe unlocks the simmering passion between them, Rina and Cameron may just find love for the holidays after all...YOURS FOR CHRISTMASFamous former NFL stars don’t date single working moms like Bailey Voss. She’ll allow herself to daydream about Kenny Scott’s muscles and killer smile, but wanting more would lead to post-holiday regret. Then Kenny volunteers to run a toy drive with Bailey, and she learns that he’s not just hot…he’s also generous, funny, nice. And as festive spirit spreads, Kenny gets wrapped up in Bailey’s kisses — and decides to make this the first of many Christmases together…Previously published.

    . .The chance discovery of a newspaper image from 1971 sets two people on the path to learning the disturbing truth about their parents’ pasts.Parisian archivist Hélène takes out a newspaper advert calling for information about her mother, who died when she was three, and the two men pictured with her in a photograph taken at a tennis tournament at Interlaken in 1971. Stéphane, a Swiss biologist living in Kent, responds: his father is one of the people in the photo. Letters and more photos pass between them as they embark on a journey to uncover the truth their parents kept from them. But will the relics of the past fill the silences left by the players?Winner of fifteen literary awards, this dark yet touching drama deftly explores the themes of blame and forgiveness, identity and love.Hélène Gestern lives and works in Nancy, France. The People in the Photo is her first novel.

    As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

    The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe. The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson believes the Garden of Eden was on the island of Tasmania. His traveling partner, Dr. Thomas Potter, unbeknownst to Wilson, is developing a sinister thesis about the races of men. Meanwhile, an aboriginal in Tasmania named Peevay recounts his people’s struggles against the invading British, a story that begins in 1824, moves into the present with approach of the English passengers in 1857, and extends into the future in 1870. These characters and many others come together in a storm of voices that vividly bring a past age to life.

    Yes, she is old. Yes, she sometimes forgets where she put her glasses, or her heart medication. But doesn't everyone? That doesn't give workers--paid to assist her, mind you--the right to rifle through her personal belongings, or "accidentally" forget something of hers in their pocket. It definitely does not give them the right to embezzle thousands of dollars from her family trust.Just when she is most desperate, a young neighbor takes her by surprise. Bonding over their shared love of soap operas, Jo and Toby engage in old-school reconnaissance to find answers. Together, they brave roller skates, walks along uneven ground, and even downtown parking on what may be Jo's most exciting adventure in forty years."Yes, And" is a feel-good story that explores the hearts of two misunderstood, kindred spirits, connected just when they need each other most.

    As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter…Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

               Told with Clive James's trademark dry wit, The      Silver Castle is a tragicomic morality tale for our time. Part Candide, part Oliver Twist, part Huckleberry Finn, The Silver Castle defies its reader to remain aloof from the suffering of the world's swarming poor while it inspires laughter over the human condition generally. It is a novel of wonder despite its unrelenting realism--      indeed, only wonderment is possible in the face of Sanjay's knack for survival and more than occasional good fortune.           In his astonishing odyssey from the gutter to the soundstages and salons of Bollywood, Sanjay meets up with every variant of sinner and would-be savior, and along the way he trades on his "heart-breaking" physical beauty and canny lingual facility to grab at luck wherever it may be had--in the pocket of a tourist, as a guide for the Western news crews who regularly descend on Bombay to update their stock footage of grinding poverty, or in the bed of an older male protector or a past-her-prime cinema princess.           Throughout, Sanjay's spirit is sustained by the movies, and by his first behind-the-scenes glimpse, as a young trespasser on the set of the Silver Castle, of the magical artifice of filmmaking. It is a true vision of an utterly false reality, the source of Sanjay's subsequent triumphs and of his ultimate misfortune. But what happens to Sanjay in the end is not a singular event. As this deeply humane novel convincingly argues, Sanjay's fate is the world's.Back Ad:Perhaps it would have been better for [Sanjay] if he had never seen the Silver Castle, never felt a guiding hand, never blinked at an unstained smile. Then he would not have missed these things. It is just possible, however, that the memory of his first visit to Long Ago sustained him. Imagination and energy are part of each other, and few of us, even though we live in circumstances far more favourable, would ever get to where we are going unless a picture of it, however inaccurate, was already in our minds. If we had to, we too would have to dodge the rain between rubbish dumps, on the long journey back to the taste of a cheese roll, the tang of sparkling water, trumpets that crackle and toe-nails stained with plums. We don't have to, but Sanjay did.

    In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire--the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."In Heavy Water and Other Stories, Amis astonishes us with the vast range of his talent, establishing that he is one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation.

    Olivia Murray, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist and make a difference with her work. When opportunity arrives, she seizes it, accompanying her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to northern Iraq for a family wedding, hoping to capture an image that lands her a job in the photo department. More important, though, the trip is a chance to understand Delan’s childhood and bridge the differences of their pasts. Yet when the return home proves less safe than Delan believed, Olivia is confronted with a reality she had not expected, and is awakened to the dangers of a town patrolled by Iraqi military under curfew and constant threat.But in this world torn apart by war, there are intoxicating sights and scents, Delan’s loving family, innocence not yet compromised, and small acts of kindness that flourish unexpectedly. All of it will be tested when Olivia captures a shattering, tragic moment on film, one that upends all their lives and proves that true bravery begins with an open heart.

    But what of its opposite -- the moment when it becomes clear that things are indisputably over? Dumped is a survey of every type of romantic crack-up, a group of stories full of the hilarity, wisdom, insight, and sometimes, yes, fierce revenges of some of the most memorable broken hearts in recent literature. Dumped sheds light on what can be the toughest part of human relations -- whether newly elucidating the misery we've all endured, or merely reminding us that others have had it far worse -- from the mother in Elizabeth Berg's Open House absurdly attempting to tell her son his father has left, to the betrayed wife in Roald Dahl's "Lamb to Slaughter," who beats her husband to death with a leg of lamb, then cooks it for the police. With contributions from such notable authors as Will Self, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Parker, Andre Dubus, and Tobias Wolff, as well as rising stars like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Steve Almond, Dumped spans every variety of romantic catastrophe and every possible response to it; from the wise to the hilarious, the bitter to the bittersweet. This book is the panacea for problems of the heart.