Told in shifting first-person voices that ring with truth and the poetry of the streets, the novel offers a variety of memorable characters. There’s Teresa, Bianca’s mother, a deeply religious woman who has sacrificed much to keep her family together, but finally comes to the painful conclusion that she must break it apart in order to save its individual members. Bianca’s friend Roberto is worn down by the violence that surrounds him, by the “dead young faces lying in the coffin, eyes that seen no more’n eighteen years of life closed forever...” and dreams of a better life for himself and Bianca. But it is Bianca’s voice—full of sharp humor and edgy teenage bravado that barely covers the confusion and aching loneliness underneath—that is the most arresting of all, a voice that touches the heart and shows us something we need to see.

Benedict explores the harsh but vital landscape of the inner city with uncommon insight and authenticity. Her first novel, A World Like This, was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for “deftly evoking a world where love seems impossible to attain, yet managing to make the reader care about characters society has relegated to the lowest rung.” Bad Angel is further evidence of this gifted novelist’s energetic storytelling and profound compassion.

About the Author: Helen Benedict is the author of the novel A World Like This and several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes and Portraits in Print. She is associate professor of journalism at Columbia University.

For Rhoda Penmark, aged nine, has developed a most extraordinary moral code, all her own, and peculiarly fitted for her needs.

Rhoda presents her mother with a problem of such terrifying dimensions that he individual imagination must take over when Mr. March’s story is done.

About the Author: William March (1893-1954) was born in Mobile, Alabama, attended Valparaiso University in Indiana, and studied law at the University of Alabama. He served in the Marine Corps during World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. After the war, he took a job with the Waterman Steamship Corporation, and worked there for eighteen years before giving up his position to devote himself to writing. March published three volumes of stories and six novels, including The Bad Seed, his final book.

The IT happened!

The craft was plucked out of the solar system to crash on a wild planet never seen by man. Only an infant boy, sleeping in stasis inside a safety cube, survived. He was to become Balzan, adopted son in a tribe of bipeds resembling earth cats!

Reptilian raiders, flashing deadly neutron swords, had taken Balzan’s cat-people into slavery to satisfy the blood-lust of an insatiable queen. Only Balzan could hope to rescue them. But first he must learn the terrible truth about the evil blood stones, even if the knowledge destroyed him!

Now Balzan was being held captive by another tribe of winged humanoids, living deep in underground caverns lighted only by glowing fungi. In this strange world where all women were the wives of all men, where no one was owner or owned, Balzan was plunged nto terrifying adventure ... with the slimy, gigantic night crawlers ... with the most horrible monster of all, the fiendish Sl’yth!

A new world for Balzan to survive, where Orala the priestess plans to seduce him and Androth the Krell king to kill him.

Only the Lights of Zetar, dazzling sentries left over from a civilization dead millions of years, can thwart these enemies and emblazon a path between hallucination and reality.

Balzan wins his weirdest combat yet in a twilight world of slaves and six-legged spider anthropoids.

About the Author: Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaican writer and poet. He was a communist in his early life, but after a visit to the Soviet Union, decided that communism was too disciplined and confining. He was never an actual member of the Communist Party. McKay was involved in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature; Banjo (1929); and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously.

into this world arrives twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth “Buzzy” Price, an aspiring poet only too aware of her suburban background. Moral support is at hand from shy but devoted Henry, the Howes’ biological son—though perhaps Buzzy is most grateful for her friend’s connection to her awn unrequited love, Afua’s boyfriend, the worldly Marcel.

As the years pass and a coalition government takes office, Buzzy’s fortunes rise and the elder Howes’ lives threaten to unravel. But do the civilising possibilities of art involve enlarging Buzzy’s romantic ambitions, or revealing their moral complacency? And could meek and gentle Henry, having angered his family by going to work for the political enemy, turn out to be steelier than anyone thought—as steely, even, as his formidable adopted sister?

About the Author: Tim Glencross studied modern languages at Cambridge University. He worked as a Shadow Minister’s researcher and speechwriter before qualifying as a lawyer. He lives in London.

