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The Comfort of Strangers

Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to a bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession.
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Beyond the Chocolate War

The school year is almost at an end, and the chocolate sale is ancient history. But no one at Trinity School can forget the Chocolate War. Devious Archie Costello, commander of the secret school organization called the Vigils, still has some torturous assignments to hand out before he graduates. In spite of this pleasure, Archie is troubled that his right-hand man, Obie, has started to move away from the Vigils. Luckily Archie knows his stooges will fix that. But Obie has some plans of his own.
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Don't Care High

Paul's attempts to adjust to New York City life are thwarted at his high school, nicknamed Don't Care High, until his manipulation of a new Student Council president wakes up the apathetic student body.
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The Guermantes Way

"The Guermantes way" is the path that runs past the chateau belonging to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. It also represents the path into "the social kaleidoscope" traveledby Proust's narrator, which culminates in his introduction to the Paris salon of the Guermantes. The rich cast of characters in this third volume of In Search of Lost Time includes Robert de Saint-Loup, who is obsessedwith the prostitute Rachel, and Baron de Charlus, a public womanizer and secret homosexual. The final volume of a new, definitive text of "A la recherche du temps perdu" was publishedby the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take intoaccount the new French editions.
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Midnight Unbound

Midnight Unbound A Midnight Breed Novella A lethal Breed warrior is called upon by his brethren in the Order to bodyguard a beautiful young widow he’s craved from afar, in this new novella in the "steamy and intense" (Publishers Weekly) Midnight Breed vampire romance series from New York Times and #1 international bestselling author Lara Adrian. As a former Hunter bred to be a killing machine in the hell of Dragos's lab, Scythe is a dangerous loner whose heart has been steeled by decades of torment and violence. He has no room in his world for love or desire--especially when it comes in the form of a vulnerable, yet courageous, Breedmate in need of protection. Scythe has loved--and lost--once before, and paid a hefty price for the weakness of his emotions. He's not about to put himself in those chains again, no matter how deeply he hungers for lovely Chiara. For Chiara Genova, a widow and mother with a young Breed son, the last thing she needs is to put her fate and that of her child in the hands of a lethal male like Scythe. But when she's targeted by a hidden enemy, the obsidian-eyed assassin is her best hope for survival . . . even at the risk of her heart.
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Nothing Like the Sun

A magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare’s love life, following young Will’s maturation into sex and writing. A playful romp, it is at the same time a serious look at the forces that midwife art, the effects of time and place, and the ordinariness that is found side by side with the extraordinariness of genius.
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Cathedral

Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another.  These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s work and “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart” (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).
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The March of Man

1905, anonymous translator. A meditation, or prose-poem, on the march of human progress, probably written as a response to the failed Russian revolution of 1905.
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The Winemaker

From the author of The Physician and Shaman now comes this story of a young man—the grapes he grows, the wine he fashions, the women he loves, and his struggle against an evil that seeks to destroy him. Already an international bestseller. Josep Alvarez is a young man in the tiny grape-growing village of Santa Eulália, in northern Spain, where his father grows black grapes that are turned into cheap vinegar. Joseph loves the agricultural life, but he is the second son, and his father’s vineyard will be inherited by his brother Donat, the firstborn. Josep needs to keep his hands in the soil. He yearns for a job growing grapes and for an opportunity to marry Teresa Gallego. In Madrid, an assassination plot, conceived against the political leader of Spain by men of wealth and power, creates a storm of intrigue that sucks into its vortex a group of innocent young farm workers in Santa Eulália. How Josep’s life is changed drastically by these events, and how, ironically, they gradually turn him into an inspired vintner with an evolving vision of life, is the fascinating story of The Winemaker.
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The Wizard Heir

