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Merivel: A Novel
by Rose TremainMerivel is an unforgettable hero—soulful, funny, outrageous and achingly sad. His unmistakable, self-mocking voice speaks directly to us down the centuries.From the Orange Prize–winning author Rose Tremain comes a brilliant and picaresque novel of seventeenth-century England. In the wake of the gaudy years of the Restoration, Robert Merivel, physician and courtier to Charles II, faces the agitations and anxieties of middle age. Questions crowd his mind: has he been a good father? Is he a fair master? Is he the King’s friend or the King’s slave? In search of answers, Merivel sets off for the French court of Versailles, where—inevitably—misadventures ensue.
The Montevideo Brief: A Thomas Grey Novel (A Thomas Grey Novel #0)
by J. H. Gelernter“A swashbuckling tale of adventure, piracy, and international intrigue.… A treat for spy novel junkies and devotees of British history alike.” —Kirkus Reviews A secret treaty will determine whether England can survive against Napoleon, and Captain Grey races across the Atlantic to intercept a treasure fleet.Vienna—June 1804. At the glittering debut of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, a Spanish diplomat meets with Captain Thomas Grey, agent of His Majesty’s Secret Service. In exchange for a gigantic bribe, the Spaniard discloses Spain’s darkest secret the actual terms of the Treaty of San Ildefonso with France.Spain’s neutrality in Napoleon’s war on Britain is only a ruse to keep the British navy from attacking the great treasure-armada now gathering in South America. Spanish warships will depart Montevideo, Uruguay, carrying 2,000 tons of gold; when the gold is safely in Madrid, Spain will declare war on Britain and ally with France to divide the British Empire between them. Britain’s only hope is to sink or capture the treasure fleet, and the responsibility of delivering that blow falls to Grey. As Jack Aubrey would have said in such a crisis, "There is not a moment to be lost!"
Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel
by Madeleine ThienWinner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award Finalist for the Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction "A powerfully expansive novel…Thien writes with the mastery of a conductor." —New York Times Book Review“In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.”Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.
The Collective: A Novel
by Don Lee"Riveting, moving, and—most impressive—agile and resourceful in its approach to race. Don Lee explores that issue from every conceivable angle, raising a thousand questions and undercutting easy answers." —Jennifer EganJoshua Yoon, Eric Cho, and Jessica Tsai arrive at Macalester College with different baggage but a singular and overpowering ambition—to become artists. As the years progress, their resolve is tested first by an act of campus racism and later, while they’re living together as adults in Cambridge, by a set of real-world demands and distractions that ultimately drive them in vastly different directions. A dazzling exploration of racial identity and the queasy position of the artist in contemporary America, Don Lee’s latest is a landmark achievement—his most funny, tragic, and revealing book yet.Winner of the 2013 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
The Resurrectionist: A Novel
by Matthew Guinn"A fine gothic novel…Be warned: Corpses abound." —Washington PostAt South Carolina Medical College, Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career—working university public relations—takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves are unearthed on campus.In a parallel narrative set in the nineteenth century, Nemo ("no man"), a university slave purchased for his unusual knife skills, becomes an unacknowledged member of the surgical faculty by day—and by night, a "resurrectionist," responsible for procuring bodies for medical study. An unforgettable character, by turns apparently insouciant, tormented, and brilliant, Nemo will seize his self-respect in ways no reader can anticipate.With exceptional storytelling pacing and skill, Matthew Guinn weaves together past and present to relate a Southern Gothic tale of shocking crimes and exquisite revenge.A 2014 Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel.
Funeral for a Dog: A Novel
by Thomas Pletzinger“The kind of writing that makes us want to read the whole book as soon as possible; a shot of adrenaline that immediately takes us to a new world.”—David Varno, Words Without Borders Journalist Daniel Mandelkern leaves Hamburg on assignment to interview Dirk Svensson, a reclusive children's book author who lives alone on the Italian side of Lake Lugano with his three-legged dog. Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife (who is also his editor); he suspects she has other reasons for sending him away.After stumbling on a manuscript of Svensson's about a complicated ménage à trois, Mandelkern is plunged into mysteries past and present. Rich with anthropological and literary allusion, this prize-winning debut set in Europe, Brazil, and New York, tells the parallel stories of two writers struggling with the burden of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Funeral for a Dog won the prestigious Uwe-Johnson Prize, and critics raved: "Pletzinger's debut is a real smash hit. It's been a long time since a young German writer has thrown himself into the hurly-burly of life and literature with so much intelligence and bravado" (Wolfgang Hobel, Der Spiegel).
