From the best-selling author of Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier, her strongest work yet--a collection of burnished, impossible-to-put down narratives framed by two stunning, linked novellas.A wife struggles to make sense of her husband's sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother's wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy--and vulnerability--of impending fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families--one a tightly knit foursome, the other a father and son who share little more than having been abandoned by the same woman--forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.Swim Back to Me showcases one of our most vibrant talents at the height of her powers--a book that... Views: 64
Thirty years ago, Ellen Mosley vanished into the criminal underworld with $500,000 of the Mob's money, leaving behind her husband and young children. With his father near death, Judge Whit Mosley launches a search for his mother and finds her framed for murder and in trouble for stealing money from crime lords again - this time millions of dollars. He has one impossible chance to save Ellen - now known as Eve: take her on the run, outsmart a gang of sophisticated killers, and find the missing millions. Caught in a nightmare of double crosses and vicious schemers, Whit turns his back on law and order for the one person he most wants to trust but knows the least - a dangerous woman who may be plotting the cruellest deception of all. Views: 64
Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, an imaginative debut that ranges from Havana to BerlinAncient cities and fallen empires come to life in this masterful collection. In the Byzantine court, a noble with a crippled hand is called upon to ensure that a holy man poses no threat to the throne. On an island in Lake Michigan, a religious community crumbles after an ardent convert digs a little too deep. And the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke rises to fame and falls from favor in two stories that recount his origins in Havana and the height of his success in Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. Ben Stroud's historical reimaginings twist together with contemporary stories to reveal startling truths about human nature across the centuries. In his able hands, Byzantium makes us believe that these are accounts we haven't heard yet. As the chronicler of Burke's exploits muses, "After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any... Views: 64
