From the Dust Jacket: With the publication of his first novel, Simple Prayers, Michael Golding was hailed as one of the most captivating new voices of his generation. Now he triumphs again with the enchanted tale of an eccentric connoisseur of beauty whose life is transformed when he meets a most unusual boy. Through wild adventures and wondrous discoveries, their relationship will lead them to a world of mind and heart, fear and grace, startling reality and transcendent magic.

His European-North Dakota-Jewish origins were humble, but New York tycoon Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky eventually towered over a gilded era. To money itself he was indifferent. All that mattered was that he was able to surround himself with things of beauty, not the least of which was his exotic companion Cassandra Nutt, whose thirst for life was exceeded only by Jean Pierre’s own fabulous hunger for cars, clocks, clouks, pianos, horses, houses, swimming pools, airplanes, and lovers.

Then, at the age of seventy-one, Jean Pierre Michel finally acquires the one possession that has always eluded him: a son. Benjamin is an astonishingly beautiful orphan of the Depression, marred by only a single, striking imperfection: a strawberry birthmark that spreads, like the Russian steppes, across his right cheek and throat. Generous and selfish, prodigy and fool, he will grow to be the betrayed son, the spurned lover, the escaped Jew. And he will be blessed by a disturbing yet wondrous gift.

From New York to Amsterdam, from the Jazz Age to the Age of the Computer, Benjamin’s Gift is a richly comic, deeply moving tour de force filled with vivid incident and incandescent characters. It is, in short, the story of our century.

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About the Author: Michael Golding was born in Philadelphia and educated at Duke, Oxford, and the University of California at Irvine. He currently resides in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in California, with his son, Joshua. His first novel, Simple Prayers, has been translated into nine foreign languages. This is his second novel.

Middle-aged and still reeling from her four-year-old divorce, Dee spends her days helping people piece together their family histories and worrying about the day her adopted daughter Jill will meet her birth mother. But when Dee meets seventy-four-year-old Mikhail, she is drawn from her life in present-day Seattle to war-torn Europe a half-century earlier. As a young man, Mikhail fled his native Latvia into Germany to escape Hitler’s army. Forced to leave his loved ones behind, he eventually reached the United States to begin a life there. Decades later, the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain was lifted, and Mikhail learned he had a child back in Europe. With Dee’s help, he sets out to reconcile with his son before it’s too late, and together the pair embark on an emotional journey of healing. From Seattle to New York City, from Berlin, Germany, to Riga, Latvia, The Berlin Connection is a compelling novel that resonates with the human drama of loss and new beginnings.

From the Dust Jacket (U.S. edition): Nineteen forty-five, London. The vote in the House of Lords as to who should inherit the Barrington family fortune has ended in a tie. The Lord Chancellor’s deciding vote will cast a long shadow on the lives of Harry Clifton and Giles Barrington. Harry returns to America to promote his latest novel, while his beloved Emma goes in search of the little girl who was found abandoned in her father’s office on the night he was killed. When the general election is called, Giles Barrington has to defend his seat in the House of Commons and is horrified to discover who the Conservatives select to stand against him. But it is Sebastian Clifton, Harry and Emma’s son, who ultimately influences his uncle’s fate.

In 1957, Sebastian wins a scholarship to Cambridge, and a new generation of the Clifton family marches onto the page. But after Sebastian is expelled from school, he unwittingly becomes caught up in an international art fraud involving a Rodin statue that is worth far more than the sum it raises at auction. Does he become a millionaire? Does he go to Cambridge? Is his life in danger? Best Kept Secret, the third volume in Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling series, will answer all these questions but, once again, pose so many more.

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About the Author: Jeffrey Archer was educated at Oxford University. He has served five years in Britain’s House of Commons and nineteen years in the House of Lords. All of his novels and short story collections—including Only Time Will Tell, The Sins of the Father, Kane and Abel, and False Impression—have been international bestselling books. Archer is married with two sons and lives in London and Cambridge.

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By the Same Author: Only Time Will Tell (2011); Sins of the Father (2012); and Be Careful What You Wish For (2014), among many others.

This is the story of Eli, a young man whose life was nothing but foster home after foster home. Abuse after abuse. One day, after his father nearly kills him, again, he runs away and finds the perfect family for him. After his parents drug and kidnap him, he devises a plan to get them sent away so that they will never bother him again. It back fires and he’s sent to yet another home. This one worse than his own. Will young Eli ever find happiness? Is he forever doomed to be abused?

