The Paperboy


Pete Dexter - 1995
    A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.Then Ward James, hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade.  She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free--and meet--her convicted "fiancÚ."With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of The Story, racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a back seat to headline news...

The Hummingbird's Daughter


Luis Alberto Urrea - 2005
    Sixteen year old Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream - a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from the dead with the power to heal - but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.The Hummingbird's Daughter is a vast, hugely satisfying novel of love and loss, joy and pain. Two decades in the writing, this is the masterpiece that Luis Alberto Urrea has been building up to.

Headhunters


John King - 1997
    Formed in the chemical mists of New Year's Eve, The Sex Division sees the once sacred act of procreation at its most material, as five men devise a system based on the sexual act. In this lager-soaked league, the most that women can offer a man is 4 points - unless, that is, she leaves her handbag unattended... From its base in the asset-stripped, emotionally castrated 90s, Headhunters shows the dreams of The Sex Division members breaking through the heavy media cloud of anorexic pin-ups and paedophile fashion. A missing brother, prophetic visions, a love affair, and tit-for-tat confrontation draw the characters out into the open - revealing the men behind the machismo, their need for mutual respect, and their recognition of the hidden or suppressed affinities.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker: Notes


Neil McEwan - 1998
    

The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels


Edward St. Aubyn - 2015
    For the first time, all five books in the Patrick Melrose series are collected in a single edition: NEVER MIND BAD NEWS SOME HOPE MOTHER'S MILK AT LAST Acclaimed for their searing wit and their deep humanity, this magnificent cycle of novels - in which Patrick Melrose battles to survive the savageries of his childhood and lead a self-determined life - is one of the major achievements in English fiction.

Black Dogs: The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock's Greatest Robbery


Jason Buhrmester - 2009
    Before the final performance, $203,000 of the band’s money went missing from a safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel in what was called the single highest deposit box theft in the city’s history. The money was never recovered. Black Dogs might be the story behind the greatest rock ’n’ roll heist of all time. the last thing nineteen-year-old Patrick Sullivan needed was a new scam. Just months earlier, he had left a trail of broken friendships and new enemies in Baltimore for a fresh start in New York City after a botched robbery attempt landed one of his best friends in jail. But when he spies a briefcase full of cash backstage at a Led Zeppelin concert, Patrick makes plans for one last crazy mission–one that he hopes will redeem him in the eyes of everyone he left behind. To pull it off, Patrick will have to return to his hometown to round up his crew: Alex, the one who did time for Patrick’s last crime; Frenchy, the neurotic musician who still lives with Mom; and dim-witted but endearing Keith, the greasy-haired loner who excels at installing car stereos and then uninstalling them, all in the same day.When the unlikely team’s plan goes horribly wrong, the boys find themselves mixed up with Backwoods Billy, the psychotic leader of the Holy Ghosts Christian motorcycle gang. They need some help, and they find it in some unlikely places: by crossing paths and making deals with a pill-popping DA, a safe-cracking funk band called the New York Giants, and the Maryland chapter of the Misty Mountain Hoppers Led Zeppelin Fan Club. Sporting a rare 1958 Les Paul guitar and a complicated plan that could either go wonderfully right or horribly wrong, the guys, fueled by beer and egos, make a desperate attempt at robbing the world’s coolest rock band–to hilarious result.Black Dogs brings to life one of the infamously unsolved rock ’n’ roll mysteries and introduces us to a lovable bunch of knuckleheads who may have just pulled off the greatest heist in rock ’n’ roll history.

The Deep End of the Ocean


Jacquelyn Mitchard - 1996
    Both highly suspenseful and deeply moving, The Deep End of the Ocean imagines every mother's worst nightmare—the disappearance of a child—as it explores a family's struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds. Filled with compassion, humor, and brilliant observations about the texture of real life, here is a story of rare power, one that will touch readers' hearts and make them celebrate the emotions that make us all one.

Assumption


Percival Everett - 2011
    But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution.In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.

Of Women and Salt


Gabriela Garcia - 2021
    Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.

Hard Rain Falling


Don Carpenter - 1964
    The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class: married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

Hand Me a Fig Leaf


James Hadley Chase - 1981
    As they prove to be uninterested, he turns instead to Colonel Parnell of the Parnell Detective Agency. It seems at first to be a simple case of a missing person but they soon find themselves in the middle of a complicated web of deceit, intrigue and murder.

Sleepless


Charlie Huston - 2010
    Gripping, unnerving, exhilarating, and haunting, Sleepless is well worth staying up for.What former philosophy student Parker Hass wanted was a better world. A world both just and safe for his wife and infant daughter. So he joined the LAPD and tried to make it that way. But the world changed. Struck by waves of chaos carried in on a tide of insomnia. A plague of sleeplessness.Park can sleep, but he is wide awake. And as much as he wishes he was dreaming, his eyes are open. He has no choice but to see it all. That's his job. Working undercover as a drug dealer in a Los Angeles ruled in equal parts by martial law and insurgency, he's tasked with cutting off illegal trade in Dreamer, the only drug that can give the infected what they most crave: sleep.After a year of lost leads and false trails, Park stumbles into the perilous shadows cast by the pharmaceuticals giant behind Dreamer. Somewhere in those shadows, at the nexus of disease and drugs and money, a secret is hiding. Drawn into the inner circle of a tech guru with a warped agenda and a special use for the sleepless themselves, Park thinks he knows what that secret might be. To know for certain, he will have to go deeper into the restless world. His wife has become sleepless, and their daughter may soon share the same fate. For them, he will risk what they need most from him: his belief that justice must be served. Unknown to him, his choice ties all of their futures to the singularly deadly nature of an aging mercenary who stalks Park.The deeper Park stumbles through the dark, the more he is convinced that it is obscuring the real world. Bring enough light and the shadows will retreat. Bring enough light and everyone will see themselves again. Bring enough light and he will find his way to the safe corner, the harbor he's promised his family. Whatever the cost to himself.It is July 2010.The future is coming.Open your eyes.

Beat the Reaper


Josh Bazell - 2009
    Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan's worst hospital, with a talent for medicine, a shift from hell, and a past he'd prefer to keep hidden. Whether it's a blocked circumflex artery or a plan to land a massive malpractice suit, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwna is a hitman for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Relocation Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he's the last person you want to see in your hospital room.Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown's new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwa might-just might-be the same person ...Now, with the mob, the government, and death itself descending on the hospital, Peter has to buy time and do whatever it takes to keep his patients, himself, and his last shot at redemption alive. To get through the next eight hours-and somehow beat the reaper.Spattered in adrenaline-fueled action and bone-saw-sharp dialogue, BEAT THE REAPER is a debut thriller so utterly original you won't be able to guess what happens next, and so shockingly entertaining you won't be able to put it down.

The Kate Morton Collection: The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden


Kate Morton - 2010
    Morton's first two unforgettable novels in one volume: The House at Riverton plus The Forgotten Garden.

The President


Miguel Ángel Asturias - 1946
    It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”