Illness.Captivity.A fight for survival...Seventeen-year-old Zel doesn't know what to do. Her mum is seriously ill, and the doctors have no answers. When Zel's best friend, Finn, finds an old Wiccan text with a miraculous solution, it seems too good to be true... but Zel's willing to try anything, even breaking into the garden of the formidable Judge Gothel.But the unthinkable happens, and everything goes wrong.Betrayed by those she loved most, Zel must fight for her own survival. Imprisoned in the Towerwood Facility for Troubled Youth, she is kept in isolation under the watchful eye of her guard, Prince. He seems to be her only way to freedom-and she is determined to escape the clutches of Gothel and free herself from her desperate fate.This is not the Rapunzel you grew up with...Readers, please note that Towerwood is a novella of...

In his first collection of short stories, Barnes explores the narrow body of water containing the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension which lies between England and France with acuity humor, and compassion. For whether Barnes's English characters come to France as conquerors or hostages, laborers, athletes, or aesthetes, what they discover, alongside rich food and barbarous sexual and religious practices, is their own ineradicable Englishness. The ten stories that make up Cross Channel introduce us to a plethora of intriguing, original, and sometimes ill-fated characters. Elegantly conceived and seductively written, Cross Channel is further evidence of Barnes's wizardry. From the Trade Paperback edition.

This epic novel is set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese war, from the time Japan annexed Manchuria in the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War. During these years, a militaristic Japan pursued an aggressive dream to colonize not only China but also the whole of Southeast Asia and beyond. The brutal sacking of Chiang Kai-shek's new capital, Nanking, which refused to surrender to the Imperial Army, was a graphic example of Japanese retribution in a war of punishment. The story of these tumultuous years is told through the lives of a disparate group of fictional characters: a young Russian woman émigré caught between her complex love affair with a British journalist and a liberal-minded Japanese diplomat, an Indian nationalist working for Japanese intelligence, a Chinese professor with communist sympathies, an American missionary doctor and a Japanese soldier, who are all brought together by the monstrous dislocation of war. Enmeshed in a savage world beyond...

This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

One of the most influential works of modern American fiction is available for the first time as an eBook, featuring a new Author’s Note, as well as an Introduction by Joshua Ferris. Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in estimation from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form and inspired an entire generation of writers. In six stories (“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Isabelle,” “The Wavemaker Falters,” “The 400-Pound CEO,” “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”) and a novella (“Bounty”), Saunders introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With original commentary from Joshua Ferris and Saunders himself, this eBook edition is the perfect occasion to discover or revisit a virtuosic, uniquely American voice. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from George Saunders's Tenth of December. Praise for George Saunders and *CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “There is no author I recommend to people more often—for ten years I’ve urged George Saunders onto everyone and everyone. You want funny? Saunders is your man. You want emotional heft? Saunders again. You want stories that are actually about something—stories that again and again get to the meat of matters of life and death and justice and country? Saunders. There is no one better, no one more essential to our national sense of self and sanity.”—Dave Eggers “The debut of an exciting new voice in fiction . . . Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith “George Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him.”—Jonathan Franzen “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon “In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders is improvising around a single scary note. Few writers have sounded it with such clarity, boldness, and wit.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing. Few writers can encompass that range of adjectives, but Saunders is a true original—restlessly inventive, yet deeply humane.”—Jennifer Egan “This book is a rare event: a brilliant new satirist bursting out of the gate in full stride, wildly funny, pure, generous—all that a great humorist should be.”—Garrison Keillor “[Saunders has] shades of both Denis Johnson and Raymond Chandler. . . . By turns he’s ferocious, witty, and uproarious, but what makes his fiction memorable is the gravitas of its dark portraiture of America.”—The Boston Globe*

From the author of Uninvited: Damaged by trauma, a grown woman and a teenage boy form a destructive bond fuelled by rage . . . Penny is a victim of rape. It leaves her emotionally devastated, alone, and consumed by anger. She strives to rid herself of her fury, but it won't go away. Charlie is a fourteen-year-old boy who watched his much-loved older brother die in a hit-and-run accident on a cold night in their small village. He, too, is filled with denial and rage. These two neighbours develop a strange and unlikely friendship, fed by a shared hatred of the world. As bodies start to appear, a young girl goes missing, and their toxic union grows ever more primitive and feral. Will they ultimately destroy themselves—or each other?

Imogen Waterstone has always prided herself on being a thoroughly independent young woman, but now she needs a man of implacable will and nerves of iron. That's why she invited Matthias Marshall, infamous Earl of Colchester, to her home in Upper Strickland. Who better than the legendary explorer to help her lay the perfect trap? Her scheme is simple, really: She plans to let it be known that when she inherited her uncle's collection of antiquities, she also inherited a map to a fabulous ancient treasure. She's sure that her enemy would risk financial ruin in pursuit of the mythical artifact. And to make doubly sure the scoundrel took the bait, she wants Colchester to pretend that he's out to seduce Imogene so that he, too, could get his hands on her map. Yet in all of her plotting, Imogene never anticipates Colchester's violent reaction to her request or her own electrifying reaction to him. Neither does she expect that a malevolent threat would emerge from the labyrinth of London—sinister enough to endanger her and Colchester's lives.

Shifra Horn's beautifully imagined novel tells the story of five generations of women in one family against the backdrop of one hundred years in Jerusalem.The story begins with the birth of the family's first boy to Amal, the last generation. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are overjoyed, because the birth of a healthy boy means that the curse against the women of the family has been broken. They tell Amal the story of those "foremothers": Mazal, the orphan, whose ill-fated marriage initiates the curse; her daughter Sara, whose golden hair is a symbol for her power to heal; Sara's daughter Pnina-Mazal, the unwanted child whose talent for knowing others' thoughts brings both joy and sorrow; and her daughter Geula, Amal's mother, whose sharp intellect is her gift and her burden.