A Better World tells the stories of three women who find themselves confronted with incredible tragedy, each caught in a world that tramples the vulnerable and forgets the meek. Civil war rages in Sri Lanka, where Saja watches, powerless, as both her husband and most of her family are lost to the brutality. Yonna is a talented, Wayuu rug weaver who attends a celebration in her honor that ends in bloodshed. The beautiful Taraji, who never truly knows the hardship she has left behind in South Africa, is adopted by a loving couple at the age of five. But even Taraji’s distant past comes back to haunt her. Three women, each with a different tale, share the same courageous fight for survival and an even harder struggle to find love. They leave the turmoil of their homelands to seek a better future but soon discover that loneliness can be found in a crowded room, and wrenching fear in the safest suburb. Resilience wins each of them a second chance at happiness, but it could all be lost once more if they fail to release the pains of their pasts.

From the Dust Jacket: Aaron Hill has it all—athletic good looks and the many privileges of a star quarterback. His Sundays are spent playing NFL football in front of a televised audience of millions. But Aaron’s about to receive an unexpected handoff, one that will give him a whole new view of his self-centered life.

Derrick Anderson is a family man who volunteers his time with foster kids while sustaining a long career as a pro football player. But now he’s looking for a miracle. He must act as team mentor while still striving for the one thing that matters most this season—keeping a promise he made years ago.

Megan Gunn works two jobs and spends her spare time helping at the youth center. Much of what she does, she does for the one boy for whom she is everything—a foster child whose dying mother left him in Megan’s care. Now she wants to adopt him, but one obstacle stands in the way. Her foster son, Cory, is convinced that 49ers quarterback Aaron Hill is his father.

Two men and the game they love. A woman with a heart for the lonely and lost, and a boy who believes the impossible. Thrown together in a season of self-discovery, they’re about to learn lessons in character and grace, love and sacrifice.

Because in the end, life isn’t defined by what takes place on the first day of the week, but by how we live it between Sundays.

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About the Author: Karen Kingsbury is America’s favorite inspirational novelist with six million books in print. Her Life-Changing Fiction™ has produced multiple bestsellers including Even Now, One Tuesday Morning, Beyond Tuesday Morning, and the popular Redemption series. Her most recent release, Ever After, was named the 2007 Christian Book of the Year. She lives in Washington state with her husband, Don, and their six children.

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By the Same Author: When Joy Came to Stay (2000, Multnomah); Halfway to Forever (2002, Multnomah); Reunion (with Gary Smalley) (2004, Tyndale House); A Treasury of Adoption Miracles: True Stories of God’s Presence Today (2005, Warner Faith); Fame (2005, Tyndale House); Forgiven (2005, Tyndale House); Even Now (2005); Like Dandelion Dust (2006, Center Street); Found (2006, Tyndale House); Family (2006, Tyndale House); Ever After (2007); and Forever (2007, Tyndale House), among many others.

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Compiler’s Note: Much of Kingsbury’s prodigious output centers on the “Baxter Family Saga,” which began with the Redemption Series (co-written with Gary Smalley), and continued with the Firstborn Series, Sunrise Series, Above the Line Series, and Baily Flanigan Series, among others. Following the revelation (in Reunion) that the Baxter family matriarch had given up her firstborn for adoption, and the subsequent efforts of the family to become reunited with its lost member (in the Firstborn series), the adoption theme fades to background noise. Readers who find Kingsbury’s intensely Christian point of view appealing will likely enjoy all of her books; not just the ones I have chosen to list here. All others are hereby forewarned.

From the Dust Jacket: Bawdy, joyous, messy, hysterically funny, and guaranteed to offend—regardless of religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or profession—Between the Bridge and the River is the debut novel of Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show.

Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the American South suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre adventures that, it turns out, are somehow interconnected—and, even more surprisingly, meaningful. The eclectic cast of characters features Socrates, Carl Jung, and Tony Randall, along with an ex-television evangelist with a penchant for booze, prostitutes, and uncomfortable knitwear who gets mugges in Miami by an almost pure-blooded Watusi warrior, and sets off on a road trip in a stolen motor home.

Between the Bridge and the River is a romantic comic odyssey that is impossible to summarize—and impossible to stop reading.