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives: Stories
by Brad WatsonFinalist for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: "Watson's talent is singular, truly awesome; [his stories] are infused with an uncanny beauty."—A. M. Homes In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about every kind of domestic discord: unruly or distant children, alienated spouses, domestic abuse, loneliness, death, divorce. In his masterful title novella, a freshly married teenaged couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum—and find out exactly how mismatched they really are. With exquisite tenderness, Watson relates the brutality of both nature and human nature. There’s no question about it. Brad Watson writes so well—with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes, inadequacies, and rare grace—that he must be an extraterrestrial.
The Paladin: A Spy Novel
by David Ignatius“Tension, suspense, betrayal, and revenge.… David Ignatius is the best in the world at this stuff.” —Lee ChildIn this latest novel from the “dean of international intrigue” (Brad Thor) and New York Times best-selling author David Ignatius, CIA operations officer Michael Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence service. Headed by an American journalist, the self-styled bandits run a cyber operation unlike anything the CIA has seen before. Fast, slick, and indiscriminate, the group steals secrets from everywhere and anyone, and exploits them in ways the CIA can neither understand nor stop.Dunne knows it’s illegal to run a covert op on an American citizen or journalist, but he has never refused an assignment and his boss has assured his protection. Soon after Dunne infiltrates the organization, however, his cover disintegrates. When news of the operation breaks and someone leaks that Dunne had an extramarital affair while on the job, the CIA leaves him to take the fall. Now a year later, fresh out of jail, Dunne sets out to hunt down and take vengeance on the people who destroyed his life.
You Are the Love of My Life: A Novel
by Susan Richards Shreve“Spare, elegant and absolutely riveting.” —PeopleIt’s 1973 and the Watergate scandal is on everyone’s lips. Lucy Painter, a children’s book illustrator and single mother of two, leaves New York and the married father of her children to return to Washington, DC, to the neighborhood where she grew up and the house where her father committed suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of her father’s death or the identity of their own father. As new neighbors enter their insular lives, her family’s safety and stability become threatened. Beautifully told, You Are the Love of My Life is a story of how shame leads to secrets, secrets to lies, and how lies stand in the way of human connection.
The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons: Selected Stories
by Goli Taraghi“Carries the flavor of the old world, its underlying ferocity leavened by a lyrical mysticism. . . . Her prose is transcendent.”—Washington Post Rich in characters both whimsical and deeply poignant, humorous and real, the stories of Goli Taraghi have made her one of the world’s most beloved contemporary writers from Iran. A best-selling author in her native country and widely anthologized in the United States and around the world, Taraghi's work is now made fully accessible to an English-speaking audience in this standout and long-awaited volume of selected stories, selected as a Best Book of 2013 by staff and critics at National Public Radio. Drawing on childhood experiences in Tehran during the reign of the Shah, her exile in Paris, and her subsequent visits to Tehran after the revolution, Taraghi develops characters and tales that linger in one’s mind. In the title story, a woman traveling from Tehran to Paris is obliged to help an old woman—the Pomegranate Lady—find her way to her fugitive sons in Sweden. In "The Gentleman Thief," a new kind of polite, apologetic thief emerges from the wreckage of the revolution. In "Encounter," a woman's world is upended when her former maid becomes her jailer. And in "The Flowers of Shiraz," a group of teenagers finally manages to coax a shy schoolmate out of her shell—only to once again encounter tragedy.Reminiscent of the work of Nadine Gordimer and Eudora Welty, Taraghi's stories capture universal experiences of love, loss, alienation, and belonging—all with an irresistible sense of life’s absurdities.
Marabou Stork Nightmares
by Irvine Welsh"For anyone who gets high on language, this book is a fantastic trip...a real tour de force."—Madison Smartt Bell, Spin The acclaimed author of the cult classics Trainspotting and The Acid House, Irvine Welsh has been hailed as "the best thing that has happened to British writing in a decade" (London Sunday Times). This audacious novel is a brilliant (and literal) head trip of a book that brings us into the wildly active, albeit coma-beset, mind of Roy Strang, whose hallucinatory quest to eradicate the evil predator/scavenger marabou stork keeps being interrupted by grisly memories of the social and family dysfunction that brought him to this state. It is the sort of lethally funny cocktail of pathos, violence, and outrageous hilarity that only Irvine Welsh can pull off.
