Book One in THE JACK REACHER Cases. Former FBI agent Lauren Pauling met Jack Reacher in THE HARD WAY, the 10th Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. Now, in A HARD MAN TO FORGET, Pauling is a private investigator in New York and receives a mysterious letter with Jack Reacher's name, along with a phone number. Pauling calls the number and reaches a woman whose husband has gone missing. Even stranger, the woman claims she didn't contact Pauling, and has no idea who Jack Reacher is. Intrigued, begins to investigate and when the woman becomes the target of the same men who may have abducted her husband, Pauling recruits Michael Tallon, a former special ops soldier. Pauling and Tallon quickly realize they're dealing with much more than a missing persons case, and soon they're in a deadly race to stop a terrifying act of mass murder. "Fast-paced, engaging, original." –New York Times bestselling... Views: 43
The Accidental is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts–parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid–encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to se their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s exhilarating facility with language, her narrative freedom, and her chromatic wordplay propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.Ali Smith’s acclaimed novel won the prestigious Whitbread Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.From the Trade Paperback edition.Amazon.com ReviewBefore writing The Accidental, Ali Smith wrote Hotel World, shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and several short story collections. Her work is absolutely original, with a trademark quirky style, with whole passages that seem to have been bound into the wrong book and occasional historical asides completely outside the narrative line. Don't be fooled; with Smith, every word has a purpose. Amber is the catalyst who makes the novel happen. She appears on the doorstep of the Smart's rented summer cottage in Norfolk, England, barefoot and unexpected. Eve Smart, a third-rate author suffering writer's block, believes that she is a friend of her husband's. Michael is a womanizing University professor, but he doesn't usually drag his quarry home. He thinks that she must be a friend of Eve's. Everyone is politely confused and Amber is invited to dinner. She is a consummate liar and manipulator who manages to seduce everyone in the family in some significant way. Magnus, Eve's 17-year-old son from a former marriage and Astrid, her 12-year-old daughter, are easy prey. Magnus is in despair. He played a prank on a classmate and it went horribly wrong when she killed herself because of the humiliation it caused. He cannot shake the guilt and is about to hang himself from the shower rod when Amber walks into the bathroom, the perfect deus ex machina. She bathes him and takes him back downstairs, announcing that she found him trying to kill himself. Everyone titters. Could it be possible? This is a recurring question as Amber's behavior becomes more and more outrageous. Is this really happening, or is it some family-wide delusion? To add to the mystery, there is a Rashomon-like character to the story in that the same events are recalled by the Smarts through their own filters. This is a completely engrossing novel that raises as many questions as it answers. --Valerie RyanFrom Publishers WeeklyHeather O'Neill plays Amber, a mysterious stranger who wangles her way into the lives of a vacationing English family spending the summer in a remote cottage. O'Neill reads with studious detachment and a persistent air of mischief, as if the entire story is a particularly juicy practical joke. Given Amber's predilection for wreaking havoc in her new adopted family's comfortably misguided lives, the emotion is supremely apropos. O'Neill is joined by a cast of performers, including Ruth Moore as the perpetually harried, perpetually preoccupied Eve, who spends all her time dreaming of the characters of the latest historical novel she's writing, and Stina Nielsen as Astrid, a 12-year-old with a frightening imagination and a propensity for recording the world on her video camera. The bulk of the book, though, is read by O'Neill, who provides a suitably nuanced reading, at times placid, at times flashing an air of free-floating menace. It is her work, above all, that brings Smith's novel to fully fleshed existence. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 43
Fantasy/Young Adult. 108635 words long. First published in 2008, 2008 Views: 43
All three parts in one volume!From the author of New York Times bestseller Little Girl Lost, this unforgettable and moving thriller is perfect for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane. (Released in the UK as Hurt.)Just before Christmas, the body of a sixteen-year-old girl is found along the train tracks on the outskirts of a small town. As Detective Lucy Black investigates the teenager's tragic last hours in search of clues to her death, she realizes that some of the victim's friends may have been her most dangerous enemies—and that whoever killed her is ready to kill again. Haunted by the memory of a case gone wrong, and taunted by a killer on the loose, Lucy finds herself pitted against a lethal opponent hiding in plain sight.From an author described by John Connolly as "a major force" in suspense literature, Someone You Know is one of the most atmospheric, powerful thrillers you'll read all year. Views: 43