On one side are Christabel’s indomitable Scottish grandmother, and Isobel, the unsentimental narrator. On the other are the foster mother and the social workers. Everyone suffers, but the main casualty is the child.

About the Author: Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938, and educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. From here she won an Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford where in 1960 she was awarded an honours degree in History. The day after she finished her final exams, she married Hunter Davies, whom she met and fell in love with at the age of 17. Since 1963 Margaret Forster has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to Radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She lives half the year in London and half in the Lake District, and is married to the writer Hunter Davies. They have three children.

By the Same Author: Shadow Baby (1996), among others.

When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet—the devious Major Alex Fisher—in order to destroy the Barrington family firm, just as the company plans to build its new luxury liner, the MV Buckingham.

Meanwhile, in London, Harry and Emma’s adopted daughter wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art where she falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him. Both families are delighted until Priscilla Bingham, Jessica’s future mother-in-law, has a visit from an old friend, Lady Virginia Fenwick, who drops her particular brand of poison into the wedding chalice.

Then, without warning, Cedric Hardcastle, a bluff Yorkshireman who no one has come across before, takes his place on the board of Barrington’s. This causes an upheaval that none of them could have anticipated, and will change the lives of every member of the two families.

The master storyteller showcases his talent like never before as the Clifton and Barrington families march forward into the sixties, in this epic tale of love, revenge, ambition and betrayal.

About the Author: Jeffrey Archer, whose novels and short stories include Kane and Abel, A Prisoner of Birth and Cat O’ Nine Tales, has topped the bestseller lists around the world, with sales of over 270 million copies.

He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction (seventeen times), short stories (four times) and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries).

The author is married with two sons, and lives in London and Cambridge.

By the Same Author: Only Time Will Tell (2011); Sins of the Father (2012); and Best Kept Secret (2013), among many others.

But in the course of his wanderings, Cyrus finds himself caught between the innocence and insouciance of his youth and the responsibility and worry that await him in adulthood. When his parents’ marriage falls apart and his family is shattered, Cyrus is forced out of his carefree existence into a more severe reality.

With an acute ear for the nuances of Indian English and a comic appreciation of a boy’s life, Ardashir Vakil creates an extraordinarily vivid tableau of India while at the same time drawing a rich portrait of adolescence and its appetites. Beach Boy is, as John Updike notes, “a long ode to boyish hunger, and to the rich variety of stuffs that hold it at bay.”

The winner of a Betty Trask award and a finalist for the Whitbread Prize for first fiction in England, Beach Boy has been heralded by American, British, and Indian critics alike for riding the crest of a new wave of Indian fiction that is bringing us fresh voices and novel writing.

About the Author: Ardashir Vakil was born in Bombay in 1962. He teaches English at Pimlico Comprehensive School in London, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. Beach Boy, his first novel, won a Betty Trask award, was a finalist for the Whitbread Prize in the United Kingdom, and was a bestseller in India.

But midway across the country, by a trick of circumstances, motherhood catches up with Taylor when she becomes the guardian of an abandoned baby girl she calls Turtle. Eventually the pair arrive on two flat tires in Tucson, where they meet Mattie, the proprietor of an extraordinary auto-repair shop with a glorious vegetable garden out back and, we gradually learn, a safe-house for Central American refugees upstairs.

After a disastrous stint in a crumbling downtown hotel, Taylor finds a perfect housemate in Lou Ann Ruiz, another native Kentuckian, whose husband has just left her. With sisterly fondness and a measure of painful honesty, they keep each other going.

But Taylor and Lou Ann are also part of a larger collection of intertwined lives: Edna and Virgie, the elderly neighbors whose friendship is built upon a marvelous secret; Mattie, who offers Taylor employment and a crash course on the human condition; and Estevan and Esperanza, who have filed a terrifying past in Guatemala and wait to begin their lives again. And there is Turtle, who becomes a healing force in all of their lives and a tie that binds them together.

This is a novel about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places. For despite desperate circumstances, these characters’ lives are buoyed by a warm humor and stalwart optimism. The Bean Trees is a story of laughter and heartache, and it marks a wonderful debut for a new contemporary novelist.