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About the Author: Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show on CBS, was born in Glasgow. He worked his way through the entertainment industry as a drummer, comedian, actor, and director. Since moving to the United States in 1885, he has written two motion pictures, Saving Grace and I’ll Be There, in which he also starred. He lives in Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover: Jeffrey Ford’s World Fantasy Award-winner The Physiognomy introduced Cley, master of a twisted and terrifying science in a nightmare city. In the brilliantly audacious Memoranda, the reformed phystognomist embarked on a surreal quest through the mind of the monster who imagined the dark metropolis. Now comes the third and final leg of Cley’s bizarre life journey.

Cley has witnessed miracles, and both he and his world have been changed by them. But now the former Physiognomist First Class must travel to the inconceivable ends of his world—and into the perilous heart of a sentient wilderness. Only there, where demons and wraiths feed on flesh and terror—where astonishing sights and circumstances are commonplace—can amends be made and the old Cley buried. But the Beyond has its needs and a living consciousness that encompasses all the wonders within its boundaries. And each step forward brings Cley inescapable responsibilities as it carries him deeper into the core of legend and toward a mystery older than time.

The setting is Parramatta, 15 miles west of Sydney, in the early years of colonial settlement, centred on Governor Macquarie’s futile attempts at integrating aborigines and traces the lives of two boys; Toby Redmond, an aboriginal boy adopted by white settlers and John Batman, struggling to overcome the stigma of his father’s convict past.

From Kirkus Reviews: It is with compassion and understanding that the author handles her central figure, the gnome-like little Lydia, a child-woman of 14 whose homeliness had made her almost impossible to place away from the orphan asylum. Then Miss Marion came along, in need of a maid of all work, and there, through household management for which she had a flair and through the love and care of the other children, Lydia comes in to her own at last. There is a tragic theft in later years, but this too is solved and once again the future is Lydia’s own. Definitely appealing.

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About the Author: Dorothy Evelyn Smith was born in Derby, England, the daughter of a Methodist parson. She first began to write successfully for English magazines while her husband was serving in the First World War. Thereafter her short stories and articles steadily reached a wide market, though her work was subject to interruptions from her growing daughter and son and their prodigious number of pets. In 1939, when most English magazines went off the market, Mrs. Smith began her first novel, interrupted this time by her war work. Often she wrote “on the end of the kitchen table with bombs falling around the house,” and part of her first novel was finished while she was confined to bed with an injured leg.

From the Dust Jacket: At the heart of this electrifying novel is a crime of unfathomable horror and its effect on several profoundly different lives, each altered by a surprising connection to the others.

We hear four brilliantly realized voices: Helen, an inmate at Sloatsburg women’s prison serving a life sentence for the murder of her children; trapped within the maze of her own tortured mind, she is the subject of damning national attention. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy—the new chief of psychiatry at Sloatsburg. Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet, intent on nothing but fame. And Ike Bradshaw, a sardonic corrections officer, formerly a New York City narcotics detective.

As the alternating narratives unfold, we begin to wonder why Dr. Forrest has chosen Sloatsburg over the Park Avenue practice for which she was trained. And the origin of Helen’s psychosis is revealed—both its shocking depths and its disturbingly convincing rationale—as well as why she is desperate to make herself known to the young actress Angie.

The Big Girls is a powerful and audacious novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of the maternal instinct, the vitality and evil of communities, and the cult of celebrity—written in spare, evocative prose and with a bold understanding of the darkest, most hidden aspects of human nature.

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About the Author: Susanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and a book of non-fiction, I Myself Have Seen It. She lives in New York City.

Alex Santucci is a 14-year veteran, former All-Star 3rd baseman for the Kansas City Crowns. The slugger has spent his entire Baseball career playing in the Midwest and is in the last year of a 6-year, $55 million contract. Just before the All-Star break, rumors start about Alex being traded to the Washington Presidents after their Superstar infielder Bruce Hammersly goes down with an injury. Alex grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC and lived on Johnson Avenue, a couple of Backyards from the house of his baseball idol, Walter Johnson, “The Big Train.” Ironically, his emotional world changes when his team Doctor introduces a new pain medication. He decides to take his girlfriend of five years, Sally Keegan PhD, an Associate Professor at nearby Park University, home to Bethesda during the four day All-Star break. Physically Alex finds his power stroke and becomes Baseball’s hottest hitter. As his feelings for Sally reach new heights, Alex starts to come to grips with many new emotions about his past family history. As the trade deadline approaches, the young Kansas City Crowns are surging towards first place. Crowns owner Larry Garson, who treats Alex as a son he never had, refuses to consider trading him and his big contract. Crowns General Manager Frank Fellows knows that he could use the ten million in savings for veteran pitching talent and young prospects in a trade for Santucci. Will Alex’s future be now in Kansas City or will his destiny be fulfilled in “Big Train’s Backyard” of Washington DC!

