. .Growing up, Alexandra and her older brother Ashley were never close. Her decision to move in to Ashley's Upper West Side apartment to care for him during his final months surprises herself as much as anyone, but it can't erase the guilt Alex feels at the years they wasted. Now, four years after his death, with a bout of depression and a suicide attempt behind her, Alex feels fragile but no longer broken. As for normal--only with her roommate and best friend Jordy and their gay friend Jax can she feel anything close to that.Then Alex's therapist, Sam, bequeaths her a cryptic message that changes everything. The note reads simply, "You're missing a piece of yourself." At Sam's funeral, Alex meets Tucker--the charming, cute son of one of New York's wealthiest businessmen. As their romance deepens, Tucker tries to draw Alex out of her safety zone. But is Tucker the key to Sam's riddle, or is the real answer still waiting to be found?At once humorous and heartbreaking, and peopled with deftly rendered characters, Closer to Fine is an exquisite first novel about love, loss, and self discovery, written with uncommon verve and grace.

    I killed myself.”Having destroyed his life, the suicidal T. Rimberg strikes out on a journey through history and geography. From Minneapolis to Europe to a fiery accident near Green Bay, he searches for a father who is likely dead, digs for meaning where he’s sure there is none, fires off suicide letters to family, celebrities, presidents, and football stars, and lands in a hospital bed across from a priest who believes that Rimberg has caused a miracle. This funny, moving novel asks us to consider the nature of second chances and the unexpected form that grace sometimes takes.

    The attacker, unimaginably, is her trusted parish priest. Terrified, Kathleen never tells her pious Catholic mother, and when she discovers she is pregnant, she pays a terrible price for her silence. Her mother believes Kathleen to be a fallen child and sends her to have her ill-begotten baby in Ireland. Kathleen toils in a notorious Magdalene Laundry, where heartless nuns dole out merciless penance on shamed girls. Kathleen never recovers from her trauma, and years later she’s become the overprotective, paranoid mother of a second child. Meanwhile, Faye, a widowed mother of three worries about her teenage son, Tim. He’s increasingly withdrawn, but when several parcels are mysteriously delivered the shocking truth about what is going on in his life is slowly revealed. She turns to an old flame believing he is at the root of Tim’s problems and as the couple rekindles their love, Tim’s troubles deepen. Faye pours out her sorrows in letters to a friend, and slowly, shocking family secrets and interwoven relationships reveal themselves. As it turns out, Kathleen isn’t the only fallen one in this story of love, forgiveness, and powerful family ties. Every Family Has One is the anticipated sequel to The Catholic Woman’s Dying Wish. It can be read as a stand-alone sequel.

    "Here Be Monsters" is Jamie Sheffield's first novel.Tyler Cunningham is a detective like no other. He can mimic humanity, but in most cases fails utterly to understand people, why they do the things they do, or act in the ways that they do. His saving grace is an insatiable hunger for knowledge that combines with an ability to make connections from a series of seemingly unrelated data-points that other people miss; this continually pulls him into other peoples' problems, where his focus and unique perceptual abilities allow him to solve puzzles that others cannot see in ways that nobody else could conceive.In the heart of the Adirondack Park, the Northeast's last great wilderness, Tyler Cunningham, a detective who struggles to understand the human condition, finds himself trapped and powerless in the face of shocking cruelty and violence when the closest thing Tyler has to a friend vanishes as a result of his actions. His unique talents strap readers in for an astonishing thrill-ride, keeping them balanced on a knife's edge of suspense, while Tyler struggles frantically to unlock the secrets to a violent conspiracy that he finds himself swept up in, as the book rushes headlong towards a shocking conclusion deep in the primitive wilderness.

    Part comedy of manners, part social commentary, love story, mystic narration and thriller, it is a sort of Indian version of Oliver Goldsmith's THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.