About the Author: Barbara Kingsolver is a fiction writer, poet, journalist, biologist, and human-rights activist who grew up in eastern Kentucky and now lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and daughter. The Bean Trees is her first novel.

Soon you will hear them at night, high in the mountains—the fleet, deadly sweep of their claws, the blood-chilling thunder of their roar filling the canyon
ONE IN SEARCH OF THE OTHER...

He has lived as a young man, while the beast within uses him, consumes him ... She has lived as a woman, waiting, traveling in secret to find him and arouse one desire within him.
WITH ONE POWERFUL PURPOSE...

But to awaken him, she must first drive the beast to new limits of courage, to a culminating act of bravery performed high in the cliffs—an act that will unite them at last ... or end in a savage, inexplicable destiny...

About the Author: Robert Stallman first employed his abundant talents as a storyteller in entertaining his friends in a one room school in Illinois during the Depression. At sixteen Stallman left the flat Midwest for the mountains of New Mexico, where he soon started work as a telephone linesman. Marriage, the army, a daughter and college followed, and ten or so years in which he was living stories instead of writing them. He travelled, worked at several jobs, then did further study before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University. He began writing in his spare time—poetry, stories, articles, essays—and quickly became totally absorbed by it. One day someone suggested he should write a book about a monster. The seed planted, Stallman started writing, completed his first book, The Orphan, and found that ideas for further books kept coming.

By the Same Author: The Orphan (1980) and The Captive (1981).

After Mr. Brenner is killed, Davy becomes the real leader of the family--protecting them, foraging for food and hunting in the woods, scouting to see if the Indians are about to attack. His knowledge of the woods not only helps the Brenners to survive but enables Davy to keep the others of the district informed of danger when it threatens.

The love that Sara Brenner and Davy feel for each other grows and deepens, but the vengeful figure of Jamie, who also loves Sara, is always in the background--for Davy knows that Jamie will try to capture Sara and also burn their home.

As the Rangers, led by Brant, attack the Cherry Valley settlements, Davy calls upon all his knowledge of the forest and the ways of the Indians to outwit Brant, his Rangers, and the Indians themselves. In doing so and protecting Sara and her family, he takes the one giant step over the threshold to manhood and, in making the most important decision of his life, learns that real security lies in the ability to stand on his own. He also understands that war demands the utmost and extracts it from a man standing alone at the frontier within himself.

About the Author: Born in Hays, Kansas, Ray Grant Toepfer attended the University of Wisconsin where he received a Master’s Degree in English in 1943.

The Army then took the prospective author for from his Midwest origins. For a year her served in Greeland as librarian and as editor of the base newspaper.

Upon his discharge from the Army, Mr. Toepfer worked as an advertising copywriter and encyclopedia editor before enrolling, in 1963, in the Ph.D. program of the City University of New York, Hunter College. He is currently working on his doctorate, teaching English and creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Mr. Toepfer’s previous work, The White Cockade, was based upon events in New York State during the American Revolution. The Scarlet Guidon, the author’s first novel, was described by The Library Journal as "a vivid and readable portrayal of the War on the Southern side.

Many years later, Eithne is an artist and tries to remember her sister Beatrice in her sketches of the dark wooded bogs behind the house. She searches for the meaning of her mother Sarah’s steadfast silence and her father’s drink-fuelled rage, and for the secret hidden at the heart of their family.

And then, just as suddenly as Beatrice had vanished, another girl appears...

About the Author: Noëlle Harrison was born in London in 1967. She studied at the University of London, and moved to Ireland in 1991. She has written and produced three stage plays, Northern Landscapes, Black Virgin and Runaway Wife, and one short film, Blue Void. She has won awards for her short stories, and has written extensively on visual art in Ireland, contributing to various journals and artists’ catalogues. She lectures part time on the history of art. Beatrice is her first novel.

Noëlle Harrison lives in Oldcastle, County Meath, with her young son.

At her mother’s funeral, she is given a birth certificate that is key to a long-held family secret. Grappling with this mystery and overwhelmed by memories of her lover, Julia is at a loss until comfort, warmth, and passion come to her from an unexpected source: her lover’s wife.