The Valley of Unknowing
by Philip Sington“Remarkable…Superbly anchored in place and time…[A] brilliant, evocative and accurate novel.”—The Times (London) In the twilight years of Communist East Germany, Bruno Krug, author of a single world-famous novel written twenty years earlier, falls for Theresa Aden, a music student from the West. But Theresa has also caught the eye of a cocky young scriptwriter who delights in satirizing Krug’s work. Asked to appraise a mysterious manuscript, Bruno is disturbed to find that the author is none other than his rival. Disconcertingly, the book is good—very good. But there is hope for the older man: the unwelcome masterpiece is dangerously political. Krug decides that if his affair with Theresa is to prove more than a fling, he must employ a small deception. But in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, knowing the deceiver from the deceived, the betrayer from the betrayed, isn’t just difficult: it is a matter of life and death. Now the celebrated author and secret Stasi informer is ready to confess…The Valley of Unknowing is both a moving and entertaining love story and a seductive thriller, one that pits the past against the future, commerce against creativity, and art against life.
Young Men in Spats
by P. G. Wodehouse“Sublime comic genius”—Ben Elton These eleven stories describe the misadventures of the delightfully idle “Eggs,” “Beans,” and “Crumpets” that populate the Drones club: young men wearing spats, starting spats, and landing in sticky spots. For the first of his many appearances in the Wodehouse canon, Uncle Fred comes to what he believes to be the rescue.
Head Wounds: A Kevin Kerney Novel (Kevin Kerney Novels #14)
by Michael McGarrityClayton Istee, son of retired police chief Kevin Kerney, goes up against an elusive Mexican hitman in a mesmerizing story of murder, revenge, and redemption.Given a chance to salvage his law enforcement career, Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Detective Clayton Istee catches a bizarre late-night double homicide at a Las Cruces hotel. Both victims, a man and a woman, have been scalped with their throats cut.The murders show all the signs of a signature hit, but national and state crime databases reveal no similar profiles. Digging into the victims’ backgrounds, Clayton discovers that six months prior the couple had walked out of a nearby casino with $200,000 of a high-stakes gambler’s money.He also learns the crime had been hushed up by an undercover federal DEA agent, who resurfaces and recruits Clayton for a dangerous mission to seize the Mexican drug lord responsible for the killings.Thrust into the nightmare world of borderland drug wars and corrupt cops, Clayton duels with a cunning assassin poised to kill him and his family in a ferocious climax to the Kevin Kerney series that is sure to stun.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint: A Novel
by Brady Udall"An ingenious tale [that] takes its heart from Dickens and its soul from America’s great outlaw West." —ElleHalf Apache and mostly orphaned, Edgar Presley Mint’s trials begin on an Arizona reservation at the age of seven, when the mailman’s jeep accidentally runs over his head. As he is shunted from the hospital to a school for delinquents to a Mormon foster family, comedy, pain, and trouble accompany Edgar through a string of larger-than-life experiences. Through it all, readers will root for this irresistible innocent who never truly loses heart and whose quest for the mailman leads him to an unexpected home.
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
by Mary Roach“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) explores the irresistibly strange universe of life without gravity in this New York Times bestseller.The best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. From the Space Shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule, Mary Roach takes us on the surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth.
Small Days and Nights: A Novel
by Tishani DoshiA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, this brilliant novel is “a shattering study of disaffection and belonging” (Bidisha, Guardian). Escaping her failing marriage in the United States, Grace Marisola has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives an unexpected inheritance—a house on the beaches of Madras—and discovers an older sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Grace’s attempts to leave her old self behind prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury, and bewilderment of life with Lucia.
The Emperor's Body: A Novel
by Peter BrooksNapoleon, twenty years dead, rises like a phoenix over the politics of France and the destinies of three lovers. Against the historical backdrop of the French expedition in 1840 to retrieve Napoleon's body from Saint Helena, two men and a woman find themselves engulfed in long-dormant and dangerous political passions. Philippe de Rohan-Chabot, an aristocratic young diplomat, is charged with bringing the body from the island prison where Napoleon died to a glorious tomb at Les Invalides in Paris. Chabot's rival is the aging diplomat and author Henri Beyle, known to posterity as Stendhal. The enigmatic and impulsive Amelia Curial must free herself from the shadow of her mother's scandalous loves and untimely death, and from the life of stale convention that her family urges upon her. The dead emperor is a token in a political game to appease the enemies of the monarchy, but that gamble imperils the king's rule and a new revolution looms. Meanwhile, the interplay of the three central characters traces a delicate pattern of romance, longing, misunderstanding, and the obstacles to the pursuit of happiness.
