In a small seaside city on the Jersey Shore, three half-siblings confront the death of a distant and bullying patriarch. They now have the chance to imagine new relationships and new futures, ones that would have been near-unthinkable while their father was alive. Caught in their crossfire are the conservative religious communities that border Asbury Park, the longtime locals who have been pushed to the fringe by the Shore's revitalization, and the...

Beckett Pierce is the most eligible bachelor in the nosiest small town in upstate New York. But after his last girlfriend handcuffed herself to his porch and set his welcome mat on fire, he's not looking for any more romance. Even if it lands right in his backyard. And has miles of red hair. Gianna Decker has her hands full---no, overflowing---with problems. With two kids, a useless ex, and a brand new yoga studio, the last thing on her mind is finding...

"Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger. Sometimes a distance from the world's tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars. The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the...

Ann Lindell has left the Uppsala police force and is living a quiet life, making artisanal cheese in a small town in Uppland, Sweden. But life in the country is not as idyllic as it seems. On New Year's Eve someone sets fire to the former village school, which is now a home for asylum seekers, and three people are killed. Ann Lindell's investigative instincts come back to life, and soon she takes on the case. She is contacted by a mysterious man who...

"On her morning jog, Portia Paltrow comes upon the dead body of antiques store owner and college professor Owen Hill, sprawled across the back doorstep of Selma Parker's fabric and quilt shop on Elderberry Road. The site of their Saturday morning quilting bee just became a crime scene. Violent crime is rare in the charming village of Crestwood, Kansas, and rumors are soon circulating of a burglary gone wrong. But who would rob a quilt shop? No, Owen...

In 1956, Grace Metalious published Peyton Place, the novel that unbuttoned the straitlaced New England of the popular imagination, transformed the publishing industry, topped the bestseller lists for more than a year, and made its young author one of the most talked-about people in America. In 1959, the sizzling sequel, Return to Peyton Place, picked up where Peyton Place left off: Allison MacKenzie, now the author of America's No. 1 bestseller, is...

"Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters-some historic, some invented-crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg-as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts. Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich's...

"Maya Farlow learned the hard way to depend only on herself, so when she fell too deeply for the bad-boy charms of Del Mitchell, she did the only thing she could--she ran. Stunned, Del left Fool's Gold to make his name and fortune in extreme sports. Now ten years later, May's been hired to promote her hometown's new slogan, The Destination for Romance. The celebrity spokesman is none other than Del, the man she dumped but never forgot."--Page [4]...

"Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel. Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it's at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They're on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails,...

Introducing this collection of stories, R.K. Narayan describes how in India 'the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story'. "Malgudi Days" is the marvellous result. Here, Narayan portrays an astrologer, a snake-charmer, a postman, a vendor of pies and chappatis - all kinds of people, drawn in full colour and endearing domestic detail. And under his magician's touch the whole imaginary city of Malgudi springs...