In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Station Eleven, a sweeping literary love story about two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart.America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded laborer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years. But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.... Views: 43
A Time to Heal Brody Mason needs a nurse. As soon as he can walk again, he'll leave Hope, Montana, and go straight back to the army. But Kaitlyn Harpe? That's adding insult to injury. Not just because she's a daily reminder that Brody's fiancée, Kate's sister, married his best friend while he was fighting in Afghanistan. But because Kaitlyn had kept the truth from him. The Kaitlyn he knew before he deployed would never have perpetuated a lie like that. But this new person—the confident, beautiful woman with hidden depths in her eyes—is nothing like the shy, serious girl he knew. This Kaitlyn troubles him. Because Brody is starting to wonder if he proposed to the wrong sister... Views: 43
An attempt to portray the horror of certain men's brutal sexual domination of women, this novel by the German author of "The Piano Teacher" tells the story of Gerti, a woman who turns in revulsion from her husband to a younger man, only to discover that he too wishes to treat her unkindly. In a quaint Austrian ski resort, things are not quite what they seem. Hermann, the manager of a paper mill, has decided that sexual gratification begins at home. Which means Gerti – his wife and property. Gerti is not asked how she feels about the use Hermann puts her to. She is a receptacle into which Hermann pours his juices, nastily, briefly, brutally. The long-suffering and battered Gerti thinks she has found her saviour and love in Michael, a student who rescues her after a day of vigorous use by her husband. But Michael is on his way up the Austrian political ladder, and he is, after all, a man. In Elfriede Jelinek's mitteleuropa, love is as distant from sex as the Alps are from the sea, and the everyday mechanics of husband, wife, and child, become a loveless horror. Both a condemnation of the myth of romantic love and an angry defence of women's sexuality, Lust is pornography for pessimists. A bestseller throughout Europe, Lust conforms Elfriede Jelinek as the most challenging writer – female or male – in Europe today. It is a dark, dazzling performance. Views: 43
After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal—beautifully recounted here—were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.From BooklistPulitzer Prize–winning author Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his high-strung mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown of Gloversville, New York. All of her life, she clung to the notion that she was an independent woman, despite the fact that she couldn’t drive, lived upstairs from her parents, and readily accepted their money to keep her household afloat. She finally escaped her deteriorating hometown, which went bust when the local tannery shut down, by moving to Arizona with her 18-year-old son when he left for college and following him across the country right up until her death. His comical litany of her long list of anxieties, from the smell of cooking oil to her fruitless quest for the perfect apartment, is a testament to his forbearance but also to his ability to make her such a vivid presence in these pages. Part of what makes this such a profound tribute to her is precisely because he sees her so clearly, flaws and all. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Prizewinning author Richard Russo’s many fans will be lining up for his first nonfiction work, which has generated considerable prepublication buzz. --Joanne Wilkinson Review“One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years... Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable.” —Michael Schaub, WFSU“Rich and layered... an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time.” —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune“Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful.” —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast“Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown.” —Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist“An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction.” —Kirkus Views: 43
Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be features new fiction starring Joe R. Lansdale's unlikely best friends Hap and Leonard, two good ol' boys from East Texas who have a way of getting into some bad fixes, along with some of Lansdale's most famous and hard-to-find Texas Observer columns. In his nonfiction, Lansdale discusses, dissects, and discovers the trials of a Southern writer's life, his personal literary inspirations from Poe to porn, race and class in today's unsettled South, the Cold War in East Texas, the tornado, and the Bomb. Also featured is a candid and often coruscating Outspoken Interview, and an essential bibliography of one of today's most prolific and eclectic writers. Views: 43