Sixteen-year-old Seph McCauley has spent the past three years getting kicked out of one exclusive private school after another. And it's not his attitude that's the problem: it's the trail of magical accidents - lately, disasters - that follow in his wake. Seph is a wizard, orphaned and untrained, and his powers are escalating out of control. After causing a tragic fire at an after-hours party, Seph is sent to the Havens, a secluded boys' school on the coast of Maine. Gregory Leicester, the headmaster, promises to train Seph in magic and initiate him into his mysterious order of wizards. But Seph's enthusiasm dampens when he learns that training comes at a steep cost, and that Leicester plans to use his students' powers to serve his own mysterious agenda.
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Memory Wall

Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's collection of stories is about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In 'The River Nemunas', a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. 'Village 113' is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seedkeeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in 'Afterworld,' the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson. The stories in Memory Wall show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be one of the masters of the form.
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The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

When a young troll named Hawthorn is stolen from Fairyland by the Red Wind, he becomes a changeling – a human boy -- in the strange city of Chicago, a place no less bizarre and magical than Fairyland when seen through trollish eyes. Left with a human family, Hawthorn struggles with his troll nature and his changeling fate. But when he turns twelve, he stumbles upon a way back home, to a Fairyland much changed from the one he remembers. Hawthorn finds himself at the center of a changeling revolution--until he comes face to face with a beautiful young Scientiste with very big, very red assistant. Time magazine has praised Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books as "one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century." In this fourth installment of her saga, Valente 's wisdom and wit will charm readers of all ages.
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Voices From the Street

Stuart Hadley is a young radio electronics salesman in early 1950s Oakland, California. He has what many would consider the ideal life; a nice house, a pretty wife, a decent job with prospects for advancement, but he still feels unfulfilled; something is missing from his life. Hadley is an angry young man--an artist, a dreamer, a screw-up. He tries to fill his void first with drinking, and sex, and then with religious fanaticism, but nothing seems to be working, and it is driving him crazy. He reacts to the love of his wife and the kindness of his employer with anxiety and fear. One of the earliest books that Dick ever wrote, and the only novel that has never been published, Voices from the Street is the story of Hadley's descent into depression and madness, and out the other side. Most known in his lifetime as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick is growing in reputation as an American writer whose powerful vision is an ironic reflection of the present. This novel completes the publication of his canon.
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The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World

WHO RUNS THE WORLD? SQUIRRELS! Fourteen-year-old Doreen Green moved from sunny California to the suburbs of New Jersey. She must start at a new school, make new friends, and continue to hide her tail. Yep, Doreen has the powers of . . . a squirrel! After failing at several attempts to find her new BFF, Doreen feels lonely and trapped, liked a caged animal. Then one day Doreen uses her extraordinary powers to stop a group of troublemakers from causing mischief in the neighborhood, and her whole life changes. Everyone at school is talking about it! Doreen contemplates becoming a full-fledged Super Hero. And thus, Squirrel Girl is born! She saves cats from trees, keeps the sidewalks clean, and dissuades vandalism. All is well until a real-life Super Villain steps out of the shadows and declares Squirrel Girl his archenemy. Can Doreen balance being a teenager and a Super Hero? Or will she go . . . NUTS?
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Pagan's Scribe

Pagan's final adventure finds our sarcastic hero a bit older and wiser as he leads his young scribe out of the world of books to brave the real-life dangers of a papal crusade. Impressed by the bookish Isidore, Pagan Kidrouk -- now Archdeacon of Carcassonne -- hires the boy as his scribe. Eager to flee a cloistered existence, naive Isidore quickly discovers that the real world isn't as the poets and philosophers claim. The year is 1209, and papal forces from the north are driving their bloody crusade against the Cathar heretics to Carcassonne. With the battle lines inching ever closer, the world of Father Pagan, Lord Roland, and Roland's mysterious brother grows more real to Isidore -- and more terrifying -- by the day. The last of four books in an acclaimed series, PAGAN'S SCRIBE casts the worldly, wise-cracking Pagan in an unexpected role as friend and mentor to a young soul in need.
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