From the Back Cover: Abandoned as an infant because of her incessant crying, and left hanging from a tree in a makeshift sling, Billie Girl is rescued by a passing couple, then turned over to a homeless boy who sells her for $5 to the two women who raise her—women who carry a startling secret. Billie Girl’s life, a gender-bending puzzle filled with dark humor and lessons on killing out of love, is a series of pivotal encounters with strangers who struggle along with what they are given. Twin themes of sexuality and euthanasia run throughout Ina journey from hard-dirt Georgia farm to end-of-life nursing home, Billie Girl comes to understand the mercy of killing.

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About the Author: Vickie Weaver is a 2006 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her unpublished collection Below the Heart was a semi-finalist in the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2008, and placed in the top ten of The Parthenon Prize 2007. Her short stories have appeared in Timber Creek Review, Roanoke Review, Alligator Juniper, and the anthology Women. Period. Weaver, who attended college in her mid-40s, settled into the writing life after earning an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She teaches at Indiana University East.

From the Dust Jacket: Rita Mae Brown, the outspoken author of such bestsellers as Rubyfruit Jungle and Six of One, returns to Runnymede, Maryland, for her most accomplished novel yet, Bingo. Runnymede—a town divided by the Mason-Dixon line since before the Civil War—is now the setting for combat of a different kind: two elderly widows vying for the love of the new man in town.

Julia Hunsenmeir Smith, eighty-two, and Louise Hunsenmeir Trumbull, just turned eighty-six, have fought since girlhood over everything from hair ribbons to religion. But their rivalry over handsome newcomer Ed Tutweiler Walters, seventyish, is the fiercest yet, and the sisters’ shenanigans are watched with wonder by the whole town, particularly on the weekly bingo nights, when Julia’s and Louise’s barbs fly faster than the bingo balls.

The hostilities are observed most closely by Julia’s [adopted] daughter, Nicole, perpetually caught in the middle. And Nicole’s own life is in turmoil. The town’s newspaper, established before the Revolutionary War, is up for sale, and the forces of change—so dreaded in Runnymede—are symbolized for Nicole by the threat of a corporate takeover of the newspaper that is her life. Nicole is also at a personal turning point: after suffering years of notoriety as a lesbian, she finds herself in the midst of a love affair that would amaze Runnymede as much as it astonishes Nicole herself.

Readers of Rita Mae Brown’s novel Six of One will remember Runnymede and the flamboyant Hunsenmeir sisters, but Bingo stands alone as a funny and touching novel of today’s South, rich in the acerbic observations and lovingly rendered characters that are hallmarks of Rita Mae Brown’s writing.

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About the Author: Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, Six of One, Southern Discomfort, Sudden Death, High Hearts, and a unique manual for writers, Starting from Scratch. She is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, a poet, and has been a teacher of writing. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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By the Same Author: Rubyfruit Jungle (1973, Daughters, Inc.); Six of One (1978, Harper & Row); Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual (1988, Bantam Books); Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser (1997, Bantam Books); Loose Lips (1999, Bantam Books); The Sand Castle (2008, Grove Press); Animal Magnetism: My Life with Critters Great and Small (2009, Ballantine Books); A Nose for Justice (2010, Ballantine Books); Murder Unleashed (2012, Ballantine Books); and Cakewalk (2016, Bantam Books), among many, many others.

A writer, weaving fantasies about the daughter she relinquished for adoption thirty-one years ago, faces a starkly different reality when the young woman suddenly re-enters her life—an event that re-opens old wounds for them both but launches them, and several others, on an unexpected journey of emotional risk-taking, healing and love. Set in England, Australia and southern Italy.

From the Publisher: The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of the Rare family. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing and a kitchen filled with herbs and folk remedies. During the turbulent first years of World War I, Dora becomes the midwife’s apprentice. Together, they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives.

