The first days of summer: Jim Praley is home from college, ready to unlock Tulsa's secrets. He drives the highways. He forces himself to get out of his car and walk into a bar. He's invited to a party and there he meets Adrienne Booker; Adrienne rules Tulsa, in her way. A high-school dropout with a penthouse apartment, she takes a curious interest in Jim. Through her eyes, he will rediscover his hometown: its wasted sprawl, the beauty of its late nights, and, at the city's center, the unsleeping light of its skyscrapers.
Elm Howells has a loving family and a distinguished career at an elite Manhattan auction house. But after a tragic loss throws her into an emotional crisis, she pursues a reckless course of action that jeopardizes her personal and professional success. Meanwhile, talented artist Gabriel Connois wearies of remaining at the margins of the capricious Parisian art scene, and, desperate for recognition, he embarks on a scheme that threatens his burgeoning reputation. These narratives converge, with disastrous consequences.
Returning to America after World War II, former naval officer Philip Bowman finds a position as a book editor and loses himself in a world of intimate connections and surprising triumphs until he is betrayed by the woman he loves, which sets him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.
Sam Dolan is a young man coming to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film. He has a difficult relationship with his father, B-movie actor Booth Dolan—a boisterous, opinionated, lying lothario whose screen legacy falls somewhere between cult hero and pathetic. Allie, Sam’s dearly departed mother, was a woman whose only fault, in Sam’s eyes, was her eternal affection for his father. Also included in the cast of indelible characters: a precocious, frequently violent half-sister; a conspiracy-theorist second wife; an Internet-famous roommate; a contractor who can’t stop expanding his house; a happy-go-lucky college girlfriend and her husband, a retired Yankees catcher; the morose producer of a true-crime show; and a slouching indie-film legend. Not to mention a tragic sex monster. Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family’s friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything—regret, resentment, dignity, moving pictures, the dead—and taking it again from the top. Against the backdrop of indie filmmaking, college campus life, contemporary Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Owen King’s epic debut novel combines propulsive storytelling with mordant wit and brims with a deep understanding of the trials of ambition and art, of relationships and life, and of our attempts to survive it all.
Iraq, 2005. Seven mercenaries hear an enticing rumor: somewhere, in the swirling desert sands, lies an abandoned Republican Guard convoy containing millions of pounds of Saddam's gold. The mercenaries form an unlikely crew of battle-scarred privateers, killers and thieves, veterans of a dozen war zones, each of them eager to make one last score before their luck runs out. After liberating the sole surviving guard member from U.S. capture, the team makes its way to the ancient ruins where the convoy was last seen. Although all seems eerily quiet and deserted when they arrive, the men soon find themselves caught in a desperate battle for their lives, confronted by greed, betrayal, and an army that won't stay dead.
Meet Horton Moon, a street-wise (if improvident) family man trying to get by as best he can in Depression-era Minneapolis. Beside the hard times, Moon does battle with his own demons: a fickle heart, a taste for the drink, and a bad habit of slipping rather too easily from one side of the law to the other. When he meets a remarkable young girl newly arrived in the city from the Dakota plains, Moon falls in love and falls off the edge. His marriage disintegrates, he loses his job and his bearings, and he steps into a dark underworld of crime and retribution.
Queen Victoria's Book of Spells is an anthology for everyone who loves works of neo-Victorian fiction, and wishes to explore the wide variety of ways that modern fantasists are using nineteenth-century settings, characters, and themes. These approaches stretch from steampunk fiction to the Austen-and-Trollope inspired works that some critics call Fantasy of Manners, all of which fit under the larger umbrella of Gaslamp Fantasy. The result is eighteen stories by experts from the fantasy, horror, mainstream, and young adult fields, including both bestselling writers and exciting new talents such as Elizabeth Bear, James Blaylock, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Gregory Maguire, Delia Sherman, and Catherynne M. Valente, who present a bewitching vision of a nineteenth century invested (or cursed!) with magic.
Jesse and Ramon are a loving couple, but after years spent unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, they turn to adoption, relieved to think that once they navigate the bureaucratic path to parent-hood they will have a happy ending. But nothing has prepared them for the labyrinthine process--for the many training sessions and approvals; for the constant advice from friends, strangers, and "experts"; for the birth mothers who contact them but don't ultimately choose them; or even, most shockingly, for the women who call claiming they've chosen Jesse and Ramon but who turn out never to have been pregnant in the first place. Jennifer Gilmores eloquence about the human heart--its frailties and complexities--and her razor-sharp observations about race, class, culture, and changing family dynamics are spectacularly combined in this powerful novel. Suffused with passion and fury, "The Mothers "is a taut, gripping, and satisfying book that will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.
Angelo DiNoto is the most powerful crime lord in New Jersey, his empire sustained by pure heroin from the poppies of an old Turkish farmer. That is, until a five million dollar shipment goes missing. A shady developer and his daughter, a postal clerk dying of cancer, a private investigator, two of DiNoto's enforcers, and a collections agent all have designs on finding the shipment, which leads to an unforgettable showdown over the old Turk's load.
Two friends who grew up together as part of an extreme doomsday-prepping religion are reunited twenty years later in a search for an abducted child.
After two tours as a sniper in Iraq, Tommy Smith has returned to his former life as a cowboy and wilderness guide in California's Sierra Nevada, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of his youth and heal the wounds the world can't see. When, high on a mountain pass, he and his partner find the wrecked plane of a billionaire adventurer who disappeared months earlier, a seemingly innocent act triggers a breathtaking cycle of violence that threatens Tommy's world. Soon he is enmeshed in the struggle between the billionaire's trophy wife and wannabe drug lord son and their allies. Every effort to set things right draws him deeper into a bad situation and closer to needing those deadly skills that he had hoped to leave behind forever. With lean, efficient prose and dialogue that crackles with repartee, Bart Paul has written a contemporary thriller of steadily mounting suspense and ruthless action. He captures both the beauty of the high mountain wilderness and the laconic rhythms of the outfitters' lives, and in Tommy Smith, he offers a protagonist whose cool competence, homegrown decency, and clarity of purpose in the face of danger suggest a brotherhood with heroes from the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.
After bravely serving her country in Iraq, Frankie Byrne Tennyson is finally home. Home to a husband whose lingering feelings of abandonment make her wonder if their lives can ever be the same. Home to a daughter whose painful encounters with bullies can only be healed by a mother's love. And home to a father who still can't accept his daughter's decision to serve. But the most difficult part about coming home lies within Frankie herself. To save everything she holds dear, she must face the toughest battle of her life.