Popular books

Susana Moreira-Marques

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to Trás-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own meditations. Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques’ book speaks about death in a fresh way.<

Rick Moody

Hotels of North America

<p>Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe-they tell his life story.</p><p>The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life-or at least the life he has carefully constructed-which writer Rick Moody must make sense of.</p><p>An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's mastery ability to push the bounds of the novel.</p><

George R-R Martin

L'agonie de la lumière

Quand Dirk T’Larien reçoit le joyau-qui-murmure, des souvenirs douloureux resurgissent. Il se demande pourquoi son amour perdu, la belle Gwen, fait ainsi appel à lui si longtemps après leur rupture. Espérant renouer avec elle, il embarque sur le premier vaisseau à destination de Worlorn pour arracher Gwen aux violents chevaliers Kavalars.<

Vonda Mcintyre

Le serpent du rêve

<p>Serpent, une guérisseuse, a traversé le désert popur soigner un enfant malade du clan d’Arevin. Dans son monde, les serpents sont mieux que le symbole de la médecine. Ce sont ses principaux instruments contre la maladie et la souffrance. Leurs venins modifiés peuvent guérir ou prémunir.</p><p>Serpent dispose dans sa trousse d’un cobra, Brume, d’un crotale, Sable et d’un serpent du rêve, Sève, d’un espèce rare et singulière qui vient d’un autre monde et qui peut dispenser le sommeil ou adoucir une fin inéluctable. Lorsque Sève est tué, Serpent se sent comme mutilée. Et parce qu’elle entrevoit la possibilité d’obtenir un autre serpent du rêve, elle entreprend un long et dangereux voyage à travers un univers inconnu : la Terre de l’avenir.</p><p>Prix Nebula 1978, prix Hugo et Locus 1979.</p><

Zachary Mason

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

<p>Zachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel, , reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.</p><

Ronit Matalon

The Sound of Our Steps

In the beginning there was Lucette, who is the mother to three children — Sammy, a gentle giant, almost blind, but a genius with locks; Corinne, a flighty beauty who cannot keep a job; and the child, an afterthought, who strives to make sense of her fractured Egyptian — Jewish immigrant family. Lucette's children would like a kinder, warmer home, but what they have is a government-issued concrete box, out in the thorns and sand on the outskirts of Tel Aviv; and their mother, hard-worn and hardscrabble, who cleans homes by night and makes school lunches by day. Lucette quarrels with everybody, speaks only Arabic and French, is scared only of snakes, and is as likely to lock her children out as to take in a stray dog. The child recounts her years in Lucette's house, where Israel's wars do not intrude and hold no interest. She puzzles at the mysteries of her home, why her father, a bitter revolutionary, makes only rare appearances. And why her mother rebuffs the kind rabbi whose home she cleans in his desire to adopt her. Always watching, the child comes to fill the holes with conjecture and story. In a masterful accumulation of short, dense scenes, by turns sensual, violent, and darkly humorous, The Sound of Our Steps questions the virtue of a family bound only by necessity, and suggests that displacement may not lead to a better life, but perhaps to art.<

Elizabeth Mccracken

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

<p>"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.</p><p>This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't-but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.</p><

Elizabeth Mccracken

The Giant's House: A Romance

The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt — the “over-tall” eleven-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town — walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who’s ever really understood her, and as he grows — six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight — so does her heart and their most singular romance.<

Luke Mccallin

The Man from Berlin

Gregor Reinhardt

Julian May

Le pays multicolore

La saga du Pliocène

Il appuya sur la touche. Un bref instant de douleur, un éblouissement, les limbes gris. Ils ne respiraient plus, leur cœur ne battait plus. Et puis, soudain, il fit chaud et ils ouvrirent les yeux dans un éblouissement de vert et de bleu. Des mains les agrippèrent… En 2034, en France, non loin de Lyon, un hom­me a découvert un passage vers le lointain passé de la Terre : la Porte du Temps. Une communication à sens unique vers le Pliocène, cet âge luxuriant d’il y a six millions d’années, à la fin de l’ère ter­tiaire. Des pionniers, des renégats, des révoltés, des rêveurs et des aventuriers partent pour un voyage sans retour vers cet Exil paradisiaque, rejetant les étoiles pour le splendide et redoutable matin du monde. Pour une Terre plus étrangère que les autres planètes.<