But when Gilbert Thomas, a brash medical doctor, comes to Scots Bay with promises of fast, painless childbirth, some of the women begin to question Miss Babineau’s methods—and after Miss Babineau’s death, Dora is left to carry on alone. In the face of fierce opposition, she must summon all of her strength to protect the birthing traditions and wisdom that have been passed down to her.

Filled with details that are as compelling as they are surprising—childbirth in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion, the prescribing of vibratory treatments to cure hysteria and a mysterious elixir called Beaver Brew—Ami McKay has created an arresting and unforgettable portrait of the struggles that women faced to have control of their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.

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About the Author: Ami McKay is the author of the number–one Canadian bestseller The Birth House, winner of three Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, and a nominee for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Virgin Cure. Originally from Indiana, she now lives with her husband and two sons in Nova Scotia.

From the Back Cover: She could have easily taken the advice of those that overcame the same addiction she allowed to placate to her emotions. However, she continually consumed herself with the momentary high she received each time she inhaled. She stood invincible. Nothing could bring her down. Nobody could come between her and the only thing she found to bring her happiness and a brief intermission from all the problems that drove her to a state of mental anguish. Nothing else could stop the tears from falling. Nothing else allowed her to escape the fact she used and abused her children. Nothing erased the fact she allowed men to violate her daughter because SHE was the one that needed to feel love. Nothing soothed the fact that she could never be the mother she desired to be. Hell, how could she? She barely had a high school education. She had no job, nor the qualification to attain one. She only had what others gave her, which wasn’t deserving of a second thought.

Time after time, she asked herself her purpose. She wondered why God punished her the way He was punishing her. Why God would allow her to carry yet another child? Two relationships with her children already failed. “Why should I have to deal with another one?” she asked herself that frequently.

Many people had tried to minister to her and demanded that she allow God to speak to her instead of damning and blaspheming His name because of her wrongdoing. She, on the other hand never quite acknowledged her own mistakes; only manipulated the plans of the Creator into devious acts, which had actually spared her life more times than she could ever grasp or understand.

From the Dust Jacket: A novel of consummate dramatic sweep and emotional force, Birthright is the story of a father and daughter locked in a bitter contest for control of the world’s most legendary banking house.

Reared in the splendid excess of her family’s London home and country estate; blessed with beauty and a precocious intelligence that has already captured the eve of her empire-building grandfather, Deborah de Kronengold has everything, or so it seems. But her childhood equilibrium is shattered when she discovers that she is adopted, and when she becomes the object of her father Leslie’s malevolence. Upon the deaths of her grandfather Samuel and Madeleine, her lovely and ill-fated mother—and the mysterious disappearance of the will naming Deborah Samuel’s principal heir—Leslie sets in motion a series of shocking and irrevocable events. Deborah is turned out, and with nothing but her resolve to claim her birthright, she moves to New York, and starts to build a financial empire to rival her father’s—and to bring him down.

Birthright is also a constellation of passionate love stories: there is Bash, Deborah’s first love, whose heritage forbids him what he most desires; and David, who offers Deborah wealth and security and adoration—but at a terrible price. Finally, there is the story of another love affair—set in distant war-torn Italy, which unlocks the secret of Deborah’s birthright.

As played out against the glamorous world of international finance, and set in the boardrooms of London, Paris, and New York, in sumptuous townhouses, chateaus, and penthouses, and in Italy and in modern Israel, Birthright cuts a grand and satisfying swath. It is a triumph of the unexpected that will hold the reader captivated right up to its surprising conclusion.

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About the Author: Joseph Amiel was educated at Amherst College and Yale Law School. The author of the novel Hawks, as well as several screenplays, he lives with his wife and two children in New York City.

Once left to die in a Dumpster, no one would have believed that seventeen years later, Jackie would be entering premed in the upcoming fall. More astounding, who would have thought that Jackie would acquire the traits of his rescuers, the Intellectual Hobos, as they were once called. Jackie had a style that mimicked that of his adopted father, Lonnie, and a heart of gold much like that of his uncle Joe. Jackie was determined to follow the path of his uncle Frank. He hoped to become a physician one day. Following the novel, Drawn from the Water, Bitter Cup is book 2 in the series, A Purpose for Living. It is a story about unwanted change forced upon the community of downtown St. George, intertwined with sagas of struggle. Jackie and the members of his extended family are confronted with obstacles they must overcome. Bitter Cup is a story where people discover love, acceptance, and appreciation in light of tragedies.