    1936) exhibits his deep distrust of language and the way it can conceal as much as it reveals. Not surprisingly, DeLillo treats interviews with the same care and caution. For years, he shunned them altogether. As his fiction grew in popularity, especially with White Noise, and he began to confront the historical record of our times in books such as Libra, DeLillo felt compelled to make himself available to his readers. Despite claims by interviewers about his elusiveness, he now hides in plain sight.In , the renowned author makes clear his distinctions between historical fact and his own creative leaps, especially in his masterwork, Underworld. There it seems the true events are unbelievable and imaginary ones not. Throughout long profiles and conversations—ranging from 1982 to 2001 and published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Rolling Stone—DeLillo parries personal inquiries. He counters with the details of his work habits, his understanding of the novelist's role in the world, and his sense of our media-saturated culture. A number of interviews detail DeLillo's less-heralded work in the theater, from The Day Room to a recent production of Valparaiso, itself a stinging satire on the interviewing process.DeLillo also finds time to comment on his nonliterary passions, primarily the movies and baseball. Lee Harvey Oswald also inspires much extraliterary discussion, not just as the subject of Libra, but as a figure who, like the terrorists always lurking in DeLillo's fictions, captures our attention in ways novelists cannot. For DeLillo, a writer who eschews celebrity, the ultimate response might be the one he offered in his very first interview, paraphrasing Joyce: "Silence, exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most things." Fortunately for his many readers and fans, he proves himself here to be a talker.

    She has carefully built an exemplary life. But all of this is threatened when a comrade from the seventies shows up. Over the next week Doreen's past rushes in as she is forced to admit to her family and herself the actions that caused her to change her name and identity three decades earlier.In 1970 she was impressionable and idealistic Lucy Johansson. When her brother, Adam, came home from Vietnam damaged and bitter, they moved to California, where she raged against the war and the Establishment with many others of her generation. She joined an antiwar group and participated in increasingly militant protests designed to bring attention to their cause and to change the world for the better. But all the best intentions and careful planning couldn't keep things from going terribly wrong.Told from a twenty-first-century perspective, She Was spans the width of the American continent and the depth of social upheaval of the second half of the twentieth century. She Was explores the violent, determining act in one woman's life that mirrors the formative trauma of her age. She Was is a story about the indelible nature of the past, about hiding in the ordinary, and, ultimately, about making amends.

    Meandering through the narrow streets she finds herself at the door of one of the city's most renowned and reclusive mystics and discovers her father's top rabbinical student, Russian immigrant Moshe studying forbidden Kabbalistic texts. She has a disturbing vision of a tree of prayers growing up inside the house, and the prayers all seem to be talking to her. The prayers become a giant bird, and chase her from the house. Malka has unwittingly uncovered a great mystical gift. Kabbalists believe that since the world was spoken into existence, if they can hear and understand that original Divine language, they can use it themselves, to shape and manipulate reality. Once in a millennia, a kabbalist is born with this ability. It turns out that Malka is one of them. After a disastrous first date with Moshe, Malka flees Jerusalem for Safed where she is drawn into a cult called Mystical Encounters, run by charismatic cult leader Avner Marcus. Avner is unsettled by Malka's authenticity, and she is not allowed to attend classes. Her only friends are former night club singer Shira, and traumatised ex-soldier Evven. Malka sets up her own mystical retreat in the woods, at an abandoned construction site. When she reveals this to Avner, he forces her to take him there and tries to rape her. Malka manages to evade him, and then burns down the cult after manipulating the Modern Hebrew word for Electricity, Chashmal Malka heads for Tel Avi, and sleeps rough on the beaches of the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa. Here she is discovered by legendary Arab chef Rukh Baraka, who is seeking to rekindle his career by training Arab and Israeli street children to create extraordinary food for his new restaurant, the Leviathan. Malka bonds with fellow runaway Mahmoud, who is escaping the wrath of his Imam father at his "deviant" sexuality. Mahmoud reveals the city behind the city, the hidden Palestinian history of which Malka has been ignorant. Moshe has been trying to find Malka and is forced to confront some of his own demons, including the disappearance of his younger sister when she was in his care. Moshe swears that he will not lose another girl he loves.

