Often considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Bleak House blends together several literary genres—detective fiction, romance, melodrama, and satire—to create an unforgettable portrait of the decay and corruption at the heart of English law and society in the Victorian era. Opening in the swirling mists of London, the novel revolves around a court case that has dragged on for decades—the infamous Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs. As Dickens takes us through the case’s history, he presents a cast of characters as idiosyncratic and memorable as any he ever created, including the beautiful Lady Dedlock, who hides a shocking secret about an illegitimate child and a long-lost love; Mr. Bucket, one of the first detectives to appear in English fiction; and the hilarious Mrs. Jellyby, whose endless philanthropy has left her utterly unconcerned about her own family. As a question of inheritance becomes a question of murder, the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, struggles to discover the truth about her birth and her unknown mother’s tragic life. Can the resilience of her love transform a bleak house? And—more devastatingly—will justice prevail? Originally published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853, it was then issued in book form.

From the Dust Jacket: Ida Morgan-Weiss, professor of humanities, is a 39-year-old Jewish woman who is detached from her past and sees a great void in her future. Adopted at birth, she is haunted by the mystery of her origins. Recently separated, she longs for the child that her husband never wanted to have.

When Ida’s husband leaves her for another woman, she is determined to change her life. Promptly she secures a professorship in Boston, moves out of her house in Washington, and moves in with her former roommate, Rose. Like Ida, Rose is nearing forty and is struggling with the desire to bear and nurture a child. But Rose’s decision, unlike Ida’s, is uncomplicated by the need for a man in her life.

Ida’s attraction to a new faculty colleague draws her into another complex relationship. She still can not grasp the present and forge a future for want of a past. Ida finally realizes that she can only resolve her personal dilemma by making a long journey, a journey in search of the mother she never knew. Only then could she know what it means to fulfill the imperative of her Jewish heritage: to “choose life ... for a blessing and not for a curse.”

This journey through the heart of a late-waking woman is movingly charted in gentle, impressionistic prose by a talented new writer.

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About the Author: Linda Bayer has taught literature and art history at Wesleyan University, Boston University, and the Hebrew University, where she occupied an endowed chair. She holds a Ph.D. in English and art history and is currently completing a second doctorate in psychology and education. Her articles, short stories, and television documentaries span the fields of literary criticism, psychological analysis, the arts, feminism, American Studies, and Jewish concerns. She is the author of a text on Renaissance art and a book on literature and architecture, The Gothic Imagination. This is her first novel. Her permanent residence is in Washington, D.C.

From the Publisher: In Blessings, her third, most ambitious, and most accomplished novel, bestselling author Sheneska Jackson proves that she can capture the sound of women talking like no one else can. She knows what thrills, angers, and motivates them, and she shares the secrets that spill out from under hair dryers with heartbreaking and often hilarious candor. At Blessings, Patricia Brown’s Los Angeles salon, we listen in on the dish and the drama and get real with the four unforgettable women who work there.

Pat is the owner and matriarch of the salon, and she presides over Blessings with a kind but commanding air—preventing fiery arguments, smoothing over conflicts, and lending a sympathetic ear to those who need it. But she may never get a chance to be a mother of her own children. After discovering she is infertile, she embarks on a mission to adopt a child, but learns that the process is filled with more anguish than she expected.

Zuma is Blessings’ star stylist, and she knows it. This brash diva is a self-described superwoman committed to making her dream of being both a businesswoman and a mom come true. She’s got so much confidence that she has vowed to get artificially inseminated if she doesn’t find Mr. Right soon—and she secretly hopes that this will eradicate the indescribable sorrow lingering from the abortion she had years ago.

Faye, another stylist, can’t quite forget the memory of her late husband. Lonely and overweight, she turns to food to dull the pain of raising her two children alone. Her daughter has grown up into an explosive young woman, and her little boy is learning the hard way how to survive in the world without a dad. But companionship and support will come along when she’s least expecting it.

Sandy, the manicurist, is still searching for her own fulfillment and can’t be bothered with the needs of her two small kids. Though she makes no apologies for her highly neglectful mothering, she ultimately makes a mother’s biggest sacrifice.

Written with Jackson’s trademark skill and sass, Blessings paints a deeply moving picture of female struggle and triumph. As Pat, Zuma, Faye, and Sandy laugh, weep, argue, and console each other, Jackson reveals the priceless, inextricable bond between motherhood and sisterhood, and shows why she’s become a beloved chronicler of the hearts and minds of women.

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About the Author: Sheneska Jackson was born in South Central Los Angeles and currently lives in the San Fernandoi Valley. She teaches fiction writing for UCLA’s Extension program. Blessings is her third novel.