Patricia A Mckillip

Harfner im Wind

Erdzauber

<p>Die letzte und endgültige Auseinandersetzung stand bevor. Im Reich des Erhabenen war die Zeit des Friedens zu Ende — durch Morgons Kampf mit dem teuflischen Zauberer Ohm, durch die Machenschaften der rätselhaften Gestaltwandler.</p><p>Morgon wußte, daß es Verbindungslinien zwischen all diesen einzelene Vorfällen geben mußte — nur konnte er die Linien nicht ziehen. Wer wer Ohm? Welche Rolle spielte Thod, jener geheimnissvolle Harfner, der ihn einst an Ohm verraten hatte?</p><p>Und was wollten die Gestaltwandler aus dem Meer?</p><p>Als Fürst von Hed war Morgon ein friedliebender Mensch. Aber für ihn wie für das Reich des Erhabenen gab es nirgendwo mehr Frieden — und erst der letzte verzweifelte Augeblick der Kampfes brachte Kunde vom anbreichen des neuen Zeitalters.</p><

Julian May

Les conquérants du Pliocène

La saga du Pliocène

<p>Les cerveaux humains furent submergés par des images fulgurantes et douloureuses, des visions de menace, de torture et de massacre. Les exotiques scintillants dans leur harnachement de couleur semblaient affluer de tous les horizons, invulnérables, splendides, féroces…</p><p>Par la Porte du Temps, des milliers d’humains ont gagné le Pliocène, le Pays Multicolore d’il y a six millions d’années. Partis pour retrouver l’aven­ture et la liberté sur une Terre méconnaissable et sauvage, ils se retrouvent sous la domination des Tanu, des exotiques venus d’une autre galaxie qui ont colonisé l’Europe et fait des exilés du Temps des esclaves soumis à leur joug psychique.</p><p>Pour ceux qui ont rêvé d’être les conquérants du Pliocène, le combat commence…</p><

Joseph Mcelroy

Plus

<p>A brain orbiting the earth in a capsule, its human body gone, its onetime body. A novel written from the point of view of the brain told in the 3rd person close up — too close for comfort. A brain that has been surgically divorced and lifted out of that body that had been terminally ill, we will learn — an engineer who had been suffering from radiation and had agreed to be used in a solar experiment — though he is perhaps of hardly more than passing concern in a tale whose growing is here and now under light which is alive in a capsule with green growing things. A solar energy experiment that changes unexpectedly.</p><p>A brain hooked up to instruments and nutrients in a space capsule, monitoring its physiological self, transmitting information along the Concentration Loop to scientists on Earth, whom it knows only by sound as the Good Voice, the Acrid Voice. Groping for words, memory, links, a grasp of what is happening to it, the brain, this stunned thing, begins to go beyond its assigned functions. It becomes more than IMP, a NASA acronym for Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. It is Imp Plus. Awakening, always awake, growing, we learn, not only as it relearns words and itself, fragments of memories from its terrestrial life and other data rich and fascinating, but growing a strange new body. When it develops an autonomous intellect and effective life and cuts itself off from ground control in the unraveling drama of this growth, what can be its fate in collaboration with the sun and still more than the sun?</p><

Peter May

Coffin Road

<p>A man is washed up on a deserted beach on the Hebridean Isle of Harris, barely alive and borderline hypothermic. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his identity is a map tracing a track called the Coffin Road. He does not know where it will lead him, but filled with dread, fear and uncertainty he knows he must follow it.</p><p>A detective crosses rough Atlantic seas to a remote rock twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. With a sense of foreboding he steps ashore where three lighthouse keepers disappeared more than a century before — a mystery that remains unsolved. But now there is a new mystery — a man found bludgeoned to death on that same rock, and DS George Gunn must find out who did it and why.</p><p>A teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her father's death. Two years after the discovery of the pioneering scientist's suicide note, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that he would wilfully abandon her. And the more she discovers about the nature of his research, the more she suspects that others were behind his disappearance.</p><

