“A gifted storyteller...her characters are intelligent, brave, and witty...human and real.”—Susan Isaacs, New York Times Book ReviewThe critically acclaimed author of Good-bye and Amen, Leeway Cottage, and More Than You Know, Beth Gutcheon returns with Gossip, a sharply perceptive and emotionally resonant novel about the power of knowing things about others, the consequences of rumor, and the unexpected price of friendship. A story set among the rich, famous, and well-dressed of Manhattan's Upper East Side, Gossip is a bravura display of this exceptional author's breathtaking talents, addressing important themes of motherhood, friendship, and fidelity. Every reader who admires the strong, character-driven women's fiction of Sue Miller, Alice Hoffman, Elizabeth Berg, and Kaye Gibbons should lend an ear to Beth Gutcheon's Gossip. Views: 59
Blue Fire and Ice told how the peoples of The Land joined together to discover the source of the devastating blue fire, deep in the ice fields of the High Mountains. Now, when the Myrmidots attempt to
harness the fire’s awesome power, disaster strikes and, for the first time in memory, relations between
Muddlemarsh, Beadledom and Myrmidon are strained. Meanwhile, from beyond the High Mountains,
mysterious forces threaten to destroy The Land. Muddles, Beadles and Myrmidots must join together
to face their greatest challenge yet. Views: 59
Some secrets follow you to the grave. Others send you there. Emily has lived her entire life inside a patriarchal commune led by her father and her stepbrothers. There are more rules than she cares to admit, but the most important one, keep it in the commune, is the one most difficult for her to abide by… especially since the only people willing to champion her cause live on the outside. Views: 59
In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.** Views: 59
Veronica Speedwell returns in a brand new adventure from Deanna Raybourn, the New York Times bestselling author of the Lady Julia Grey mysteries... London, 1887. Victorian adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell receives an invitation to visit the Curiosity Club, a ladies-only establishment for daring and intrepid women. There she meets the mysterious Lady Sundridge, who begs her to take on an impossible task—saving society art patron Miles Ramsforth from execution. Accused of the brutal murder of his artist mistress Artemisia, Ramsforth will face the hangman's noose in a week's time if Veronica cannot find the real killer.But Lady Sundridge is not all that she seems, and unmasking her true identity is only the first of the many secrets Veronica must uncover. Together with her natural historian colleague Stoker, Veronica races against time to find the true murderer—a ruthless villain who not only took Artemisia's life in cold... Views: 59
From the author of Bad Mother and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits—a mystery series featuring a Los Angeles mom...With a new arrival on the way, the Applebaum household is bursting at the seams. And Juliet is balancing clue-chasing and diaper-changing with a new task: house-hunting...Juliet loves her kids. She loves their dirty little faces and skinned knees. She loves the ridiculous and amazing things they say. But when three-and-a-half year old Isaac evicts her husband and her from their own bed one night, love is the last thing on her mind. Juliet now recognizes the need for a few changes...starting with a bigger house. And when the new baby arrives, they'll welcome the extra space.But if there's ever a bad time to search for a new house in L.A., it's now. In a buyer-unfriendly real estate market, one practically has to kill to find an affordable home. No wonder Juliet is prepared to over look a corpse on the grounds of her would-be... Views: 59
The Christmas season offers hope for the best life has to give as four of romance's hottest authors--Lisa Kleypas, Lisa Cach, Claudia Dain, and Lynsay Sands--present holiday tales filled with love and laughter. Views: 59
Russian terrorists kidnap a man suspected of Nazi war crimes--and get the wrong man. The rebels threaten to kill their captive unless ten million dollars and the real war criminal are delivered to them within 72 hours. Only the KGB's newest secret weapon could possibly stop their plan--Comrade James Bond.
From Kirkus Reviews Gardner rouses himself for more elaborate plotting than usual in his tenth stint as Ian Fleming's stand-in, but Gardner's James Bond, on loan to the KGB for some antiterrorist housecleaning, has aged a lot less gracefully than Sean Connery. A dissident Russian cabal calling itself The Scales of Justice (SoJ) has kidnapped somebody it claims is Josif Vorontsov, notorious second-in-command at Babi Yar, from his home in New Jersey and threatened to assassinate high-level brass hats until the government takes Vorontsov off their hands and places him on trial for war crimes. When the Kremlin denies that SoJ has the real Vorontsov and refuses to recognize his extradition, SoJ begins taking out high-level brass hats, and the KGB asks British Intelligence to let them have somebody--guess who--able to infiltrate SoJ by substituting for two English-speaking recruits. Gardner lays some promising trails--Bond working for the KGB, Bond partnered by Mossad agent Pete Natkowitz, two interloping French agents (one a natural bedmate), the news that SoJ intends to videotape its own free-lance war-crimes trial, and all the usual seductions, killings, double-crosses, flashbacks, and intimations of The End (this time by hard-liners bombing Washington while the US is busy bombing Baghdad)--but the going keeps getting muddier, as if somebody else had finished the book over a third martini (shaken, not stirred). Bond saves the world, gets the woman and the Order of Lenin, and turns in a less muffled performance than in last year's Brokenclaw, though still below average for Gardner's series. Let's not talk about how far below Fleming's average. Views: 59
Tatyana Tolstaya's powerful voice is one of the best in contemporary Russian literature. She wrote many a commentary on modern-day Russia for the New York Review of Books before moving back to Moscow to complete her first novel, The Slynx. Tolstaya is a descendant of the great Leo Tolstoy but that might be beside the point. The Slynx is a brilliantly imaginative satire set in a hypothetical Moscow two hundred years after an event termed "the Blast." The Blast has forever altered the landscape of Moscow. People now live with mutations, called Consequences. Some have cockscombs growing everywhere, some have three legs and then there are the Degenerators who are humans in doglike bodies. Some "Oldeners" still linger on. Their only Consequence is that they remain unchanged and seemingly live forever. They remember life before the Blast and moan the primitive cultural mores of the society they live in, where only the wheel has been invented thus far and the yoke is just catching on. This feudal landscape is ruled by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, a tyrant who rules with an iron hand. Kuzmich passes off all Russian literature as his own works and issues decrees at the drop of a hat to keep the public ignorant and docile. The primary protagonist of The Slynx is a young scribe, Benedikt. His job is to copy all of Kuzmich's "works" on to bark, for use by the public. Benedikt marries a coworker, Olenka, and discovers the wonder of books through his father-in-law, Kudeyar Kudeyarich. His father-in-law, however, harbors nefarious plans to oust the current regime. Benedikt's love of books soon turns ugly and Kudeyarich channels this force to implement his own evil designs. The Slynx is translated fluidly by Jamey Gambrell. One wonders how she worked in intelligent phrases such as: "You feel sorry for someone. Must be feelosophy." Tolstaya's descriptions of the futuristic backdrop where people eat and trade mice as currency are bizarre yet not hugely so. Sometimes she seems to be so in love with her own creation that the storyline tends to wander. But she does not stray too far and her prose dripping with rich imagery more than makes up for it. Tolstaya's futuristic Russia might not be very different from the one she often complains about. "Why is it that everything keeps mutating, everything?" laments an Oldener, "People, well all right, but the language, concepts, meaning! Huh? Russia! Everything gets twisted up in knots." The perils of a society in which "Freethinking" is a crime and where an indifferent populace can be "evil" are ably brought out by the gifted Tolstaya. "There is no worse enemy than indifference," she warns, "all evil in fact comes from the silent acquiescence of the indifferent." The scary "Slynx," in the novel, is a metaphor for all the evil that is waiting to rear its ugly head on a sleeping people. The Slynx's descriptions of a tyrannical society might be too simplistic to apply to Russia. Its reception in the country has been mixed. The newspaper Vechernaya Moskva commented: "After all that we have read and thought over about Russia during the last fifteen years, this repetition of old school lessons is really confusing. There is a surfeit of caricatures of the intellegentsia, of anti-utopias depicting the degradation and decay of the national consciousness, and postmodernistic variations on the theme of literary-centrism." That having been said, Tolstaya's haunting prose serves as a chilling reminder of the way things could be, especially when government censorship and other controls move silently back in. The "Slynx" is never too far away. History, as they say, does tend to repeat itself. Views: 59