From the Publisher: Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.

Now in her thirties, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters. The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word “disappoint,” I tasted toast, slightly burnt.

For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). But with crushes comes awareness. As with all bodies, Linda’s is a mystery to her, in this and in other ways. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past.

Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family. Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to him.

This astonishing novel questions many assumptions—about what it means to be a family and to be a friend, to be foreign and to be familiar, to be connected and to be disconnected—from others and from the past, our bodies, our histories, and ourselves.

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About the Author: Monique Truong was born in Saigon and currently lives in New York City. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable Book. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Britain’s Guardian First Book Award. She is the recipient of the PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship, and was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton for 2007-2008.

Sid is married to Martha, a nagging shrew. He has the chance to work abroad and, despite having to leave his daughter, Sarah, he goes. He learns the devastating news that he is adopted. He meets Helen and has an affair. Despite being in love he goes back to his wife. Later he sees Helen and glimpses a small boy who he realizes is his son. He hears from Helen to say she is marrying. Although young Sarah marries Frank. She is soon unhappy and gets divorced. She then marries Dennis. Sid takes early retirement so he can be near his daughter. Sid runs out of money then is taken ill and dies. It is only after his death that Sarah and Martha find out about his adoption which has a devastating effect on them.

From the Publisher: What would be the implications of a teenage boy accidentally discovering he had been adopted at birth and never told?

Nobody knows why sixteen-year-old Paul Chapman, an apparently loving son and a model pupil, has gone off the rails. His mother knows he’s not sleeping at home, his teacher has found him drunk and dishevelled. The change in his character has been as sudden as it has been dramatic. Not the best preparation for the exams that could take him on to a glittering university career.

But then they don’t know that Paul has stumbled across his own adoption order. Suddenly, for Paul, nothing’s quite as it had always seemed, leaving him tormented by a discovery that not only calls into question the motives of his parents, but even casts doubt on his own identity.

His torment soon becomes complete. On a wild, wet night, drinking heavily, he steals a car on a local housing estate and knocks a woman over. At face value, it seems a relatively routine case for the police officers sent to investigate. The woman dies without regaining consciousness.

But soon the incident begins to have implications for more than just Paul, affecting, among others, his adopted “mother,” for so long dominated by a violent, angry husband. She must face up to the prospect of losing her “son” as well as facing her own, almost overwhelming feelings of guilt. Will she fight for him or cave in as she has in the past?

The case resonates also with police officer Nathan Trimmer, who struggles to prevent his judgement from being clouded by the vulnerable teenager that he has taken into custody.

But for local newspaper reporter Jackie Challis, the incident is a golden opportunity. Constantly in search of the one big story that might earn her a job on a national newspaper, she’ll stop at nothing to get the inside track on the relationships involved and sell the story to a tabloid news editor. For her, it’s a chance too good to miss.

All is resolved when the parties come face to face at the graveside in the aftermath of the victim’s funeral. But what will be the outcome?

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About the Author: Howard Robinson has worked for 16 years in public relations in the U.K. The Bitterest Pill is his first novel. His preparation included presenting himself for arrest at a London police station‚ by prior arrangement‚ to research police procedure. He is currently working on his second novel.

From the Dust Jacket: “So I was a ward of the court, and I slept on a cot in the basement of the Pentecostal church until old River Bill, a recently widowed deacon, offered to take me in. The church lady who came to bring me food and extra clothes delivered the news. As she picked the nits out of my hair, she said it was a miracle from God that a man like River Bill would take a wild girl like me to raise as his own daughter....”

Bitterroot Landing introduces Jael, born into a hard life, but a survivor. She will survive even River Bill. The almost impersonal kindness of strangers will rescue her; a priest with a good heart will shelter and teach her; a careful man will take his time and love her back into the world.

Voices have always spoken to Jael in her mind, and some of what they have told her to do has been frightening. But the voices she hears now speak of comfort and courage, teaching her to master the ways other people manage to live. Jael has a job now, cleaning in a church, and a room of her own in the church’s basement. As she dusts the statue of the Virgin Mary, the Virgin speaks peace to her. “There’s definitely too much hurt around here,” she says.

