• Home
  • Literature & Fiction

Suspicious Characters

Epub (my conversion)Thirteen tales of murder and intrigue by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ed McBain, Simon Brett, Sara Paretsky, and Jonathan Gash
Views: 480

After the First Death

Sixteen-year-old Miro had instructions to kill the bus driver immediately. They would then take the busload of children to the bridge and begin the standoff. Artkin was Miro’s mentor; the mastermind behind this act of terrorism that would get the world’s attention.  But Artkin had told Miro that the bus driver would be an old man. Sixteen-year old Kate sometimes substituted for her uncle and drove his bus when he was ill. She even got a special license to do so, and she’d always liked kids. She wondered what was going on when the van in front of her stopped, but when the man and the boy with guns forced their way onto the bus, she knew her worst nightmare was beginning.
Views: 480

Life After God

This collection of stories cuts through the hype of modern living, travelling inward to the elusive terrain of dreams and nightmares.
Views: 480

Juliet, Naked

Annie loves Duncan — or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life. In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. Tucker's been languishing (and he's unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin -- his young son, Jackson. But then there's also the new material he's about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet — entitled, Juliet, Naked. What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one's promise.
Views: 480

The Secret Power

A classic lost race novel in which a brave heroine discovers a hidden city of immortals in the Egyptian desert.
Views: 479

State of the Union

A heartbreaking, funny, and honest look inside of a marriage falling apart and the lengths a couple would go to in order to fix it from the bestselling author of About a Boy and High Fidelity.Soon to be a SundanceTV series starring Rosamund Pike and Chris O'Dowd!Tom and Louise meet in a pub before their couple's therapy appointment. Married for years, they thought they had a stable home life—until a recent incident pushed them to the brink.Going to therapy seemed like the perfect solution. But over drinks before their appointment, they begin to wonder: what if marriage is like a computer? What if you take it apart to see what's in there, but then you're left with a million pieces?Unfolding in the minutes before their weekly therapy sessions, the ten-chapter conversation that ensues is witty and moving, forcing them to look at their marriage—and, for the first time in a long time, at each other.
Views: 479

21st Birthday

A mother pleads with Detective Lindsay Boxer to investigate the disappearance of her twenty-year-old daughter and her baby girl. When young wife and mother Tara Burke goes missing with her baby girl, all eyes are on her husband, Lucas. He paints her not as a missing person but a wayward wife—until a gruesome piece of evidence turns the investigation criminal. While Chronicle reporter Cindy Thomas pursues the story and M.E. Claire Washburn harbors theories that run counter to the SFPD's, ADA Yuki Castellano sizes Lucas up as a textbook domestic offender... who suddenly puts forward an unexpected suspect. If what Lucas tells law enforcement has even a grain of truth, there isn't a woman in the state of California who's safe from the reach of an unspeakable threat.
Views: 479

The Bird in the Bamboo Cage

War imprisoned them. Friendship set them free. 'A beautiful, tender and fascinating story' Sinead Moriarty 'moving and utterly unforgettable' Cathryn Ryan Howard 'Beautiful ... warm, loveable characters who had me rooting for them all the way' Tracy Rees 'An absolute treat' Liz Nugent China, 1941. With Japan's declaration of war on the Allies, Elspeth Kent's future changes forever. When soldiers take control of the missionary school where she teaches, comfortable security is replaced by rationing, uncertainty and fear. Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School. Now the enemy, separated indefinitely from anxious parents, the children must turn to their teachers – to Miss Kent and her new Girl Guide patrol especially – for help. But worse is to come when the pupils and teachers are sent to a distant internment camp. Unimaginable hardship, impossible choices and danger lie ahead. Inspired by true events, this is the unforgettable story of the life-changing...
Views: 479

Downtown: My Manhattan

In Downtown, Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to 42nd Street, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people. From the Battery's traces of the early port to Washington Square's ghosts of executed convicts and well-heeled Knickerbockers; from the Five Points, once the most dangerous and squalid slum in America, to the mansions of the robber barons on "the Fifth Avenue"; from the Bowery of the 1860s, the vibrant heart of the city's theater world, to the Village of the 1960s, with its festival-like street life, this is downtown as we've never seen it before. Hamill weaves his own memories of Manhattan with the liveliest moments from its past, and points out the hints of that past living on in the city of today, fueling the ever-present nostalgia of its inhabitants.Hamill introduces us to the New Yorkers who have left indelible marks: Peter Stuyvesant and John Jacob Astor, Stanford White and George Templeton Strong, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg, Boss Tweed and Fiorello La Guardia, Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk, and scores of others. And he takes us to the eateries, saloons, theaters, movie houses, bookstores, and street corners they, and he, once frequented, whether still standing or existing only in memory. Through the city's transformations, the pulse of Pete Hamill's brilliant voice melds with the pulse that drives New York, that mixture of daring, greed, anger, rebellion, hope, entrepreneurialism, and longing that never fades. Written by native son who has lived through some of New York City's most historic moments, Downtown is an extraordinary celebration of the magnificent, haunted place that Hamill continues to call home, and that people from all over the country and the world have come to call their own.
Views: 479

Akata Woman

The electrifying third book in the series that started with Akata Witch, named one of Time magazine's "100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time" and "100 Best YA Books of All Time," from award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor. "In this series, Okorafor creates a stunningly original world of African magic that draws on Nigerian folk beliefs and rituals instead of relying on the predictable tropes of Western fantasy novels." —Time magazineFrom the moment Sunny Nwazue discovered she had mystical energy flowing in her blood, she sought to understand and control her powers. Throughout her adventures in Akata Witch and Akata Warrior, she had to navigate the balance between nearly everything in her life—America and Nigeria, the "normal" world and the one infused with juju, human and spirit, good daughter and powerful Leopard Person. Now, those hard lessons and...
Views: 479

Mr. Spaceship

The story is set in the distant future, where humanity is at war with "Yuks", an alien life form which does not use mechanical spaceships nor constructions. Instead, it relies on life forms. The war has been going on for a long time, and humanity has not been able to come up with a solution against the life-form based ships and mines that the Yuks use. One day, a team of researchers led by Philip Kramer decide to build a spaceship which is powered by a human brain. They find the ideal candidate, Kramer's old professor, a dying man who volunteers to donate his brain to the project. A human brain-controlled spacecraft would mean mechanical perfection. This was accomplished, and something unforeseen: a strange entity called . . . Mr. Spaceship!
Views: 479

Sleepwalk

An Indie Next pick for June 2022Named a Best Book of Spring by EsquireNamed a Best Book of May by The Philadelphia Inquirer Named one of the "27 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Winter" by Thrillist A high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near future America with a big hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon.Sleepwalk's hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At fifty years old, he's been living off the grid for over half his life. He's never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and a passion for LSD microdosing, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he's never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has...
Views: 479

Look at Me

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 479

In a Glass Darkly

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes. NB: The Familiar is a revision of The Watcher; Mr. Justice Harbottle is a revision of An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street.
Views: 479