BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Anne Tyler's *The Beginner's Goodbye.*
"Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jaremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn--especially when he's falling in love.... Views: 914
What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted?
To the Gregg family, hunting is just plain fun. To the girl who lives next door, it's just plain horrible. She tries to be polite. She tries to talk them out of it, but the Greggs only laugh at her. Then one day the Greggs go too far, and the little girl turns her Magic Finger on them. When she's very, very angry, the little girl's Magic Finger takes over. She really can’t control it, and now it's turned the Greggs into birds! Before they know it, the Greggs are living in a nest, and that's just the beginning of their problems… Views: 914
When the brig Amaryllis was swallowed in a hurricane, the captain and all the crew were swallowed, too. For thirty years the captain's widow, Geneva Reade, has waited, certain that her husband will send her a message from the bottom of the sea. But someone else is waiting, too, and watching her, a man called Seward. Into this haunted situation comes Jenny, the widow's granddaughter. The three of them, Gran, Jenny, and Seward, are drawn into a kind of deadly game with one another and with the sea, a game that only the sea knows how to win. Views: 914
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world. Views: 913
When a woman's body washes up on an isolated stretch of beach on the southern coast of England, Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant is on the case. But the inquiry into her death turns into a nightmare of false leads and baffling clues. Was there anyone who didn't want lovely screen actress Christine Clay dead? Views: 913
In Up at the Villa, W. Somerset Maugham portrays a wealthy young English woman who finds herself confronted rather brutally by the repercussions of whimsy.
On the day her older and prosperous friend asks her to marry him, Mary Leonard demurs and decides to postpone her reply a few days. But driving into the hills above Florence alone that evening, Mary offers a ride to a handsome stranger. And suddenly, her life is utterly, irrevocably altered.
For this stranger is a refugee of war, and he harbors more than one form of passion. Before morning, Mary will witness bloodshed, she will be forced to seek advice and assistance from an unsavory man, and she will have to face the truth about her own yearnings. Erotic, haunting, and maddeningly suspenseful, Up at the Villa is a masterful tale of temptation and the capricious nature of fate. Views: 913
During the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians and Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army. But soon Romania itself entered the war, and Bologa found himself fighting his own people.
The Forest of the Hanged asks a fundamental question about war: namely, why does a man fight? Apostol condemns an officer to death for desertion and attempting to give information to the enemy. He watches the execution of the officer with satisfaction until he witnesses a fellow soldier's grief and pity for the dead man. At this point his world shifts. His growing self-doubt and uncertainty lead him to question beliefs he once held without question. Unprepared for his own reaction when he is once again called to sit on a court martial, he finds that he too must go to the forest.
This very rare, richly descriptive novel lays bare the inner conflict engendered by a total war, yet seldom expressed Views: 913
Daniel Defoe was a writer, journalist and spy. He was one of the first authors to write a novel. In An Essay Upon Projects Defoe defines the word project and enlarges on the concept including looking at the economic ramifications of several projects he was personally familiar with. The Introduction sums up this first work by Defoe as follows. "It is practical in the highest degree, while running over with fresh speculation that seeks everywhere the well-being of society by growth of material and moral power. There is a wonderful fertility of mind, and almost whimsical precision of detail, with good sense and good humour to form the groundwork of a happy English style. Defoe in this book ran again and again into sound suggestions that first came to be realised long after he was dead. Upon one subject, indeed, the education of women, we have only just now caught him up. Defoe wrote the book in 1692 or 1693, when his age was a year or two over thirty, and he published it in 1697." Views: 912
A trunk that Nancy receives from her father for a trip to Buenos Aires becomes the center of a mystery. Views: 912
In Evil Hour is the thrilling story of a Colombian society menaced by rumour and paranoia by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
As a small South American town sweats under an oppressive heat, an unknown person creeps through the night sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. When the contents of one poster lead to a murder, everyone knows that the town is threatened by a malevolent presence - but is there anything that the mayor, the doctor or the priest can do about it?
'In Evil Hour was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!' Jim Crace
'Belongs to the very best of Marquez's work . . . should on no account be missed' Financial Times
'A splendid achievement' The Times Views: 911
The first novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and *Zero K*
At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals tobecome a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination.
And the the dream—and the dream-making—become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture, to impose a pattern on his own, and America's past, present, and future.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 911
Whether these are the written transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of our psyche, all seven stories in this collection implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable. In one, a two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. In another, a jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair. In another, over the course of a weekend, a guilt-ridden father with his teenage daughter discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence. Views: 911
Bonfire, the Black Stallion’s colt who is a champion harness racer, is in training for the biggest race of his career: the Hambletonian. But a routine practice race turns disastrous in a collision of wood, metal, horses, and jockeys. Bonfire escapes unharmed, but is spooked and refuses to race. Alec Ramsey, the owner of the Black, witnesses the crash and is determined to see that Bonfire follow in the winning footsteps of his world-famous sire. Views: 911
For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.
Pawn in Frankincense is the fourth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles. Somewhere within the bejeweled labyrinth of the Ottoman empire, a child is hidden. Now his father, Francis Crawford of Lymond, soldier of fortune and the exiled heir of Scottish nobility, is searching for him while ostensibly engaged on a mission to the Turkish Sultan. At stake is a pawn in a cutthroat game whose gambits include treason, enslavement, and murder. With a Foreword by the author.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 910
It is Norway in the thirteenth century, a land rent by unremitting warfare and feebly lit by Christianity. Olav Audunsson was once an outlaw; now he is a man of wealth and stature. But he is haunted by the memory of crimes for which there is no easy atonement and by losses that may never be redeemed. Views: 910
