Grave Girl: The Complete Trilogy


Amy Cross - 2019
    In the center of the village, the local cemetery might at first seem rather ordinary. Old gravestones lean in every direction, watched over by statues of angels. There are rumors, however, that the cemetery in Rippon hides one very dark secret. Could it be that this is where the Devil himself is buried? After running away from home in search of a fresh start, Samantha Marker can't afford to be picky about finding a new job. When she's hired to look after Rippon's cemetery, she thinks she can simply hide away from society and get on with her life. She soon discovers, however, that Rippon has begun to attract some very unwelcome attention. Dark forces are determined to recover the Devil's body, and they'll stop at nothing in their quest. Even if that means bringing about the end of the world. Thrown into a battle she doesn't even understand, Sam finds herself up against demons, ghosts and other nightmares. As if those dangers aren't bad enough, there's also the distinct possibility that all these battles might accidentally cause the Devil to rise from his grave. Even as she tries to save the world, however, Sam also has to deal with the consequences of a terrible mistake that she made long ago. How can she save humanity when she's already abandoned the one person who needs her even more? Grave Girl: The Complete Trilogy is an omnibus edition containing the three books in the Grave Girl trilogy: Grave Girl (2013), Raven Revivals (2014) and The Gravest Girl of All (2018).

Riversong


Tess Thompson - 2011
     In the wake of her husband's tragic death, Lee is pregnant and one million dollars in debt to a dangerous loan shark willing to do anything to collect. Out of money and options, Lee seeks refuge in the small Oregon town where her mother's dilapidated home sits vacant, as desperate for a fresh start as Lee herself.With a baby on the way and a living to make, Lee opens a restaurant and begins to rebuild her life. But just as she catches her breath, and the eye of a local musician offering a second chance at love, she finds herself right back in the clutches of the debt collector with more to lose than ever.

This Side of Brightness


Colum McCann - 1998
    A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the sandhogs—black, white, Irish, Italian—dig together, the darkness erasing all differences. Above ground, though, the men keep their distance until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs that will both bless and curse three generations.

I Regret Everything: A Love Story


Seth Greenland - 2015
    Jeremy Best, a Manhattan-based trusts and estates lawyer, leads a second life as published poet Jinx Bell.  To his boss’s daughter, Spaulding Simonson, at 33 years old, Jeremy is already halfway to dead.  When Spaulding, an aspiring 19-year-old writer, discovers Mr. Best’s alter poetic ego, the two become bound by a devotion to poetry, and an awareness that time in this world is limited.  Their budding relationship strikes at the universality of love and loss, as Jeremy and Spaulding confront their vulnerabilities, revealing themselves to one another and the world for the very first time. A skilled satirist with a talent for biting humor, Greenland creates fully realized characters that quickly reveal themselves as complex renderings of the human condition – at its very best, and utter worst. I Regret Everything explores happiness and heartache with a healthy dose of skepticism, and an understanding that the reality of love encompasses life, death, iambic pentameter, regret, trusts and estates.

Hell


Robert Olen Butler - 2009
    He's not the only one to suffer this fate--in fact, he's surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn't. McCord is living with Anne Boleyn in the afterlife but their happiness is, of course, constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). One day McCord meets Dante's Beatrice, who believes there is a way out of Hell, and the next morning, during an exclusive on-camera interview with Satan, McCord realizes that Satan's omniscience, which he has always credited for the perfection of Hell's torments, may be a mirage--and Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape. Butler's depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante might have celebrated.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All


Allan Gurganus - 1984
    Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature.Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Tears of the Anaren


C.W. Longbottom - 2021
    Longbottom, the Nebula Award-winning science-fiction and fantasy author and head writer of Mythic Quest. C.W. found literary fame with Inside the Caves of Beneroth and Tears of the Anaren, but even his most loyal fans don’t know that Tears of the Anaren began as a short story he wrote in the early 1970s while interning at Amazing Tales magazine.This never-before-published draft is now yours to discover, complete with C.W.’s (extremely) colorful commentary and an Introduction and Afterword by Ian Grimm, the iconoclastic creator of Mythic Quest. As sparks fly between heroic scoundrel Zeb and space seductress Merrith, we get a glimpse into the mind of a talented young man yearning for greatness. Like early Mozart, it is raw and green — but also magic.From Charlie Day, Megan Ganz, and Rob McElhenney, the Apple TV+ original comedy series, Mythic Quest, goes behind the scenes to follow the game’s creators. In a workplace focused on building worlds, molding heroes, and creating legends, the most hard-fought battles don’t occur in the game — they happen in the office. Rob McElhenney stars as Ian Grimm alongside Charlotte Nicdao and F. Murray Abraham.

