Sarah Iles' latest young lover, Ian Aston, and the seedy gangland club he frequents both possess the intense attraction of the forbidden. When one night at the Monty they witness a fatal knifing, they unwittingly learn far too much for their own good of a deadly plot that could, if successfully executed, rearrange the city's criminal power structure. Immediately, the unfaithful wife and petty criminal become targets of both police and underworld observation. In Come Clean Bill James once again explores that no-man's-land of law enforcement, where human concern and naked expediency stand perennially at odds with each other. Views: 84
China's most important contemporary literary voice delivers a portrait of twentieth-century China full of historical sweep and earthy exuberance.In his latest novel, Mo Yan—arguably China's most important contemporary literary voice—recreates the historical sweep and earthy exuberance of his much acclaimed novel Red Sorghum. In a country where patriarchal favoritism and the primacy of sons survived multiple revolutions and an ideological earthquake, this epic novel is first and foremost about women, with the female body serving as the book's central metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900 and married at seventeen into the Shangguan family. She has nine children, only one of whom is a boy—the narrator of the book. A spoiled and ineffectual child, he stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings.Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman who risks her life to save several of her children and grandchildren. The... Views: 84
A lot of people lose their way in India . . . it's a country specially made for that.'Amid the backstreets, brothels and faded hotels of Bombay, Madras and the old Portuguese port of Goa, a man searches for his lost friend. Xavier has been missing for a year, and the only clues to his disappearance lie with an overworked doctor, a young prostitute and the leader of a strange religious order.Dreamlike, elusive and profoundly disquieting, Indian Nocturne calls into question the very nature of identity. Views: 84
A fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood's earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator's Wife It is 1914, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist. But the word on everyone's lips these days is "flickers"—the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you'll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all. In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium. She also makes the acquaintance of actress Mary Pickford, whose signature golden curls and lively spirit have given her the title... Views: 84
From the internationally best-selling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air."These are the opening lines of the journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel: the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany—a house that thwarts the expectations of his recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. The narrator is eager to finish a screenplay, entitled Marriage, for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around... Views: 84
Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye to a great American classic in this sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.At the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory." In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also "wrote by Huck," the boys do just that, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war.They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and "dreadful lonely," hires himself out to "whosoever." He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures.He is eventually... Views: 84
His romantic weekend in ruins, shy twenty-something artist Perry Foster learns that things can always get worse when he returns home from San Francisco to find a dead body in his bathtub. A dead body in a very ugly sportscoat — and matching socks. The dead man is a stranger to Perry, but that's not much of a comfort; how did a strange dead man get in a locked flat at the isolated Alton Estate in the wilds of the "Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont? Perry turns to help from "tall, dark and hostile" former navy SEAL Nick Reno — but is Reno all that he seems? Views: 84
A madcap, bawdy tale about an ordinary man who goes to work for a racketeer and has the adventure of a lifetime: the last novel by an iconic British writer. Michael Cullen, from Nottingham, has a shady past, but nearing his forties, he's settled down, married a doctor, and started working for an ad agency. That is, until the agency fires him. He's not terribly upset though. Actually, he feels free—he hated that job. But he knows he's disappointed his wife and isn't sure what to do next, so he decides to hit the road for a few weeks. Then, he's contacted by his old boss, Claude Moggerhanger. A racketeer whom Cullen once tried—and failed—to put in jail, Moggerhanger seems to have forgiven him, and wants to hire him to do a little "job." All he has to do is drive Moggerhanger's Rolls Royce to Greece, get Greek food for Moggerhanger's wife, collect a few packages, and deliver one in Belgrade. This sounds pretty suspect to Cullen,... Views: 84
From science fiction legend and New York Times bestselling author Alan Dean Foster, creator of the ever-popular Pip and Flinx series, comes the climactic final novel in The Taken trilogy, his electrifying space epic about a man and his dog for whom the expression "out of this world" takes on a whole new meaning.Location is everything. In Chicago, Marcus Walker was a hotshot commodities broker. In the cargo hold of the alien Vilenjji spaceship, he and a laconic dog named George, who has been speech-enhanced to increase his value, are just two more primitive creatures being shipped to the civilized part of the universe, where the market for cuddly extraterrestrial "pets" is busting wide open.Though Walker and George manage to escape, man and dog are far from overjoyed, being even farther from Earth--billions of miles, in fact--and without a clue as to whether the direction home is up, down, or sideways. Possessing universe-level social skills, Walker becomes the... Views: 84
"Looks like war, fellows!" exclaimed Frank Sheldon, as, on a cold March morning he came briskly into the business house where he was employed, and slipped off his overcoat. "Oh, I don\'t know," responded Bart Raymond, Frank\'s special chum. "It\'s looked like war ever since the Lusitania was sunk, but we haven\'t got our fighting clothes on yet. The American eagle keeps on cooing like a dove." Views: 84
Dead Aim marks the always welcome return of Joe R. Lansdale s most enduring fictional creations: Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The result is a spare, beautifully crafted novella in which Lansdale s unique voice and inimitable narrative gifts are on full--and generous--display.The story begins simply enough when the two agree to provide protection for a woman harassed by her violent, soon-to-be-ex husband. But, as readers of this series will already know, events in the lives of Hap and Leonard rarely stay simple for long. When a protracted stakeout ends in a lethal shooting and a pair of moldering corpses turn up in an otherwise deserted trailer, the nature of this 'routine' assignment changes dramatically. The ensuing investigation unearths a complex web of lies, duplicity, and hidden agendas that leads from an upscale Texas law firm to the world of organized crime, culminating in the kind of explosive, anything-can-happen confrontation that only Joe Lansdale could create. Violent, profane, and often raucously funny, Dead Aim is a tautly written, hugely entertaining thriller and a triumph of the storyteller s art. Views: 84