Spanish Grant County is open for the taking, and the East Coast sharpies are moving in. But the one man standing in the way is rancher Stone Hart, who has friends by the name of Fog, Counter and Ysabel. And when the members of General "Ole Devil" Hardin's floating outfit are joined in Arizona by a lady named Calamity, the land grabbers, bushwackers, and bank robbers have a wildcat by the tail. Now the range is running with blood—and the wildcat is fighting back!

SUMMARY: Be careful what you wish for...One day, dayne Kuttner, a nurse, couldn't take it anymore. Sick at heart from doctors ordering her to maintain the life in patients who were already dead, saving people who didn't want the help, and most of all angry over the thought her recently deceased husband would rot in Hell for an eternity on a technicality, Dayne threw up a challenge to God. She asked that God should have sympathy for the Devil and those in Hell should get a second chance. Throughout the time of man, God had always answered people's prayers if they were done in perfect sincerity, purity and belief.So God grants Dayne's request. In His Fashion.A few of Hell's denizens are to be released to Earth so long as they follow a few rules. Lucifer, sensing a once-in-an-eternity opportunity, puts his second-in-command, Agonostis, in charge of the "Hellraised." Agonostis, currently out of favor with his leader, wonders if he's being set up. His suspicions are confirmed when Lucifer takes him aside to tell him about a second special mission while he's on Earth: within a month he must Damn Dayne's soul. A person unarguably on God's special list...

Only one thing stands between a son and his father's killer: forty years of lies.. On a remote Arizona ranch, a man who has known loss, fear, and war weeps for the first time since he was a child.  His tears are for the father taken from him four decades before in a deadly shoot-out.  And his grief will lead him back to the place where he was born, where his father died, and where a brutal conspiracy is about to explode. For Bob Lee Swagger, the world changed on that hot day in Blue Eye, Arkansas, when two local boys rode armed and wild in a '55 Fairlane convertible. Swagger's father, Earl, a state trooper, was investigating the brutal murder of a young woman that day.  By midnight Earl Swagger lay dead in a deserted cornfield. Now Bob Lee wants answers.  He wants to know the truth behind the shoot -out that took his father's life, a mystery buried in forty years of lies.  Because for Bob Lee Swagger, the killing didn't end that day in Blue Eye, Arkansas. The killing had just begun... Weaving together characters from his national bestsellers Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter's gripping thriller builds to an exhilarating climax--and an explosion of gunfire that blasts open the secrets of two generations.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award.Two of David Foster's previous books, Dog Rock and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger, feature the eccentric postman D'Arcy D'Olivieres, a great and memorable creation, and one who makes a welcome return to Foster's fiction in The Glade Within the Grove. Now the retired postman of Dog Rock, D'Arcy recalls a time when he was a fill-in postman at a small town called Obligna Creek. There he discovers an unpublished manuscript in an old mailbag - The Ballad of Erinungarah, written by 'Orion'. As D'Arcy himself says, 'Weird piece of work. Back then, 1990, I'm not sure I understood the implications. But I have thought about little else since.' D'Arcy becomes obsessed by the Ballad and the events it describes, and writes The Glade Within The Grove as a gloss on the Ballad, and investigation of events that happened nearly thirty years ago: namely the establishment of a commune in the late 60s, deep in the forest country of the Far South Coast,...

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred.In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre.American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.ContentsThe Murders in the Rue Morgue    -        Edgar Allan PoeThe Stolen Cigar Case       -        Bret HarteThe Problem of Cell 13      -        Jacques FutrelleThe Doomdorf Mystery      -        Melville Davisson PostMissing: Page Thirteen      -        Anna Katharine GreenThe Beauty Mask     -        Arthur B. ReeveA Jury of Her Peers  -        Susan GlaspellThe False Burton Combs    -        Carroll John DalyThe Keyboard of Silence    -        Clinton H. StaggA Nose for News     -        Richard SaleSpider -        Mignon G. EberhartLeg Man       -        Erie Stanley GardnerI’ll Be Waiting         -        Raymond ChandlerThe Footprint in the Sky    -        John Dickson CarrRear Window -        Cornell WoolrichThe Lipstick   -        Mary Roberts RinehartHomicide Highball   -        Robert Leslie BellemAn Error in Chemistry        -        William FaulknerFrom Another World         -        Clayton RawsonA Daylight Adventure        -        T. S. StriblingSee No Evil   -        William Campbell GaultCrime Must Have a Stop    -        Anthony BoucherSmall Homicide       -        Ed McBainGuilt-Edged Blonde  -        Ross MacdonaldChristmas Party      -        Rex StoutA Matter of Public Notice   -        Dorothy Salisbury DavisThe Adventure of Abraham Lincoln’s Clue         -        Ellery QueenWords Do Not a Book Make         -        Bill PronziniChristmas Is for Cops        -        Edward D. HochLucky Penny  -        Linda BarnesThe Parker Shotgun -        Sue GraftonChee’s Witch -        Tony HillermanBenny’s Space         -        Marcia Muller

Irene encounters a homeless man and fails to recognize him as her former college instructor Lucas Monroe—a man who once seemed destined for a bright future. Now he's missing, and there are indications that he's been blackmailing some of the city's most rich and powerful men. Irene's search for Lucas takes her from mean streets to fine mansions and ivory towers—and forces her to recall a part of her own past she'd just as soon forget.