“In flaws, you find the truth,” says the small, dark figure of a woman Jael sculpts out of wax.

“Come and look at the moon,” says the homeless woman she meets at the laundromat.

“Hello, I’m an incest survivor,” say the women in the recovery group that meets every week in the church, just the other side of Jael’s room.

Voices both real and imagined make Jael stronger every day, until she finds she no longer needs them. Until she finds that at last she has a voice of her own.

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About the Author: Born in rural South Carolina, Sheri Reynolds now lives in Richmond. She teaches part-time at Virginia Commonwealth University and is at work on a second novel.

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By the Same Author: The Rapture of Canaan (1995) and The Sweet In-Between (2008).

From the Publisher: Bittersweet Reflections mirrors the feelings of so many children who grew up in St. Patrick’s Orphanage in Montreal, Quebec. It opened in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and was run by the Grey Nuns of Montreal. Here was where the poor, impoverished, Irish immigrants were given shelter as they landed in Canada. In the late nineteen thirties my sister and I were placed in the Orphanage. This book tells about our relationship with the Sisters, our heartaches as little children trying to cope with a strange place and with strangers. It gives the reader some idea of how, as we grew older, we adapted to the regime. You will feel how our lives were influenced by the Sisters. St. Patrick’s included our school as well as a lovely Chapel all housed in the beautiful building. We children helped keep it looking lovely. We enjoyed many things that we would never have experienced in the outside world. Fortunately, we had our paternal Grandmother who was always there for us. I bonded with several of the Sisters who were like the family I never knew. The Grey Nuns of Montreal, and Toronto, as well as some of the American Sisters who cared for us deserve nothing but praise and a sincere thank you.

From the Dust Jacket: David Hartnett’s audacious and haunting first novel plunges ws into a world of terror and guilt even as it tenderly evokes the intimacies of family life, Set in a fictional Jewish ghetto in wartime eastern Europe, Black Milk follows the fortunes of a family of Viennese deportees as they confront the reality of exile. For Alicia, her mother, her son Chaim and uncle Henryk, the tensions of “resettlement” are complicated by encounters with people already inured to the ghetto’s round of humdrum desperation. There is Josef, formerly Alicia’s lover and now a member of the Judenrat administration; Rachel, the adolescent underground activist; Schaefer, the German overseer; and Mendel, an hasidic holy fool. As the novel builds towards its stark and terrible climax, these relationships knot and unravel across a narrative that deftly blends the matter-of-fact with the visionary. Black Milk is not an easy novel to forget.

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About the Author: David Hartnett was born in 1952, and read English at Exeter College, Oxford. He has published three collections of poems, A Signalled Love (1985), House of Moon (1988), and Dark Ages (1992).

From the Dust Jacket: Black Oxen is the story of Carme Risk’s pursuit of her beautiful and not quite human father through two worlds and three changes of identity. In her forties, in the year 2022, Risk has entered narrative therapy. Her memories and her father’s journal take her from the Eden of her earliest childhood to dusty, poor Lequama, a Latin American country, where she and her father become involved with the slightly mad young leaders of a recent revolution and where everyone seems to practice black magic—and, finally, to life in Northern California, where Risk, still in thrall to her elusive father, is now the widow of Lequama’s most notorious torturer.

Black Oxen features romantic intrigue and machete murders, battles and bacchanals. Full of unforgettable characters—from an unusually lucky Taoscal chief, to a sexually ferocious therapist, to a frail billionaire who wants to live forever—it is a deliciously entertaining and beautifully written novel.

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About the Author: Elizabeth Knox is the author of many books, including The Vintner’s Luck, the first to be published outside her native New Zealand. She lives with her family in Wellington.

From Kirkus Reviews: Twenty-six-year-old Barney Price takes two blows—his father’s murder and his wife’s dalliance with his adopted brother, Abner—and heads west over the divide to run down the killers. In Sage County he finds the fear of the Southwestern Syndicate, which threatens the small outfits, finds, too, the small outfits are being organized to rise against the Syndicate. Laying it on the line quickly, Price, as pro tem sheriff, has his way with an all out clean up. Hardy.

From the Back Cover: I had two mothers. Or maybe I had three. There was my real mother who died when I was born. And then there was the woman who claimed to be my mother, my stepmother. Behind them, like a shadowy third, was the crazy lady, the one who had wanted to be my mother most of all. She was both murderer and midwife, my mother’s killer and the one who brought me into the world. Hers were the first pair of human eyes I ever saw.