Because I Have Loved and Hidden It is poetic, daring, and evocative a portrait of fierce, human longing that is unafraid to chart the strange geometry of love.

About the Author: Elise Moser is a seasoned veteran of the Canadian book scene. She is the president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, the literary editor of The Rover, and a sales rep for Lexa Publishers’ Representatives. She is also a two-time winner of the CBC/QWE short-story competition. A co-editor of the highly praised Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love, her stories have appeared in literary magazines across the country. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Elise is a graduate of McGill University University, and lives in Montreal.

Thanks to her wealthy and well-connected family, twenty-six-year-old Marta is used to getting whatever she wants. And what she wants is a good time.

That is, until her father’s wife—the woman who raised her—becomes ill. Beautiful young Marta is forced to witness her unfaithful, brutish father abandon her adoptive mother in her final moments. After her father’s swift remarriage, Marta is surprised to discover that she is now the sole heir of her late mother’s sizeable estate. For the first time, she can choose to cut ties and establish her true self, apart from her parents, her social standing, and the complications of a life of excess. From the balmy beaches of Mexico to New York City, Marta searches for clues to her unconventional heritage and seeks to shed her family’s tradition of secrecy and betrayal as she finds her own way.

About the Author: Lorea Canales is a lawyer, journalist, translator, and critically acclaimed novelist. One of the first Mexican women admitted to Georgetown Law, Canales worked in antitrust and electoral law in Washington, DC, and Mexico before joining the newspaper Reforma as a legal correspondent.

Since then, Canales has taught law at Instituto Tecnoldgico Auténomo de México, edited for the New York Times Syndicate in its Spanish news service, and worked for Felipe Calderén’s presidential campaign in Mexico.

In 2010, Canales received a master’s in creative writing from New York University. She published her novel Apenas Marta (Becoming Marta) in 2011 and Los perros (The Dogs) in 2013. Canales currently lives in New York.

The Beet Queen is filled with unforgettable characters: besides Mary, who seems ordinary but causes a miracle, and Karl—beautiful, weak, seductive, and without his sister’s gift for survival—there are: their cousin Sita, lovely, disturbed, ambitious and jealous; Wallace Pfef, president of the Argus Chamber of Commerce, who bears a lonely secret; the mixed-blood Chippewa Celestine James, and her daughter, Dot, whom we first met in Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich’s previous book.

Through the years, characters in this family drama—that is suffused with a dark humor—clash, draw apart, and meet again. Theirs is a story grounded in the tenacity of relationships, in the magic of natural events and the unending mystery of the human condition. Like Love Medicine, The Beet Queen is written in prose of irresistible beauty and breathtaking clarity.

About the Author: Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, is of German-American and Chippewa descent, and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Her first book was Jacklight, a volume of poetry. Her second, Love Medicine, was the winner of both the Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times award for best novel of 1985. Foreign editions of Love Medicine have been published by major houses in England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Holland, Spain, France, and Denmark.

She lives in New Hampshire with her husband/collaborator Michael Dorris, and their children Abel, Sara, Madeline, Persia and Pallas.

By the Same Author: Tracks (1988) and The Round House (2012, Harper), among others.

Once, many years before, there had been a raid. That was some excitement, but it had happened many years ago and had all worn off. This Bill Trapp thing was the first big excitement since then, and everybody was ready. Fifteen years now he lived in the old May Place. Fifteen years he lived there without saying hardly a mumbling word to anyone. Fifteen years, and people figured that Something should have happened. So there were the stories about the strange lights and the strange noises, and stories about the way things grew inside the fence.

During all this time, the old lonely white man, Bill Trapp, just stayed inside his fence. Sometimes, once a week about, he could be seen pushing his wheelbarrow uptown to get supplies. But mostly he kept to himself until this thing happened, but it was about time. Fifteen years was a long time to wait.

A lone white man in the midst of a colored community waited—excited and tense.