Henning Mankell

Faceless Killers

Kurt Wallander

Early one morning, a small-town farmer discovers that his neighbors have been victims of a brutal attack during the night. An old man has been bludgeoned to death, and his tortured wife lies dying before the farmer’s eyes. The only clue is the single word she utters before she dies: “foreign.” In charge of the investigation is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a local cop whose personal life is in a shambles. His family is falling apart, he’s gaining weight, and he’s drinking too much, but he is tenacious and levelheaded in his sleuthing. he and his colleagues must contend with a wave of violent xenophobia as they search for the killers. Still, things get complicated when he has to deal with an eruption of violent antiforeigner sentiment, as well as a tough-minded — and very attractive — female district attorney, as he searches for the killers.<

Henning Mankell

The Troubled Man

Kurt Wallander

On a winter day in 2008, Håkan von Enke, a retired high-ranking naval officer, vanishes during his daily walk in a forest near Stockholm. The investigation into his disappearance falls under the jurisdiction of the Stockholm police. It has nothing to do with Wallander — officially. But von Enke is his daughter’s future father-in-law. And so, with his inimitable disregard for normal procedure, Wallander is soon interfering in matters that are not his responsibility, making promises he won’t keep, telling lies when it suits him — and getting results. But the results hint at elaborate Cold War espionage activities that seem inextricably confounding, even to Wallander, who, in any case, is troubled in more personal ways as well. Negligent of his health, he’s become convinced that, having turned sixty, he is on the threshold of senility. Desperate to live up to the hope that a new granddaughter represents, he is continually haunted by his past. And looking toward the future with profound uncertainty, he will have no choice but to come face-to-face with his most intractable adversary: himself.<

Ian Mcdonald

Cyberabad

<p>Wir schreiben das Jahr 2047: Indien feiert hundert Jahre Unabhängigkeit. Doch in dem Land, das mit seinen pulsierenden Großstädten, hypermodernen Computern und Künstlichen Intelligenzen in der Moderne angekommen ist, werden auch zerstörerische Tendenzen sichtbar. Zehn Menschen treiben durch diesen Mahlstrom der Technologien und Kulturen, unter ihnen ein Gangster, ein Polizist, ein Wissenschaftler, ein Politiker, ein Ausgestoßener und ein Stand-up-Comedian. Sie alle werden in den Wochen um das Jahrhundertereignis in den Strudel der Ereignisse gezogen, die das Schicksal Indiens für immer verändern werden: Ein Krieg bricht aus, Künstliche Intelligenzen verselbstständigen sich — und eine Botschaft aus dem All wird entschlüsselt. Und während sich zwischen Slums und Großrechnern die digitale Zukunft der Menschheit entfaltet, fließt der große Ganges weiter durch Cyberabad …</p><p>»Es gibt nur wenige Autoren, deren Romane unsere Sicht auf die Welt verändern — mit zählt Ian McDonald dazu.«</p><

Ian Mcdonald

Le fleuve des dieux

<p>Tous les Hindous vous le diront, pour se débarasser de ses péchés, il suffit de se laver dans les eaux du Gangâ, dans la cité de Vârânacî.</p><p>Et, en cette année 2047, les péchés ce n’est pas ce qui manque : un corps aux ovaires prélevés glisse doucement sur les eaux du fleuve ; des intelligences artificielles se rebellent et causent de tels dégâts qu’une unité de police a été spécialement créée pour les excommunier.</p><p>Gangâ, le fleuve des dieux, dont les eaux n’ont jamais été aussi basses, se rue vers un gouffre conceptuel, technologique, évolutionnaire - ou peut-être tout cela à la fois.</p><p>A travers le kaléidoscope de neuf destins interconnectés, Ian McDonald dresse le portrait d’une Inde future, mais aussi d’une Terre future, où tout n’est que vertige. Souvent considéré outre-Atlantique et outre-Manche comme le roman de science-fiction le plus important des quinze dernières années, Le Fleuve des dieux a reçu le British Science Fiction Award et a été finaliste du prestigieux prix Hugo.</p><

Stephen Mccauley

Alternatives to Sex

<p>Boston real estate agent William Collins knows that his habits are slipping out of control. Due to obsessive-compulsive daily cleaning binges and a penchant for nightly online cruising for hookups, he finds his sales figures slipping despite a booming market. There’s also his ongoing struggle to collect the rent from his passive-aggressive tenant and his worries about his best friend, Edward, whom he’s certainly not in love with. Just as he decides to do something about his life, he meets Charlotte and Samuel, wealthy suburbanites looking for the perfect city apartment. “Happy couple,” he writes in his notes. “Maybe I can learn something from them.” What he ultimately discovers challenges his own assumptions about real estate, love, and desire; and what they learn from him might unravel a budding friendship, not to mention a very promising sale.</p><p>Full of crackling dialogue delivered by a stellar ensemble of players, Alternatives to Sex is a smart, hilarious chronicle of life in post-traumatic, morally ambiguous America—where the desire to do good is constantly being tripped up by the need to feel good. Right now.</p><