Black Rainbow follows the intersecting stories of two strangely entangled women. There is Mary Rose, an ordinary young woman who is driven mad by infertility, miscarriages, and ghost babies. And there is Rania, whose mother was murdered by Mary Rose and who becomes obsessed with finding her mother’s killer.

The novel is set in the late ’60s, in suburban New Jersey, the surreal counterculture of Manhattan’s lower east side, and a magic-imbued northern New Mexico hamlet. Rania, the kidnapped infant, is now a teen-ager. School provides little except for a friendship with the charismatic Monique, who has secrets of her own.

When Monique runs away, Rania follows, along with her streetwise boyfriend, to the psychedelic East Village ziggurat called Babylon. Eventually, Rania’s solo search for Mary Rose leads her to rural New Mexico, and a surprising climax that will change her forever.

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About the Author: Miriam Sagan was born in Manhattan on the upper West Side, and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. She left for Boston the day after her high school graduation, and holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. She lived in San Francisco where she met her first husband, Robert Winson (deceased), and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984. Their daughter is Isabel Winson-Sagan.

Her first poetry book, Aegean Doorway, was published by Zephyr Press. She is the author of twenty-five books, including her first novel Coastal Lives and her memoir: Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story which won Best Memoir of the Year from Independent Publishers Association. Her books have also won a Border Library Association Award and a New Mexico Book Award.

Sagan is married to Richard Feldman and has lived for thirty years on Santa Fe’s unfashionable Westside. She founded and directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, which includes the student run magazine Santa Fe Literary Review and the public art installation Poetry Posts.

She has had writer’s residencies in the national parks, sculpture gardens, and in Iceland. She received a Lannan Foundation Marfa residency, and she has been at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Colorado Art Ranch among numerous other places. She does text installation and was the co-curator of a show at Albuquerque’s 516 Gallery combining poetry and sculpture. Most recently, she installed a poem on sand on Miami’s South beach as part of a residency at the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room.

From the Dust Jacket: In 1989 a remarkable film, Ju Dou, banned in China for depicting adultery, was released to worldwide acclaim and nominated for an Academy Award. The film was adapted from the first novel by Liu Heng, one of China’s most important young writers. Black Snow is Liu Heng’s second novel, and it will prove to be equally unsettling.

Li Huiquan returns to Beijing after serving a three-year sentence in a prison labor camp for his involvement in a juvenile street fight. Both his foster parents, who raised Him after be was discovered abandoned in a train station, are dead, and Huiquan is left with nothing but bis mother’s small life’s savings and the attentions of his Auntie Luo, who arranges for his livelihood. Huiquan agrees, with his aunt’s urgings, to sell clothing from a peddler’s cart. It is joyless, tiring work, and Huiquan can barely contain his disdain for the crowds of people eager to snatch up foreign goods.

At night, Huiquan frequents a karaoke bar, where he meets a bearded stranger with connections to the shady world of the black market, a world Huiquan finds both seductive and repulsive. He also meets Zhao Yaqiu, a naïve and silly young singer who becomes the object of his overwhelming obsession and the focus of his previously diffuse anxiety. As his surroundings turn increasingly bleak and meaningless, Huiquan’s attraction to Yaqiu, who, in his mind, may provide the only connection to the society around him, grows dangerously strong.

Black Snow is a stunning psychological portrait of a dissatisfied and emotionally illiterate young man’s desperate search for meaning and companionship in the gray world under totalitarianism. It combines the existential angst of writers such as Camus and Sartre with the disaffection of the American urban novels of the 1980s. Liu Heng’s voice is one of the first of his generation to be heard outside of China, and this novel offers an extraordinary glimpse into the psyche and life-style of the young generation in contemporary Beijing.

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About the Author: Liu Heng was born in Beijing in 1954. The movie Ju Dou was based on his novella Fuxi Fuxi. Cycles of Fate, the film adapted from Black Snow, won the Silver Bear Prize in the Berlin Film Festival.

Howard Goldblatt is a professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The translator of numerous texts, be was awarded the Translation Center Robert Payne Award in 1985. He is the founder and editor of Modern Chinese Literature.

A Christmas story, in which twin sisters are adopted, one by a respectable and one by a slum family, with predictable consequences.