Last Lovers

Last Lovers

William Wharton

Fiction

This love story, by the author of Birdy and Dad, is set in Paris in 1975. Jack, 49, and American, has walked out on his fast-lane corporate career and troubled marriage to return to his first love, painting. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris, struggling to express his long-suppressed feelings through his art. While painting in the park (and blocking the sidewalk), an elderly blind woman walks into him, knocking him off his feet and getting herself smeared with paint. Mirabelle, 71, is small, elegant, and radiant. They fall slowly, carefully, and improbably in love, and into a tender physically passionate affair. While Mirabelle's tremendous sense of life inspires Jack to paint with new vision and freedom, he shares with her the mysteries of passion, and frees her from the traumatic event that blinded her in childhood.
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And the Sea Will Tell

And the Sea Will Tell

Vincent Bugliosi

Nonfiction / Mystery & Thrillers / Crime

Alone with her new husband on a tiny Pacific atoll, a young woman, combing the beach, finds an odd aluminum container washed up out of the lagoon, and beside it on the sand something glitters --a gold tooth in a scorched human skull. The investigation that follows uncovers an extraordinarily complex and puzzling true-crime story. Only Vincent Bugliosi, who recounted his successful prosecution of mass murderer Charles Manson in the bestseller Helter Skelter, was able to draw together the hundreds of conflicting details of the mystery and reconstruct what really happened when four people found hell in a tropical paradise. And the Sea Will Tell reconstructs the events and subsequent trial of a riveting true murder mystery, and probes into the dark heart of a serpentine scenario of death.
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Flying Hero Class

Flying Hero Class

Thomas Keneally

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

Hijackers, representing a Palestinian faction, take over an airliner flying between New York and Frankfurt. But nothing is straightforward. The author also wrote Schindler's Ark, The Playmaker and Towards Asmara. This book was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
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Shiloh

Shiloh

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Children's Books / Young Adult

There's nothing eleven-year-old Marty Preston enjoys more than spending time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia. But this time is different. This time Marty sees a young beagle on the road past the old Shiloh school-house. Marty feels sure the dog is being abused by his owner. When the dog runs away to Marty's house, his parents say he must bring him back. But it hurts Marty to return the runaway dog to his cruel master. That's when Marty secretly decides he'll do anything to save the dog he names Shiloh.
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Object Lessons

Object Lessons

Anna Quindlen

Literature & Fiction / Memoir

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "Elaborate and playful...Honest and deeply felt....Here is the Quindlen wit, the sharp eye for the details of class and manners, [and] the ardent reading of domestic lives." -THE NEW YORK TIMES It is the 1960s, in suburban New York City. Maggie and her family, are in the thrall of her powerful grandfather Jack Scanlan. In the summer of her twelfth year, Maggie is despertately trying to master the object lessons her grandfather fills her head with. But there is too much going on to concentrate. Everything at home is in upheaval, her grandfather is changing, and Maggie is unsure if what she wants is worth having.... From the Trade Paperback edition.
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The Ugly Little Boy

The Ugly Little Boy

Isaac Asimov

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Mystery & Thrillers / Science

The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg Asimov wrote the short story "The Ugly Little Boy" in 1958. But in the novel of the same name, also known as Child of Time, there is much more to the story of the little Neanderthal boy plucked out of time and transferred to the 21st century. Now, Robert Silverberg--in this second collaboration with Asimov--has made this sf classic into an engrossing novel-length tale.
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Beyond the Gate of Worlds

Beyond the Gate of Worlds

Robert Silverberg

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Here are three short novels from three masters of science fiction--all set in the universe of one of Silverberg's most successful novels, Gate of Worlds. Imagine an alternate Earth where the Black Plague killed not 30 percent of Europe's population, but 80 percent, leaving it prey to the incursions of the Moslems; and where the New World was spared the ravages of the Europeans.
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The Novel

The Novel

James A. Michener

Historical Fiction / History / Biographies & Memoirs

In this riveting, ambitious novel from James A. Michener, the renowned chronicler of epic history turns his extraordinary imagination to a world he knew better than anyone: the world of books. Lukas Yoder, a novelist who has enjoyed a long, successful career, has finished what he believes to be his final work. Then a tragedy strikes in his community, and he becomes obsessed with writing about it. Meanwhile, Yoder’s editor fights to preserve her integrity—and her author—as her firm becomes the target of a corporate takeover; a local critic who teaches literature struggles with his ambitions and with his feelings about Yoder’s success; and a devoted reader holds the key to solving the mystery that haunts Yoder’s hometown. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for The Novel “Michener explores some of the deepest issues raised by narrative literature.”—The New York Times “A good, old-fashioned, sink-your-teeth-into-it story . . . The Novel lets us see an unfamiliar side of the author, at the same time portraying the delicate, complex relationship among editors, agents and writers.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Michener loves literature, and his information about some of his favorite reading is almost as alluring as his explanation of how to handle a manuscript.”*—Associated Press “So absorbing you simply will not want [it] to end.”—Charleston *News & Courier
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Moroccan Traffic: Send a Fax to the Kasbah

Moroccan Traffic: Send a Fax to the Kasbah

Dorothy Dunnett

Historical Fiction / Mystery & Thrillers

The Chairman of Kingsley Conglomerates is conducting negotiations, which are both difficult and somewhat dubious, in Morocco. He is accompanied by executive secretary Wendy Helmann. However, there are soon distractions when unorthodox Rita Geddes appears on the scene. Wendy discovers that there is much more at stake than the supposed negotiations, and finds herself at the centre of kidnappings, murder, and industrial espionage. Explosions, a car chase across the High Atlas out of Marrakesh and much more follows. Of course, the prior arrival of portrait painter Johnson Johnson is in many ways fortuitous, but he has some ghosts of his own to lay.
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Skinner's Room

Skinner's Room

William Gibson

Science Fiction / Essay

Skinner's Room is a short story by William Gibson originally composed for Visionary San Francisco, a 1990 museum exhibition exploring the future of San Francisco. It features the first appearance in Gibson's fiction of "the Bridge", which Gibson revisited as the setting of his acclaimed Bridge trilogy of novels. In the story, the Bridge is overrun by squatters, among them Skinner, who occupies a shack atop a bridgetower. An altered version of the story was published in Omni magazine and subsequently anthologized. "Skinner's Room" was nominated for the 1992 Locus Award for Best Short Story.
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