Adam Mars-Jones

Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father

<p>When his widowed father — once a high court judge and always a formidable figure — drifted into vagueness if not dementia, the writer Adam Mars-Jones took responsibility for his care. Intimately trapped in the London flat where the family had always lived, the two men entered an oblique new stage in their relationship.</p><p>In the aftermath of an unlooked-for intimacy, Mars-Jones has written a book devoted to particular emotions and events. is a highly entertaining book about (among other things) families, the legal profession, and the vexed question of Welsh identity. It is necessarily also a book about the writer himself — and the implausible, long-delayed moment, some years before, when he told his sexually conservative father about his own orientation, taking the homophobic bull by the horns. The supporting cast includes Ian Fleming, the Moors Murderers, Jacqueline Bisset and Gilbert O'Sullivan, the singer-songwriter whose trademark look kept long shorts from their rightful place on the fashion pages for so many years.</p><

Pasha Malla

People Park

<p>It's the Silver Jubilee of People Park, an urban experiment conceived by a radical mayor and zealously policed by the testosterone-powered New Fraternal League of Men. To celebrate, the insular island city has engaged the illustrationist Raven, who promises to deliver the most astonishing spectacle its residents have ever seen. As the entire island comes together for the event, we meet an unforgettable cross-section of its inhabitants, from activists to nihilists, art stars to athletes, families to inveterate loners. Soon, however, what has promised to be a triumph of civic harmony begins to reveal its shadow side. And when Raven's illustration exceeds even the most extreme of expectations, the island is plunged into a series of unnatural disasters that force people to confront what they are really made of.</p><p>People Park is a tour de force of eerily prescient, grotesque, and hilarious observation and a narrative of gripping, unrelenting suspense. Malla writes as if the twin demons of Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor were resting on his shoulders. You've never read anything quite like People Park.</p><

Pasha Malla

The Withdrawal Method

<p>Pasha Malla knows joy in all of its weird, unsettling, and wondrous forms. In their humor, warmth, and rigorous honesty, his stories clearly capture something odd and beautiful: the unmistakable feeling of empathy. From young couples fighting through the emotional trauma of the modern world to children navigating wayward, forbidden paths of a fantasized adulthood, Malla presents characters deeply entrenched in the familiar and hearts that slowly open to reveal the pain and unexpected love that life accumulates.</p><p>Malla’s is an assured new voice; his smooth, mature style is punctuated by bursts of wild humor and enlivened by endlessly inventive storytelling. As individual narratives, these stories speak to each side of the protean human psyche, but when taken together they address with full understanding the fragility of our lives.</p><

Meghan Mccain

Dirty Sexy Politics

<p>Meghan McCain came to prominence as the straight-talking, progressive daughter of the 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. And her profile has only risen since the election ended in favor of the other guy.</p><p>What makes Meghan so appealing? As a new role model for young, creative, and vocal members of the GOP, she's unafraid to mix it up and speak her mind. In she takes a hard look at the future of her party. She doesn't shy away from serious issues and her raucous humor and down-to-earth style keep her positions accessible.</p><p>In this witty, candid, and boisterous book, Meghan takes us deep behind the scenes of the campaign trail. She steals campaign signs in New Hampshire, tastes the nightlife in Nashville, and has a strange encounter with Laura and Jenna Bush at the White House. Along the way, she falls in love with America--while seeing how far the Republican Party has veered from its core values of freedom, honesty, and individuality. In , Meghan McCain gives us a true insider's account of life on a campaign trail.</p><p>Meghan McCain is the creator of the Web site and has written for . She is currently a blogger for .</p><