The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel
by Manu JosephA quirky and darkly comic take on domestic life in southern India.The PEN Open Book Award called Manu Joseph "that rare bird who can wildly entertain his readers as forcefully as he moves them." In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Joseph brilliantly brings his talents to the story of an Indian Christian family living far afield in south India.It has been three years since seventeen-year-old Unni Chacko mysteriously fell from a balcony to his death. His family—journalist father Ousep, who smokes two cigarettes at once “because three is too much”; mother Mariamma, who fantasizes gleefully about murdering her husband; and twelve-year-old love-struck brother Thoma with zero self-esteem, have coped by not coping. When the post office delivers a comic drawn by Unni that had been lost in the mail, Ousep, shocked out of his stupor, ventures on a quest to understand his son and rewrite his family’s story.Combining family drama with philosophy, social satire with satisfying storytelling, The Illicit Happiness of Other People reminds us that the greatest mystery of all—the one most worth our time and energy—is understanding the people we love.
Finding Camlann: A Novel
by Sean PidgeonA compelling argument about the origins of King Arthur wrapped in a brilliant novel.Set against a rich historical landscape evoked by the secret places and half-forgotten legends of the British countryside, Finding Camlann is both a "fascinating mystery that will engage readers attracted by history, myth and language" (Washington Independent Review of Books) and a "beautifully written, intelligent, and ingenious" (Gillian Bradshaw) novel of how stories shape our notions of the past—and of ourselves.Archaeologist Donald Gladstone is sure that there never was a "real" King Arthur—that is, until a surprising find at Stonehenge seems to offer hard evidence of Arthur's existence. Teaming up with Julia Llewellyn, a gifted linguist working at the Oxford English Dictionary, Donald sets off on a literary and mythological quest that will change both of their lives. Gloriously many-layered, Finding Camlann is a deeply satisfying love story, a gripping detective story, and a narrative journey of myriad pleasures.
The Bank of Fear: A Novel
by David Ignatius"Sizzling…engrossing all the way." —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewHit men stalk computer analyst Lina Alwen and financial investigator Sam Hoffman in pursuit of the knowledge the pair may have regarding a late Iraqi dictator’s billions. From London to Switzerland, and from Baghdad to the mysterious corners of the just-budding Internet, this spy thriller covers the map to uncover a world of corruption.
The Painter from Shanghai: A Novel
by Jennifer Cody EpsteinReminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha, a re-imagining of the life of Pan Yuliang and her transformation from prostitute to post-Impressionist. Down the muddy waters of the Yangtze River and into the seedy backrooms of "The Hall of Eternal Splendor," through the raucous glamour of prewar Shanghai and the bohemian splendor of 1920s Paris, and back to a China ripped apart by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution: this novel tells the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented—and provocative—Chinese artists of the twentieth century.Jennifer Cody Epstein's epic brings to life the woman behind the lush, Cezannesque nude self-portraits, capturing with lavish detail her life in the brothel and then as a concubine to a Republican official who would ultimately help her find her way as an artist. Moving with the tide of historical events, The Painter from Shanghai celebrates a singularly daring painting style—one that led to fame, notoriety, and, ultimately, a devastating choice: between Pan's art and the one great love of her life.
The Un-Americans: Stories
by Molly AntopolA stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history, the debut work of fiction by a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree.Moving from modern-day Jerusalem to McCarthy-era Los Angeles to communist Prague and back again, The UnAmericans is a stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history. Molly Antopol’s critically acclaimed debut will long be remembered for its "poise and gravity" (New York Times), each story "so full of heartache and humor, love and life…[it’s] as though we’re absorbing a novel’s worth of insight" (Jesmyn Ward, Salon).
Loverboys
by Ana Castillo“Seductive… full of infectious vigor… these stories demand, above all, to be listened to.” —New York Times Book Review From Ana Castillo, the widely praised author of So Far from God and The Guardians, comes this collection of stories on the experience of love in all its myriad configurations. Infectiously moody and murderously comic, Castillo chronicles the rapturous beginnings, melancholy middles, and bittersweet endings of modern romance between men and women, men and men, and women and women.
The Stories of Frederick Busch
by Frederick BuschA selection of short stories from a twentieth-century “American master” (Dan Cryer, Newsday). A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the school, including his own son, locked in a country jail. In Busch's work, we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another. In the words of Raymond Carver, "With astonishing felicity of detail, Busch presents us with a world where real things are at stake—and sometimes, as in the real world, everything is risked." From his first volume, Hardwater Country (1974), to his most recent, Rescue Missions (2006), this volume selects thirty stories from an "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday), showcasing a body of work that is sure to shape American fiction for generations to come.