    

    Gone. Finished. Kaput. But on the eve of his seventy-third birthday, his daughter suggests he have his brain downloaded to a microchip for safekeeping, and Jim is forced to consider what it really means to die—and what it might mean to live forever. Recipient of the 2015 Green Book Festival honorable mention in fiction and semi-finalist in the 2015 Kindle Book Awards, Do Not Resuscitate is the firsthand account of Jim Frost, an aging misanthropist who witnessed the rise and fall of the United States as a world power, the digitalization of the planet, the advent of the water wars, and the near collapse of the global economy. Yet he remains impervious to it all. Concerned more with his plasma TV, high-speed Internet, and continual supply of hash, twentysomething Jim takes an under-the-table job off Craigslist delivering mysterious red coolers to strangers in cafés in an effort to pay the bills. But when Jim’s enigmatic employer asks him to fly to North Korea for a delivery, Jim starts to wonder what he’s gotten himself into.

    Charles Marlow teaches his high school English students that language will expand their worlds. But linguistic precision cannot help him connect with his autistic son, or with his ex-wife, who abandoned their shared life years before, or even with his college-bound daughter who has just flown the nest. He’s at the end of a road he’s traveled on autopilot for years when a series of events forces him to think back on the lifetime of decisions and indecisions that have brought him to this point. With the help of an ambitious art student, an Italian-speaking nun, and the memory of a boy in a white suit who inscribed his childhood with both solace and sorrow, Charles may finally be able to rewrite the script of his life.Sometimes the most powerful words are the ones you’re still searching for.

    With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

    There's more to it than just a detective, a dead body, and Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick. Fortunately, Larry Beinhart--Edgar Award-winning author of You Get What You Pay For, Foreign Exchange, and American Hero--has taken a break from writing smart, suspenseful thrillers to act as your guide through all the twists and turns of creating the twists and turns of a good mystery. Drawing on advice and examples from a host of the best names in mystery writing--from Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane to Scott Turow and Thomas Harris--plus some of his own prime plots, Larry Beinhart introduces you to your most indispensable partners in crime: *Character, plot, and procedure * The secrets to creating heroes, heroines, and villains ("All writers draw upon themselves and their experience. While the whole of yourself might not be capable of being either a serial killer or an FBI agent, there are parts in each of us that are capable of almost anything.") * The fine art of scripting the sex scene *The low-down on violence ("A crime novel without violence is like smoking pot without inhaling, sex without orgasm, or a hug without a squeeze." ) *And much more!From the opening hook to the final denouement, Larry Beinhart takes the mystery out of being a mystery writer.

    Published at only twenty-two, she peaked early and found critical but not commercial success. Now her former life is gone, along with her writing career and beloved husband. A reclusive widow, her sole companion a dour, flatulent basset hound who barely tolerates her, her daily mantra Kill Me Now, she is a loner afraid to be alone. Her only bright spot each week is the writing class that she teaches at the university extension.This semester's class is full of the usual suspects: the doctor who wants to be the next Robin Cook, the overly enthusiastic repeat student, the slacker, the unassuming student with the hidden talent, the prankster, the know-it-all... Amy's seen them all before. But something is very different about this class—and the clues begin with a scary phone call in the middle of the night and obscene threats instead of peer evaluations on student writing assignments. Amy soon realizes that one of her students is a very sick puppy, and when a member of the class is murdered, everyone becomes a suspect. As she dissects each student's writing for clues, Amy must enlist the help of everyone in her class, including the murderer, to find the killer among them.Suspenseful, extremely witty, brilliantly written, unexpectedly hilarious, and a joy from start to finish, The Writing Class is a one-of-a-kind novel that rivals Jincy Willett's previous masterpieces.

    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times