When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the smallNorth Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raisesquestions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seemsdetermined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of eventsdraws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, awidowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children; andanother with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. Despite herreservations, Katie slowly begins to let down her guard, puttingdown roots in the close-knit community and becoming increasinglyattached to Alex and his family. But even as Katie begins to fall in love, she struggles with thedark secret that still haunts and terrifies her . . . a past thatset her on a fearful, shattering journey across the country, to thesheltered oasis of Southport. With Jo's empathic and stubbornsupport, Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between alife of transient safety and one of riskier rewards . . . and thatin the darkest hour, lo
In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in thewilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, andhis magnificent Irish wolfhound, Merlin, step from shadow intolight...and into an encounter with mystery. That night, a pair ofsingular animals will watch Grady's isolated home, waiting to maketheir approach. A few miles away, Camillia Rivers, a local veterinarian, beginsto unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring to her door allthe forces of a government in peril. At a nearby farm, long-estranged identical twins come togetherto begin a descent into darkness...In Las Vegas, a specialist inchaos theory probes the boundaries of the unknowable...On a Seattlegolf course, two men make matter-of-fact arrangements formurder...Along a highway by the sea, a vagrant scarred by the pastbegins a trek toward his destiny. In a novel that is at once wholly of our time and timeless,fearless and funny, Dean Koontz takes readers into the momentbetween one turn of the world and the next, acros
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag comes aclassic novel of mismatched lovers who give a whole new meaning tothe phrase “Fake it till you make it.” Sensible corporate lawyer Alaina Montgomery has been frustratingher matchmaking friends for years. But this time they’ve reallytried to set her up with the wrong guy: Dylan Harrison, afree-spirited single dad who runs a ramshackle bar and bait shop.Appropriately enough, she meets him on the way to ascience-fiction-themed masquerade party. When cops mistake the costumed pair for a lady of the eveningand her client, Alaina and Dylan end up in jail together. And soonthey hatch a plan to foil the matchmakers once and for all bypretending to be a couple. What begins as a good-natured rusequickly blossoms into a real romance, as these two polar oppositesdiscover that desire can’t be so easily disguised.
As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the greatSaul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, andkeenly humorous, "The Adventures of Augie March" blends streetlanguage with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicagoboy growing up during the Great Depression. A aborn recruit, aAugie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risktakers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that isato saythe leasta eccentric.
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young womanfinds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressedominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'. Her discoveryplunges her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth wherethe secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fateconnect to an evil hidden in the depths of history. In those fewquiet moments, she unwittingly assumes a quest she will discover isher birthright - a hunt for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, themedieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of theDracula myth. Deciphering obscure signs and hidden texts, readingcodes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions, andevading terrifying adversaries, one woman comes ever closer to thesecret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definitionof evil. Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumentalproportions - a captivating tale that blends fact and fantasy,history and the present with an assurance
We don't just live in the air; we live because of it. It's themost miraculous substance on earth, responsible for our food, ourweather, our water, and our ability to hear. In this exuberantbook, gifted science writer Gabrielle Walker peels back the layersof our atmosphere with the stories of the people who uncovered itssecrets: - A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy ourair really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighsseventy thousand pounds. - A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds aset of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads. - Animpoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in acircle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door. - Awell-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer. - Areclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years before he'sproved right, that the sky contains a layer of floating metal fedby the glowing tails of shooting stars.
On the eve of the Globe's production of "Hamlet,"Shakespearean scholar Kate Shelton is given what is claimed to bethe Bard's long-lost work. When a killer decides to stagetheatrical murders as flesh-and-blood realities, Shelton mustdecipher a string of clues before anyone else dies.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Franz Kafka's imagination so faroutstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition heinherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out inorder to tell his splendid, mysterious tales. Scrupulouslynaturalistic on the surface, uncanny in their depths, these storiesrepresent the achieved art of a modern master who had the gift ofmaking our problematic spiritual life palpable and real. Thisedition of his stories includes all his available shorter fictionin a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by GabrielJosipovici in ways that bring out the writer's extraordinary rangeand intensity of vision. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
Written in 1953, published in 1959 (after the 1957 publicationof Kerouac's On the Road made him famous overnight) and long out ofprint, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England milltown is one of Kerouac's most accessible works.
