The lemon table
In a suite of 11 impeccable short stories as intricate and polished as lacquered Chinese boxes, Barnes examines the peculiarities of age
The long and faraway gone
"In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved. Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors' lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt's latest inquiry takes him back to a past he's tried to escape--and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead. Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past--with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she'll stop at nothing to find answers. As fate brings these damaged souls together, their obsessive quests spark sexual currents neither can resist. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free--or ultimately destroy them?"--Publisher.
How to catch a queen
"When Shanti Mohapi weds the king of Njaza, her dream of becoming a queen finally comes true. But it's nothing like she imagined. Shanti and her husband may share an immediate and powerful attraction, but her subjects see her as an outsider, and everything she was taught about being the perfect wife goes disastrously wrong. A king must rule with an iron fist, and newly crowned King Sanyu was born perfectly fitted for the gauntlet, even if he wishes he weren't. He agrees to take a wife as is required of him, though he doesn't expect to actually fall in love. Even more vexing? His beguiling new queen seems to have the answers to his country's problems--except no one will listen to her. By day, they lead separate lives. By night, she wears the crown, and he bows to her demands in matters of politics and passion. When turmoil erupts in their kingdom and their marriage, Shanti goes on the run, and Sanyu must learn whether he has what it takes both to lead his people and to catch his queen."--Provided by publisher.
The innocents
Two orphans forage for survival on an isolated Newfoundland cove during years marked by storms and ravaging illness, before the mystery of their nature tests the limits of their bond.
I sailed with Magellan
A collection of short works by the author of The coast of Chicago is set in the urban areas of Chicago's South Side, where imaginative protagonist Perry Katzek encounters such events as a boy's musical performances on behalf of a drinking uncle, a thug's distraction by multiple ex-girlfriends, and a scheme by two youths to sell stolen flowers to finance a trip to Mexico.
Too bright to hear too loud to see
In a look at mental illness that weaves together three timelines, Greyson Todd leaves his successful Hollywood career and wife and young daughter to travel the world, giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he has been forced to keep hidden for almost twenty years.
Black River : a novel
A former prison guard and talented fiddler returns to his Montana hometown to bury his wife and confront the inmate who, twenty years ago, held him hostage during a prison riot.
Submergence : a novel
"In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report for the Secret Intelligence Service on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with the life that multiplies in the darkness of the lowest strata of water. In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, and to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance. James, a descendant of Thomas More, escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered, to fragments of his life before his incarceration, to books read, to paintings and music that haunt him now. Danny is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the oceans that they both most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat."--Publisher.
A gesture life
Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth living in suburban New York, seems on the surface to be living a quiet and harmonious life, but he remains tormented by his wartime love for a Korean comfort woman.
The tsar of love and techno : stories
A collection of interwoven tales explores themes of family, sacrifice, war, and the redemptive power of art.
Solar bones
"On All Souls Day, the late Marcus Conway returns home. Solar Bones captures in a single relentless sentence the life and death of this rural Irish engineer, and his place in the globally interconnected 21st century. The book takes in local municipal failures and global financial collapse, the quotidian pleasures of family, ancient history and the latest headlines, the living and the dead. A vital, tender, acerbic, warm, and death-haunted work one of Ireland's most important contemporary novelists, Solar Bones builds its own style and language one broken line at a time. The result is visionary accounting of the now"-- Provided by publisher.
The weight of blood : a novel
"The Dane family's roots tangle deep in the Ozark Mountain town of Henbane, but that doesn't keep sixteen-year-old Lucy Dane from being treated like an outsider. Folks still whisper about her mother, a bewitching young stranger who inspired local myths when she vanished years ago. When one of Lucy's few friends, slow-minded Cheri, is found murdered, Lucy feels haunted by the two lost girls--the mother she never knew and the friend she couldn't protect. Everything changes when Lucy stumbles across Cheri's necklace in an abandoned trailer and finds herself drawn into a search for answers. What Lucy discovers makes it impossible to ignore the suspicion cast on her own kin. More alarming, she suspects Cheri's death could be linked to her mother's disappearance, and the connection between the two puts Lucy at risk of losing everything. In a place where the bonds of blood weigh heavy, Lucy must decide where her allegiances lie"-- Provided by publisher.
The sport of kings
"Hellsmouth, a willful thoroughbred filly with the blood of Triple Crown winners flowing through her veins, has the legacy of the Forges riding on her. One of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky, the Forge family is as mythic as the history of the South itself. Descended from one of the first settlers to brave the Gap, Henry Forge, through an act of naked ambition, is attempting to blaze a new path, breeding horses on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavor, although she has desires of her own. Their conflict escalates when Allmon Shaughnessy, a black man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, and the ugliness of the farm's past and the exigencies of appetite become evident. Together, the three stubbornly try to create a new future through sheer will--one that isn't written in their very fabric--while they mold Hellsmouth into a champion. The Sport of Kings has the grace of a parable and the force of an epic. A majestic story of speed and hunger, racism and justice, this novel is an astonishment from start to finish. A vital new voice, C.E. Morgan has crafted an American myth, a contemporary portrait of the scars of the past that run through a family, and of our desperate need to escape our history, to subsume it with pleasure--or to rise above it with glory"-- Provided by publisher.