John Mccain

Faith of My Fathers

<p>John McCain is one of the most admired leaders in the United States government, but his deeply felt memoir of family and war is not a political one and ends before his election to Congress. With candor and ennobling power, McCain tells a story that, in the words of Newsweek, “makes the other presidential candidates look like pygmies.”</p><p>John McCain learned about life and honor from his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. This is a memoir about their lives, their heroism, and the ways that sons are shaped and enriched by their fathers.</p><p>John McCain’s grandfather was a gaunt, hawk-faced man known as Slew by his fellow officers and, affectionately, as Popeye by the sailors who served under him. McCain Sr. played the horses, drank bourbon and water, and rolled his own cigarettes with one hand. More significant, he was one of the navy’s greatest commanders, and led the strongest aircraft carrier force of the Third Fleet in key battles during World War II.</p><p>John McCain’s father followed a similar path, equally distinguished by heroic service in the navy, as a submarine commander during World War II. McCain Jr. was a slightly built man, but like his father, he earned the respect and affection of his men. He, too, rose to the rank of four-star admiral, making the McCains the first family in American history to achieve that distinction. McCain Jr.’s final assignment was as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.</p><p>It was in the Vietnam War that John McCain III faced the most difficult challenge of his life. A naval aviator, he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and seriously injured. When Vietnamese military officers realized he was the son of a top commander, they offered McCain early release in an effort to embarrass the United States. Acting from a sense of honor taught him by his father and the U.S. Naval Academy, McCain refused the offer. He was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and imprisoned for five and a half years.</p><

Paul Murray

An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Acclaimed as one of the funniest and most assured Irish novels of the last decade, An Evening of Long Goodbyes is the story of Dubliner Charles Hythloday and the heroic squandering of the family inheritance. Featuring drinking, greyhound racing, vanishing furniture, more drinking, old movies, assorted Dublin lowlife, eviction and the perils of community theatre, Paul Murray's debut novel is a tour de force of comedic writing wrapped in an honest-to-goodness tale of a man — and a family — living in denial…<

Omar Musa

Here Come the Dogs

<p>In small-town suburban Australia, three young men from three different ethnic backgrounds — one Samoan, one Macedonian, one not sure — are ready to make their mark. Solomon is all charisma, authority, and charm, a failed basketball player down for the moment but surely not out. His half-brother, Jimmy, bounces along in his wake, underestimated, waiting for his chance to announce himself. Aleks, their childhood friend, loves his mates, his family, and his homeland and would do anything for them. The question is, does he know where to draw the line?</p><p>Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks are way out on the fringe of Australia, looking for a way in. Hip hop, basketball, and graffiti give them a voice. Booze, women, and violence pass the time while they wait for their chance. Under the oppressive summer sun, their town has turned tinder-dry. All it’ll take is a spark.</p><p>As the surrounding hills roar with flames, the change storms in. But it’s not what they were waiting for. It never is.</p><

Yann Martel

The High Mountains of Portugal

<p>In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that — if he can find it — would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.</p><p>Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest.</p><p>Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.</p><

Stuart B Macbride

In the Cold Dark Ground

Logan McRae

<p>Sergeant Logan McRae is in trouble...</p><p>His missing-persons investigation has just turned up a body in the woods — naked, hands tied behind its back, and a bin bag duct-taped over its head. The Major Investigation Team charges up from Aberdeen, under the beady eye of Logan’s ex-boss Detective Chief Inspector Steel. And, as usual, she wants him to do her job for her.</p><p>But it’s not going to be easy: a new Superintendent is on her way up from the Serious Organised Crime Task Force, hell-bent on making Logan’s life miserable; Professional Standards are gunning for Steel; and Wee Hamish Mowat, head of Aberdeen’s criminal underbelly, is dying — leaving rival gangs from all over the UK eying his territory.</p><p>There’s a war brewing and Logan’s trapped right in the middle, whether he likes it or not.</p><

Peter May

Runaway

<p>FIVE DREAMS OF FAME</p><p>Glasgow, 1965. Jack Mackay dares not imagine a life of predictability and routine. The headstrong seventeen-year-old has one thing on his mind — London — and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow band mates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.</p><p>FIVE DECADES OF FEAR</p><p>Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay dares not look back on a life of failure and mediocrity. The heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year old is still haunted by the cruel fate that befell him and his friends some fifty years before, and how he did and did not act when it mattered most — a memory he has run from all his adult life.</p><p>London, 2015. A man lies dead in a bedsit. His killer looks on, remorseless. What started with five teenagers five decades before will now be finished.</p><