About the Author: William Demby was born in 1922 in Pittsburgh and spent his early youth in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in the coal mining region which is the locale for Beetlecreek. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947. Mr. Demby has traveled and lived abroad since 1949, working in Europe as a jazz musician and as a writer for films and television, and studying painting in Rome. He now lives with his wife and son in New York City, where he teaches. He is the author of The Catacombs, a novel published in 1965.

Winged creatures are falling from the sky.

Untruths are surfacing.

A city is dying.

Seventeen-year-old Maxwell Odyssey never wanted to save the world.

Now she has no choice.

About the Author: T.W.R. Shelton is currently a student at Western Washington University, studying to achieve her teaching certificate in Secondary English Language Arts. She is obsessed with the night sky, the ocean, and all other things great and wondrous. She lives in Washington with her quirky cat, Eleanor. This is her first book.

Hard as it has been for Freya to try to reconcile her two families, it has been harder for her mothers. Proud of her mature and sensible adoptive daughter, Liv fears Melody’s restless influence. Meanwhile, forced to give up her baby when she was just a teenager herself, Melody now craves Freya’s love and acceptance—but only really knows how to have fun.

Then tragedy strikes, and the bonds of love that tie these three women together will be tested to the max. Can they finally let go of the past, and pull together in order to withstand the toughest challenge life could throw them?

About the Author: Kate Long is the author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook, Swallowing Grandma, Queen Mum, The Daughter Game and Mothers & Daughters. She was born and raised in Lancashire and lives with her husband and two sons in Shropshire.

After years of mental and physical abuse the boy discovers that he was secretly adopted and begins an unlikely journey to search for his family. In this wonderful Huck Finn type story one surprising deception after another surfaces, culminating in a secret so powerful it had to be buried for more than fifty years.

Peppered full of twists, life determining challenges, positive role models, and many surprising skeletons in the closet, it ends with the unraveling of a father’s ultimate vengeance and a mother’s final retaliation.

About the Author: Hal English is a community banker that once served as an acting mayor of one of the largest towns in New Jersey. He is one of six million adopted children in the United States and one of 250,000 Big Bother mentors. He is a member of both National Alliance of Business Leadership and Leadership New Jersey. English has spent his life in service to his community, giving back what it has given to him by serving on dozens of non-profit boards and commissions and has helped raise millions of dollars for those less fortunate.

What other explanation could there be? With her dark complexion and kinky hair, so unlike her fair-skinned parents, Lara knew she was different. At eight she finally learned the word “adopted.” Twenty-two years later, a stranger arrives as she blows out the candles on her thirtieth birthday cake—a woman in a blue-and-black head tie who also claims the title “Lara’s mother.”

Lara, always in control, now finds her life slipping free of the stranglehold she’s had on it. Unexpected, dangerously unfamiliar emotions are turning Lara’s life upside down, pulling her between Nigeria and London, forcing her to confront the truth about her past. But if she’s brave enough to embrace the lives of her two mothers, she may discover once and for all what it truly means to be Lara.

About the Author: Lola Jaye was born and raised in London, England, where she still makes her home; she has also lived briefly in Nigeria. By the Time You Read This—Lola’s first U.S. novel—was published by HarperCollins in 2009. Her inspirational essay “Reaching for the Stars: How You Can Make Your Dreams Come True,” in which she charted her journey from foster child to author, was released in 2009 as part of the U.K.’s wildly popular Quick Reads program.

Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found herself drawn into the world of Orthodox Judaism and is now being pressed to make a commitment to that religion. Karla, a devoted social worker hoping to adopt a child with her husband, is falling in love with the owner of a newspaper stand outside her office. Ne’er-do-well Lenny is living at home, approaching another relapse into heroin addiction.

In the course of battling their own demons—and one another—the Litvinoff clan is called upon to examine long-held articles of faith that have formed the basis of their lives together and their identities as individuals. In the end, all the family members will have to answer their own questions and decide what—if anything—they still believe in.

Hailed by the Sunday Times (London) as “one of the outstanding novels of the year,” The Believers explores big ideas with a light touch, delivering a tragic, comic family story as unsparing as it is filled with compassion.

About the Author: Zoë Heller is the author of two previous novels, Everything You Know and What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal], which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. She lives in New York.