The Dice Man


Luke Rhinehart - 1971
    Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

Victor in the Rubble


Alex Finley - 2016
    On assignment in West Africa in a post-9/11 world, he is tasked with hunting down the terrorist Omar al-Suqqit, who is looking to launch his group of ragtag militants onto the international jihadi stage. But chasing a terrorist proves an easier challenge than managing his agency’s bureaucracy. Omar, meanwhile, faces his own bureaucratic struggles as he joins forces with a global terrorist group that begins micro-managing its franchises in an effort to streamline attacks. When Victor appears on his own country’s Terrorist Watch List and Omar finds himself struggling to write “Lessons Learned” in the suicide bomber program, they each realize they might have a common enemy: red tape.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs


Irvine Welsh - 2006
    Troubled restaurant inspector Danny Skinner is on a quest to find the mysterious father his mother will not identify. Unraveling this hidden information is the key to understanding the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. His ensuing journey takes him from the festival city of Edinburgh to the foodie city of San Francisco. But the hard-drinking, womanizing Skinner has a strange nemesis in the form of mild-mannered fellow inspector Brian Kibby.It is Skinner's unfathomable, obsessive hatred of Kibby that takes over everything, threatening to destroy not only Skinner and his mission but also those he loves most dearly. When Kibby contracts a horrific, undiagnosable illness, Skinner understands that his destiny is inextricably bound to that of his hated rival, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma.Irvine Welsh's work is a transgressive parable about the great obsessions of our time: food, sex, and celebrity.

Bleak Expectations


Mark Evans - 2012
    Like the radio series, but with added jokes, extra bits of story, additional dimensions to characters and masses more paper. Unless you're reading it as an e-book in which case... masses more digital information bits.Bleak Expectations recounts the remarkable adventures of young Pip Bin as he tries to repair his destroyed family and distinctly damaged life, aided by his best friend Harry Biscuit and definitely not aided by his cruel and ironically named guardian Mr Gently Benevolent and his accomplices, the fearsome Hardthrasher siblings.Weep! As Pip is sent to Britain's nastiest boarding school, St Bastard's.Gasp! As the true extent of his despicable guardian's plan becomes clear.Worry! As our hero is committed to the Workhouse, where he meets the hideous poverty-punishments of the treadmill, the grindstone and the painwheel.Sigh! As Pip finds love with London's most eligible frail beauty, Miss Flora Dies-Early.Find a tenterhook and sit on it!Grim circumstances, mistaken identities, unlikely inheritances, nightmarish court cases, ridiculous names, convenient coincidences to resolve plot problems, over-sentimental death scenes and lots and lots of adjectives: Bleak Expectations is the novel Charles Dickens might have written after drinking far too much gin.

A Traveler's Guide to Belonging


Rachel Devenish Ford - 2015
    Stunned, he finds himself alone with his newborn son in the mountains of North India and no idea of what it means to be a father, and begins a journey through India with his baby, seeking understanding for loss and life and the way the two intertwine. Set among the stunning landscapes, train tracks, and winding alleys of India, A Traveler’s Guide to Belonging is a story about fathers and sons, losing and finding love, and a traveler’s grand quest for meaning.

Into the Hills, Young Master


Alex Branson - 2017
    Into The Hills, Young Master is a novel about a man who argues online constantly going out into the world on a quest to form the perfect opinion.

Slipstream


Leslie Larson - 2006
    When Rudy loses his job cleaning jets at the airport, his sanity and his marriage threaten to follow. While his wife, Inez, secretly saves her pennies and plots an escape, his coworker Wylie, a bartender at LAX, is about to receive the surprise of his life. Meanwhile, Wylie’s brother, Logan, freshly released from jail, tries desperately to stay out of trouble while traipsing through a minefield of temptation. And Logan’s daughter Jewell is nursing a heart broken once by an unfaithful girlfriend and again by a father who can’t seem to stick around. Though they don’t know it, these five people are headed toward an explosive event that will have consequences for them all.Deftly weaving suspense, humor, and revelation, Slipstream is a rich human drama with the breathless pace of a thriller and the soul of classic noir.Also available as a Books on Tape AudioBook and as an eBookFrom the Hardcover edition.

Beatrice


Noëlle Harrison - 2004
    When her sister Beatrice disappeared from her home in the dark woods of Co. Meath, it was 13-year-old Eithne who uncovered the forlorn evidence of her life: a string of pearls, a pink beret, a compact and her beloved sketchbook. Their mother, Sarah, was so grief-stricken that she did not speak for five years, and her father Joe, sank further into drink-filled rage.Now, as an adult, Eithne is an artist, and tries to remember her sister in her sketches of the dark wooded bogs behind her house. For there was something else about Beatrice that was rarely spoken of in the household, a dark, guilty secret that her disappearance only made worse. And now, almost twenty years later, all could be revealed when a stranger appears . . .Framed by Eithne's journey to discover the truth about her sister, with the magic and beauty of art running through it, this is a richly compelling, haunting story of family secrets, passion and ultimately redemption.'Vivid and powerful, BEATRICE is a novel told in gleaming moments, like a string of pearls brought one by one out of the dark. It has the compelling power of a detective story, following a trail of ghosts into the past'NIALL WILLIAMS'It totally grips the reader's attention quite literally to the very final paragraph . . . it marks the debut of a deeply mature and skilful voice . . . 'DERMOT BOLGER, THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT