For humanity the transformation from savagery into civilization can only be led by heroes and geniuses, and new inventions, like the concept of zero, the first books and the use of metals, come at a heavy price. The tribes on the Peninsula are victims of cannibalism, plunder and genocide, from a marauding tribe of scavengers escaping the ravages of the mainland. To add to the hardship of the tribes on the Peninsula, the climate is changing, the game of the woods are few, and many predict a great... more info>>

Readers everywhere know that nothing soothes the spirit like sinking into a really good book. If you're one of that happy band, you'll quickly recognize the authors of this inspired reading guide as kindred spirits. Here David and John Major have chosen one hundred books that can each be delightfully consumed in one quiet evening. Covering categories from fantasy to fiction, history to humor, mystery to memoir, this addictive volume features books to match all your moods--by both celebrated writ... more info>>

Lynn Blanchett's Steps to Happiness: Step 1: Find a job. (Done! I'm doing PR for hotshot young designer Muriel B.--which I'm totally unqualified for.) Step 2: Find a man. (Check! There's a rich, gorgeous man chasing me ... so what if I find him infinitely less appealing than my charming, possibly gay, French coworker?) Step 3: Find a translator. (Hmm? I do have that French-English dictionary ... but it so doesn't help with the language of love.) Step 4: Find a shower. (I did just fly in from New... more info>>

Sparks fly when Marina, a bright young card counter, meets rakishly handsome Miguel, a Las Vegas casino dealer. But while Marina is reluctantly seduced by Miguel's many charms, she also discovers some disturbing things about his past. Already entangled in this dizzying new romance, Marina will have to use all her brains if she wants to keep her heart intact.

An intriguing, fabulously bizarre debut collection of short stories by prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze, author of Simple Stories. These thirty-three macabre, often comical short pieces revolve around moments of odd bliss–moments seized by characters who have found ways to conquer the bleakness of everyday life in the chaotic world of post-communist Russia. Peopled by Mafia gunmen, desperate young prostitutes, bewildered foreign businessmen, and even a trio of hungry devils, the storie... more info>>

Tressa Connell dreams of finding the right fellow, of putting her graphics art degree to work, and of traveling to Venice. The reality is that she's stuck in a dead-end job selling lingerie to rail-thin women who prowl the high-end Manhattan boutique where she works. Hounded by a helmet-haired boss, befriended by a troubled Latina makeup artist, and wooed by a Jewish cop, Tressa also has a giant grandfather clock strapped to her back, a bushel of eggs in her arms, and her mother cracking a Pampe... more info>>

Which loose-lipped gal about town has been caught canoodling with a randy restaurateur? Sources say the new "legs" of the Examiner's gossip column has been helping him bury his long-simmering scandal even though it's been eating away at her conscience. Which grizzly tabloid guy better watch his way with the ladies? We hear he got more than a hangover from a boozy night out with a mattress (model/actress) that may cost him his burgeoning relationship with a precocious Park Avenue princess. Which ... more info>>

50 Rooms is a collection of short stories based around a cast of characters who live in and around an abandoned hotel just off Hollywood Boulevard--two homeless teenage punk rockers who roam the streets of Los Angeles, scamming and stealing just to survive another night in a brutal and unforgiving city; a man who works in a slaughterhouse desperately fighting to keep his sanity and find some kind of meaning in his life; an emotionally abused small person who reaches his breaking point in a conve... more info>>

I slipped off my clothes and dove into the pool. We are 96 percent liquid. There is nothing more sensuous than a good splash against naked skin: the initial rush of cold, the smooth acquiescence of inner fluid to the outer mantle of wet.Thirty-two-year-old Audrey Hastings swims a mile each day in her backyard pool: sixty-six laps. These meticulously counted crossings are the balm for her frustrations as a new mother, and her hedge against the insecurity she feels upon discovering her first gray ... more info>>

Among those within the self-contained world of the Willow Glen nursing home are two extraordinary people. One is there to give care, the other to receive it. Yet together they form a band of love and trust that transcends their expectations and changes their lives. Violence shatters Willow Glen as a murderer roams the halls of the home, and the residents and staff must confront a truly terrifying evil and face their innermost fears, suspicions & darkest secrets...

Dramatic, moving, and exquisitely written, A Better View of Paradise explores the tender bond between fathers and daughters, ponders the delicate nature of healing, and celebrates the redemptive power of forgiveness and love. Thirty-six-year-old Stevie Pollack has come into her own as a celebrated landscape architect. Her designs, famed for their evocative natural beauty, reflect her upbringing amid the splendor of Hawai'i. But when critics blast her latest efforts and her boyfriend abruptly end... more info>>

From the internationally acclaimed author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable chords of childhood memory. Every summer Isak Lovenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarso. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none compares to ... more info>>

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."--The New YorkerA great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to b... more info>>

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks. What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett's hearth and home. Nicholson Baker's extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beau... more info>>

"There's a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings." Sophie Fitzosborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray with her eccentric and impoverished royal family. When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in from the mainland reveals a world on the brink of war. The politics of Europe seem far away from their remote island-... more info>>

Weaving together the strong threads of family and friends in a pattern of grace, forgiveness, and kindness, A Can of Peas invites readers into a place where every day brings a new story and neighbors are more than just people who live down the road. Sometimes funny and often poignant, these vignettes will draw both men and women into the reassuring rhythms of life as it ought to be--and as it still is in the heart of America. After the death of his grandfather, Peter Morgan and his new bride, Ma... more info>>

A first novel of the first order--provocative, exuberant, wickedly clever--that re-imagines the conspiracies and coincidences leading to the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan's dictator General Zia ul-Haq. At the center is Ali Shigri: Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of Fury Squadron. His father, one of Zia's colonels, committed suicide under suspicious circumstances. Ali is determined to understand what or who pushed his father to such desperation--and to aveng... more info>>

Brooding, self-loathing Tom Cartwright is a modestly successful ghostwriter whose ability to spell correctly and meet his deadlines has landed him the job of writing the autobiography of the wildly popular soap-opera star Georgina Nye. His imbibing, chain-smoking agent is swooning, and his offbeat, sweetly supportive live-in girlfriend of five years, Sara, is ecstatic--new carpets! Yet even as he feverishly pens (read: mostly makes up) Georgina's "straight-from-the-heart" life story (he's thinki... more info>>

On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, a young neo-Nazi named Vincent Nolan walks into the Manhattan office of World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights foundation headed by a charismatic Holocaust survivor, Meyer Maslow. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change in his life. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger who claims to have read Maslow's books, who has Waffen-SS tattoos under his shirtsleeves, and who says that his mission is to save guys like him from... more info>>

Whatever the season, a new novel by bestselling author Anne Perry is always a wonderful gift, but her holiday novels are particularly special treats, and A Christmas Beginning is a deeply felt story of passion and redemption. Superintendent Runcorn of Scotland Yard is spending Christmas on the wild and beautiful island of Anglesey off the north coast of Wales. On one of his solitary strolls, the lonely bachelor stumbles upon a lifeless body in the village churchyard. The unfortunate victim is qu... more info>>

Anne Perry has dazzled readers for decades with her gripping Victorian novels and has won new fans with her acclaimed World War I series. Perry's thrilling Christmas novels, recent additions to her unique repertoire, are set in the most joyous season of the year. In A Christmas Guest, Mariah Ellison, better known as the vinegar-tongued Grandmama from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, makes a stunning appearance in a bracing story full of devious delight ... and certain death. For Grandmama E... more info>>

Anne Perry's Victorian Christmas novels have attracted as many faithful readers as her two New York Times bestselling series featuring investigators Thomas Pitt and William Monk. A Christmas Promise is the seventh in Perry's holiday series, and it will surely bring joy to this special season. Three days before Christmas, in the freezing slums of London's East End, thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps encounters Minnie Maude Mudway, who is only eight, alone, and determined to find her friend Charlie. ... more info>>

Just in time for the holidays, Anne Perry gives her fans a marvelous gift: a new yuletide yarn full of light celebration and dark mischief. Dominic Corde is thrilled to "fill the robe" as substitute vicar in the village of Cottisham, while the Reverend Wynter is away on a three-week Christmas holiday. Glad to escape his dreary London flat and a less-than-satisfying job as church curate, Dominic and his beloved wife, Clarice, set off for what they hope will be a lovely winter getaway. Upon arriva... more info>>

In the Chicago Tribune, Alan Cheuse described Donald Pfarrer's novel The Fearless Man as "the gold standard for any other fiction to come out about the [Vietnam] war." Now, in this new novel, Pfarrer presents another kind of war, the one in America's streets, with the same kind of excitement, style, and power. Steven McCord, a lieutenant of police in a fairly large midwestern city, has been coarsened by twenty years' exposure to violence and cruelty. At forty-two, he has reached a crossroads in ... more info>>

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers heralds the American debut of a remarkably gifted young writer. Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can't pronounce her name, but she's no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well... more info>>