Thomas Mallon

Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

<p>Adding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times.</p><p>Finale captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.</p><p>Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal-arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel’s memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin), and even Bette Davis, with whom the president had long ago appeared onscreen. Several figures — including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan (on the verge of a terrible realization) — become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and a political revolution.</p><p>At the center of it all — but forever out of reach — is Ronald Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.</p><p>Finale is the book that Thomas Mallon’s work has been building toward for years. It is the most entertaining and panoramic novel about American politics since Advise and Consent, more than a half century ago.</p><

Elizabeth Mckenzie

The Portable Veblen

<p>Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul — the product of good hippies who were bad parents — finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma — an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.</p><p>As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone — or something — else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices,  is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.</p><

Bharati Mukherjee

The Middleman and Other Stories

Bharati Mukherjee's work illuminates a new world of people in migration that has transformed the meaning of "America." Now in a Grove paperback edition, The Middleman and Other Stories is a dazzling display of the vision of this important modern writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into the center of a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, yet glowing with the energy and exuberance of a society remaking itself.<

Ken Mcclure

Tangled Web

<p>Used to the sleepy tranquillity of village life in rural Wales, the residents of Felinbach are shocked by the brutal killing of a local baby, Anne-Marie Palmer. None more so than GP Tom Gordon, the only friend left to John Palmer who, faced with irrevocable evidence, stands accused of his daughter’s murder.</p><p>Just days later Tom is co-opted to investigate the disappearance of the body of a three-month-old cot-death victim from Caernarfon General’s Pathology Department. But the hospital is anxious to keep publicity firmly on their upcoming symposium on in vitro fertilisation, headed by world-renowned specialist Professor Carwyn Thomas, so Tom’s investigations seem thwarted at every turn. That is, until he makes the chilling discovery that Professor Thomas has more than just a passing interest in the murder of little Anne-Marie Palmer... and seems prepared to go to any lengths to stop Tom finding out why.</p><p>Suddenly a disturbing link between the murder of the Palmer baby, the missing body of a child and the IVF clinic at Caernarfon General begins to emerge. And with John Palmer about to be tried for a murder Tom is sure he didn’t commit, things are starting to look desperate — and dangerous — for all of them.</p><

Maria Maximova

Unknown

Kseniya Melnik

Snow in May: Stories

<p>Kseniya Melnik's introduces a cast of characters bound by their relationship to the port town of Magadan in Russia's Far East, a former gateway for prisoners assigned to Stalin’s forced-labor camps. Comprised of a surprising mix of newly minted professionals, ex-prisoners, intellectuals, musicians, and faithful Party workers, the community is vibrant and resilient and life in Magadan thrives even under the cover of near-perpetual snow. By blending history and fable, each of Melnik's stories transports us somewhere completely new: a married Magadan woman considers a proposition from an Italian footballer in '70s Moscow; an ailing young girl visits a witch doctor’s house where nothing is as it seems; a middle-aged dance teacher is entranced by a new student’s raw talent; a former Soviet boss tells his granddaughter the story of a thorny friendship; and a woman in 1958 jumps into a marriage with an army officer far too soon.</p><p>Weaving in and out of the last half of the twentieth century, is an inventive, gorgeously rendered, and touching portrait of lives lived on the periphery where, despite their isolation — and perhaps because of it — the most seemingly insignificant moments can be beautiful, haunting, and effervescent.</p><

Mia Molvray

Gender Gap

In principle, maximizing freedom of choice sounds like the highest of ideals. In practice, if too many make the choice…<

China Mieville

This Census-Taker

For readers of George Saunders, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, is the poignant and uncanny new novella from award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville. After witnessing a profoundly traumatic event, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged parent. When a stranger knocks on his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation are over — but by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? Is he the boy’s friend? His enemy? Or something altogether other?<

Alastair Mayer

Light Conversation

David Malouf

Ransom

<p>A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature — Achilles’s slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s —Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade from David Malouf, arguably Australia’s greatest living writer. A novel of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, tells the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and Priam, king of Troy, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. Each man’s grief demands a confrontation with the other’s if it is to be resolved: a resolution more compelling to both than the demands of war. And when the aged father and the murderer of his son meet, “the past and present blend, enemies exchange places, hatred turns to understanding, youth pities age mourning youth.”</p><

David Malouf

Fly Away Peter

For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men — sanctuary owner and employee — are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.<

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