Twenty years ago, a boy named Jack Sawyer travelled to aparallel universe called The Territories to save his mother and herTerritories "twinner" from a premature and agonizing death thatwould have brought cataclysm to the other world. Now Jack is aretired Los Angeles homicide detective living in the nearlynonexistent hamlet of Tamarack, WI. He has no recollection of hisadventures in the Territories and was compelled to leave the policeforce when an odd, happenstance event threatened to awaken thosememories. When a series of gruesome murders occur in westernWisconsin that are reminiscent of those committed several decadesearlier by a real-life madman named Albert Fish, the killer isdubbed "The Fisherman" and Jack's buddy, the local chief of police,begs Jack to help his inexperienced force find him. But is thismerely the work of a disturbed individual, or has a mysterious andmalignant force been unleashed in this quiet town? What causesJack's inexplicable waking dreams, if that is what they are, ofrobins' eggs
Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on thegracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysittingcharges when she's approached by silver-haired, elegant MarcusKidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant;like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, thechildren's books he's written, his classical music, the marvelousart in his study, his lavish presents to her -- Mr. Kidder's lifecouldn't be more different from Katya's drab working-classexistence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But bydegrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing forMr. Kidder's new painting isn't the lighthearted endeavor it oncewas. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go toget it? In the tradition of Oates's classic story "Where Are YouGoing, Where Have You Been?" "A Fair Maiden "is an unsettling,ambiguous tale of desire and control.
After his haystack was torched, Mr. Harmsworth barricaded acommon path through his orchard. But witnesses-both human andanimal-claim a ghost perpetrated the deed. And the ghost has amessage that Miss Potter hopes to figure out.
From the celebrated imagination of Dean Koontz comes a powerfulreworking of one of the classic stories of all time. If you thinkyou know the legend, you know only half the truth. Now themesmerizing saga concludes. . . . As a devastating hurricaneapproaches, as the benighted creations of Victor Helios begin tospin out of control, as New Orleans descends into chaos and thefuture of humanity hangs in the balance, the only hope rests withVictor’s first, failed attempt to build the perfect human.Deucalion’s centuries-old history began as the originalmanifestation of a soulless vision–and it is fated to end in theultimate confrontation between a damned creature and his madcreator. But first they must face a monstrosity not even Victor’smalignant mind could have conceived–an indestructible entity thatsteps out of humankind’s collective nightmare with powers, and apurpose, beyond imagining.
The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe forany folly, any outrage that will alter the tedium of her days. Butthere is another, secret Dona who longs for a life of honest love-- and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. It is this Donawho flees the stews of London for remote Navron, looking for peaceof mind in its solitary woods and hidden creeks. She finds therethe passion her spirit craves -- in the love of a daring piratehunted by all Cornwall, a Frenchman who, like Dona, would gamblehis life for a moment's joy.
How is it that we can recognize photos from our high schoolyearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate forbreakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans ofsoup if the sign says "LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER" rather than "LIMIT 4PER CUSTOMER?" In "Kluge, "Gary Marcus argues convincingly that ourminds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. Theimperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process thatoften proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones--and thosesystems don't always work well together. The end product is a"kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. Taking us on atour of the essential areas of human experience--memory, belief,decision making, language, and happiness--Marcus unveils afundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mindand simultaneously sheds light on some of the most mysteriousaspects of human nature.
"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch inthe moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, aSouthern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves arounda single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful AllisonNelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to beengaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left somany years ago?
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's short stories arethe marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing inminiaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatestcomic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh's almostsuperhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilverattentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as hisworldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, andhis sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism.The thirty-nine stories collected here include such smallmasterpieces as "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" and "Scott-King'sModern Europe"; an alternative ending to Waugh's novel "A Handfulof Dust"; a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, thehero of "Brideshead Revisited"; and two linked stories, remnants ofan abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing. Thisedition contains the original illustrations to "Love Among theRuins," as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the authoras an Ox