Christodora : a novel
"The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared's adopted son Mateo grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers"--Amazon.com.
The bird artist
A painter of birds in a remote Newfoundland coastal village confesses that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper.
The shawl
A short story and a novella which, together, tell an exquisitely powerful and moving tale of the Holocaust. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.
The wind is not a river
"Following the death of his younger brother in Europe, journalist John Easley is determined to find meaning in his loss. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Helen, he heads north to investigate the Japanese invasion of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a story censored by the U.S. government. While John is accompanying a crew on a bombing run, his plane is shot down over the island of Attu. He survives only to find himself exposed to a harsh and unforgiving wilderness, known as "the birthplace of winds." There, John must battle the elements, starvation, and his own remorse while evading discovery by the Japanese. Alone at home, Helen struggles with the burden of her husband's disappearance. Caught in extraordinary circumstances, in this new world of the missing, she is forced to reimagine who she is--and what she is capable of doing. Somehow, she must find John and bring him home, a quest that takes her into the farthest reaches of the war, beyond the safety of everything she knows."-- Dust jacket flap.
Stormsong
"After spinning an enthralling world in Witchmark, praised as "thoroughly charming and deftly paced" by the New York Times and as a "can't-miss debut" by Booklist, C. L. Polk continues the story in Stormsong. Magical cabals, otherworldly avengers, and impossible love affairs conspire to create a book that refuses to be put down. Dame Grace Hensley helped her brother Miles undo the atrocity that stained her nation, but now she has to deal with the consequences. With the power out in the dead of winter and an uncontrollable sequence of winter storms on the horizon, Aeland faces disaster. Grace has the vision to guide her parents to safety, but a hostile queen and a ring of rogue mages stand in the way of her plans. There's revolution in the air, and any spark could light the powder. What's worse, upstart photojournalist Avia Jessup draws ever closer to secrets that could topple the nation,and closer to Grace's heart. Can Aeland be saved without bloodshed? Or will Kingston die in flames, and Grace along with it?"-- Provided by publisher.
An unrestored woman
A collection of intense tales of turmoil and tragedy that explores the reverberations of Partition through generations, from a mapmaker's gamble to a grandfather who cannot speak of what he escaped as a young boy.
The memory monster : a novel
"The English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a fierce and harrowing tale of reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust, and how memory and the effort to preserve it can become an all-consuming monster. The narrator of Yishai Sarid's powerful novel is a young, initially reluctant Holocaust scholar working at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. A diligent historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II, and guides tours through the camps for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims' lives, and the process by which enslaved Jews were forced to dispose of the remains. The job becomes a mission, and then an addiction. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the mass murder committed by the Germans. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers--their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill."--Provided by publisher.
The lotus eaters
A novel that follows an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
The town of Babylon : a novel
"When his father falls ill, Andrés, a professor of public health, returns to his suburban hometown to tend to his father's recovery. Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband's infidelity and with little else to do, he decides to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth. Jeremy, his first love, is now married with two children after having been incarcerated and recovering from addiction. Paul, who Andrés has long suspected of having killed a man in a homophobic attack, is now an Evangelical minister and father of five. And Simone, Andrés's best friend, is in a psychiatric institution following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. During this short stay, Andrés confronts these relationships, the death of his brother, and the many sacrifices his parents made to offer him a better life. A novel about the essential nature of community in maintaining one's own health, The Town of Babylon is an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity, a call to reevaluate the ties of societal bonds and the systems in which they are forged"-- Provided by publisher.
Don't skip out on me : a novel
Determined to prove his worth, a half-Paiute, half-Irish ranch hand who was abandoned by his parents leaves his aging guardians to become a champion boxer before matches organized in Mexico and Las Vegas lead to his realization that he cannot change his identity or outrun his destiny.
Battleborn
A debut collection of ten short works reimagines the mythology of the American West and includes stories of a foreigner's arrival at a prostitution ranch, a hermit's attempt to rescue an abused teen, and a woman's role in a friend's degrading Vegas encounter.
Reproduction
"Felicia, a nineteen-year-old student from a Caribbean family, and Edgar, the lazy-minded and impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet by chance when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room. After the death of Felicia's mother and the recovery of Edgar's, Felicia drops out of high school and takes a job as caregiver to Edgar's mother. The odd-couple relationship between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with miscommunications, misundertandings, and reprisals for perceived and real offenses, has some unexpected results. Years later, Felicia's son Armistice--'Army' for short is a teenager fixated on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that are as comic as they are indicative of the immigrant son's fear of falling through the cracks. When Edgar re-enters Felicia's life at a typically (for him) inopportune moment, the book's exhilarating final act is set in motion and the full import of its title is revealed."--Provided by publisher.
The fires of vengeance
"In order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this must-read epic fantasy series by breakout author Evan Winter. Tau and his Queen, desperate to delay the impending attack on the capital by the indigenous people of Xidda, craft a dangerous plan. If Tau succeeds, the Queen will have the time she needs to assemble her forces and launch an all out assault on her own capital city, where her sister is being propped up as the 'true' Queen of the Omehi. If the city can be taken, if Tsiora can reclaim her throne, and if she can reunite her people then the Omehi have a chance to survive the onslaught"-- Provided by publisher.
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