They have nothing in common. Just one amazing, passionate weekend in Chicago and a desire to meet again.

    They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

    It could be the depression or the hallucinations, or it could be the little black creature that crawls in his window at night. Whatever the case, it is becoming a problem.The debut novel from Joshua S. Porter is a dark, comic and moving story of self-realization in a contemporary moral free zone.

    She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without 'coupons', and she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals.

    To the outside world they pretend she is ill and confined to her room.Their problems begin immediately. Curious officials make inquiries, well-meaning neighbors offer assistance. The children themselves fall to quarreling.Then a spellbinding stranger appears, claiming to be their father. He agrees to keep their secret -- and from that point the story moves relentlessly to its incredible climax.

    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).

    After Emily meets Alfred's fiancée Amy Flint, a 1920's "modern woman," she sets out to save her beloved from Amy's cold grip. "Emily is the perfect outside observer," writes Eva Brann in her introduction, "because she is an African in Europe, a female in a man's world, a servant to liberated sophisticates, and above all an old-fashioned creature in a modern world."

    He runs away from home in Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City and learns the bare bones of life before he hits the road with a traveling carnival. Then one icy night in the Adirondacks, the young man sees a private train roar by. In its lit windows, he spies an industrial tycoon, a poet, a gangster, and a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. He follows them, as one follows a dream, to an isolated private estate on Loon Lake.Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of mystery and menace, greed and ambition, harsh lust and tender love, that lays bare the darkest depths of the human heart and the nightmarish underside of the American dream. E. L. Doctorow has written a novel aglow with poetry and passion, lit by the burning fire of humanity and history, terror and truth.

    In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.

    Henry Porter's summer begins when his daughter Nicole-whom he hasn't seen in five years-shows up on his doorstep. Days later his girlfriend, Elizabeth, announces that she is pregnant. That Henry is speechless at these two events throws into sharp relief his emotional landscape, and this novel charts that landscape's exact contours. Anyone who has ever wondered what a man is saying when he isn't talking will find at least a large part of the answer here. Robert Bausch deciphers with perfect economy and unstinting honesty the code embodied in this man's (and a great many men's) words and actions, and discovers there the world of family legacies, love, and abuse. A Hole in the Earth brilliantly draws the webs that attract us to and repel us from our families, as well as the enduring strength that they can provide.

    "Each family," writes the author, "stood confident of being able to go on with what was theirs, while in fact they were playthings, often victims, of the now united Germany and what was brewing therein." Did the monstrous thing that followed have its foundation in families such as these? "Writing about them made me think so. Hence the title."

    In this collection of stories, predominated by winter and its festivals, George Mackay Brown re-establishes the tradition of ancient, hearthside story-telling.

    She and the baby, and sometimes Ramsden, eke out their days at shabby hospitals across England, dreaming always of better places, other things.

    It was a bargain struck between Chapman and his beautiful, emotionally injured wife - a bargain based on unexpressed, inexpressible love and on a courageous acceptance of life's deprivation.

    David Lodge, portraying two American and British professors who replace one another at their respective institutions, gives greed, pettiness, and pretense full rein.