It is Christmas Eve. Sitting on the steps of the village church in front of an enormous bonfire lit in celebration of the season, a father and his son exchange stories. The father speaks of life as an emigrant from Italy, in perpetual limbo between departure and return, between France and his home. The son tells of a life marred by his father's long is absemces, but also of an otherwise idyllic childhood spent in a vivid, enchanting land. Each hides an awful secret concerning the fate of a mysterious man whose affair with the boy's older sister changed their lives. On this night of nights, a s... View More...
"Bighearted, wise, and beautifully written, this sharply observant exploration of idealism gone awry engages at every level." --Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Archangel This entertaining and assured debut novel about a utopian summer camp and its charismatic leader asks smart questions about good intentions gone terribly wrong. Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a... View More...
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST "Transports readers into a world few Americans know" --Washington Post A timely new novel of stunning humanity and tension: a contemporary love story set on the Turkish border with Syria. Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause. An Arab American with a conflicted past, he is now in Turkey, attempting to cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad's regime. But he is robbed before he can make it, and is taken in by Amir, a charismatic Syrian refugee and former revolutionary, and Amir's wife, Daphne, a sophisticated beauty haunted by grief. As it be... View More...
""Adams is that rare writer who sends out every laugh with a sting in its tail. Most novels fade from the memory. This one sticks."--Peter Travers, "Rolling Stone Inside their picture-perfect homes, the residents of this quiet California suburb are not at all what they seem. Lance is a former weatherman, now a buff yogi, stay-athome dad, and manager of his daughter's Girl Scout troop's cookie distribution. Belle is his precocious and quick-witted daughter. Darlene is a classic Type A work-a-holic, she has little time or patience for the needs of her husband and daughter And just down the stree... View More...
Jussi Adler-Olsen s Department Q series, with more than fourteen million copies sold worldwide, continues with the most chilling cold case yet. In 1987, Nete Hermansen plans revenge on those who abused her in her youth, including Curt Wad, a charismatic surgeon who was part of a movement to sterilize wayward girls in 1950s Denmark. More than twenty years later, Detective Carl Morck already has plenty on his mind when he is presented with the case of a brothel owner, a woman named Rita, who went missing in the eighties: New evidence has emerged in the case that destroyed the lives of his two pa... View More...
A novel about holding on, letting go, and learning to love again.Now in paperback, the endearing novel that captured readers' hearts and introduced a fresh new voice in women's fiction--Cecelia Ahern. Holly couldn't live without her husband Gerry, until the day she had to. They were the kind of young couple who could finish each other's sentences. When Gerry succumbs to a terminal illness and dies, 30-year-old Holly is set adrift, unable to pick up the pieces. But with the help of a series of letters her husband left her before he died and a little nudging from an eccentric assortment of famil... View More...
" Ahern] gives us full permission to believe in magic." --Redbook Magazine One of the world's most popular writers of women's fiction--author of the beloved international bestseller, P.S. I Love You, basis for the popular film starring Hilary Swank--Cecelia Ahern now gives us Thanks for the Memories, a heartwarming tale of d j vu and second chances. Reminiscent of The Time Traveler's Wife, Thanks for the Memories is a love story brimming with hope and feeling and enlivened with an enchanting touch of magic. View More...
The first installment in Pamela Aidan's irresistible trilogy, An Assembly Such As This takes us into the world of Jane Austen's Fitzwilliam Darcy. "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me." So begins the timeless romance of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's classic novel is beloved by millions, but little is revealed in the book about the mysterious and handsome hero, Mr. Darcy. And so the question has long remained: Who is Fitzwilliam Darcy? In An Assembly Such as This, Pamela Aidan finally answers that long-standing question. In this ... View More...
Book 2 of the Ftizwilliam Darcy, Gentleman trilogy recounts Darcy's activities during the "silent time" in Jane Austen's original novel. With Bingley's affairs brought to a conclusion, Darcy leaves London for Pemberley and Christmas with his sister and their Matlock relations and to find answers to the mystery of Georgiana's recovery. Later, restless and determined to end his infatuation with Elizabeth Bennet, he accepts an invitation from an old University friend to attend a house party at the family castle with the intent of finding a suitable wife. The Social Diamonds he meets there are mor... View More...
When his proposal of marriage to the lovely Elizabeth Bennet is thoroughly rejected, Fitzwilliam Darcy must come to terms with her evaluation of his character and a future without her. Book 3 of the Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman trilogy, These Three Remain, recounts Darcy's painful journey of self-discovery and his quest to become the man he always hoped he would be, the kind of man whom Elizabeth Bennet would approve. A chance meeting with her during a tour of his estate in Derbyshire offers Darcy a new opportunity, but the acitivities of his nemesis, George Wickham, interfere once more in a w... View More...
This "beautiful novel . . . has echoes of The Great Gatsby": an immigrant father and his son search for belonging--in post-Trump America, and with each other (Dwight Garner, New York Times). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 A Best Book of 2020 * Entertainment Weekly * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly * NPR * The Economist * Shelf Awareness * Library Journal * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Slate Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A deeply personal work abo... View More...
This is the story of Charley, a child of divorce who is always forced to choose between his mother and his father. He grows into a man and starts a family of his own. But one fateful weekend, he leaves his mother to secretly be with his father--and she dies while he is gone. This haunts him for years. It unravels his own young family. It leads him to depression and drunkenness. One night, he decides to take his life. But somewhere between this world and the next, he encounters his mother again, in their hometown, and gets to spend one last day with her--the day he missed and always wished he'd... View More...
This is the story of Charley, a child of divorce who is always forced to choose between his mother and his father. He grows into a man and starts a family of his own. But one fateful weekend, he leaves his mother to secretly be with his father--and she dies while he is gone. This haunts him for years. It unravels his own young family. It leads him to depression and drunkenness. One night, he decides to take his life. But somewhere between this world and the next, he encounters his mother again, in their hometown, and gets to spend one last day with her--the day he missed and always wished he'd... View More...
The First Phone Call from Heaven tells the story of a small town on Lake Michigan that gets worldwide attention when its citizens start receiving phone calls from the afterlife. Is it the greatest miracle ever or a massive hoax? Sully Harding, a grief-stricken single father, is determined to find out. An allegory about the power of belief--and a page-turner that will touch your soul--Albom's masterful storytelling has never been so moving and unexpected.Readers of The Five People You Meet in Heaven will recognize the warmth and emotion so redolent of Albom's writing, and those who haven't yet ... View More...
Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his m... View More...