From the Dust Jacket: At the age of sixty Aristide Michal is exuberantly happy. From a Greek childhood scarred by poverty he has risen to be proprietor and master chef of a superb small restaurant in the south of France. Although he has never married the woman he calls his wife, nor adopted the orphan he calls his son, Aristide regards them both with a love approaching adoration. It is for them, more than for himself, that he withdraws his life’s savings from the bank to buy the building that houses his restaurant. For his wife it will provide security; for his son, now a remarkably handsome young man, it will provide a future.

Thus Storm Jameson sets the stage for a wry comedy in which a good man, a vain woman, and a young rogue play out a telling commentary on life’s absurd pitfalls.

A reckless whim and an act of charity set off a chain reaction and overnight Aristide is stripped, shamed, humiliated. Everything he has counted on for the years ahead is gone—everything but a stubborn acceptance life with all its frailties. How he manages to summon a kind of triumph out of his hurt and anger and defeat provides a novel of compelling fascination.

It is a commonplace to say that Storm Jameson is a marvelously accomplished writer. In The Blind Heart she is at her storytelling best, and Aristide Michal is one of her most memorable—and sympathetic—creations.

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About the Author: Storm Jameson (Margaret Storm Jameson) was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, England. After taking honors in English at Leeds University she was awarded a research scholarship to work on modern European drama at King’s College in London. For a time she was a copy writer, wrote dramatic criticism, was a publisher, then became a full-time novelist. She is married to Guy Patterson Chapman, formerly Professor of Modern History at Leeds University.

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By the Same Author: The Intruder (1956, Macmillan), among many others.

From the Publisher: The future changes in the BLINK of an eye. ... Or does it?

Seth Borders isn’t your average graduate student. For starters, he has one of the world’s highest IQs. Now he’s suddenly struck by an incredible power—the ability to see multiple potential futures.

Still reeling from this inexplicable gift, Seth stumbles upon a beautiful woman named Miriam. Unknown to Seth, Miriam is a Saudi Arabian princess who has fled her veiled existence to escape a forced marriage of unimaginable consequences. Cultures collide as they’re thrown together and forced to run from an unstoppable force determined to kidnap or kill Miriam.

Seth’s mysterious ability helps them avoid capture once, then twice. But with no sleep, a fugitive princess by his side, hit men a heartbeat away, and a massive manhunt steadily closing in, evasion becomes Impossible.

An intoxicating tale set amidst the shifting sands of the Middle East and the back roads of America, Blink engages issues as ancient as the earth itself ... and as current as today’s headlines.

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About the Author: Ted Dekker is known for novels that combine adrenaline-laced plot twists with the supernatural and the surreal. He is the best selling author of multiple titles including Heaven’s Wager, When Heaven Weeps, Thunder of Heaven and the co-author of Ihe bestselling series Blessed Child and A Man Called Blessed. Raised in the jungles of Indonesia, Ted now lives with his family in the mountains of Colorado.

From the Dust Jacket: At 45, Mo Mozart has struggled as a single mother to bring up her first two children. Now they’ve flown the nest, she’s concentrating on maintaining a career while being a good wife to her second, younger husband, Jack, and mother to their little daughter, Lily. With the help of yoga, meditation and her close group of girlfriends, Mo feels she’s at last getting the balance of her life right. Until, that is, Jack’s highly strung twin sister asks her to help trace their birth mother, Caitlin. Jack wants nothing to do with it. Her involvement in the search triggers turmoil in Mo’s life, exacerbated by the onset of menopausal symptoms, Jack’s involvement with someone else, and an old vagrant woman who unleashes unwelcome, supernatural encounters.

The hunt for Caitlin is a compelling journey of clues and dead ends, coincidence and revelation, that exposes much of the grief involved in teenage sex and adoption. It is set within a wry and authentic portrayal of the complex lifestyle which so many contemporary women lead, and against an evocative depiction of London’s historic Crystal Palace district. Each of the acutely drawn characters has personal issues, all of which raise questions about spirituality and sexuality, motherhood, relationships and family bonds.

Forced to use all her professional skills, personal contacts and psychic gifts to locate Jack’s biological mother, Mo gains a deeper understanding of herself in the process, and unearths unexpected information about her family and the intimate lives of her best friends.

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About the Author: Lucy McCarraher is an expert in work-life balance, advising organisations and individuals, and is joint author of self-help publication, The Book of Balanced Living. She has also worked in television as a writer, script-editor, concept developer and presenter; and as a researcher, journalist, book editor, writer’s agent, ghost writer, theatre critic and magazine publisher. Lucy was born and brought up in Chelsea and, after spending eight years in Australia, moved South through London via Stockwell, Kennington, Peckham and Crystal Palace. She has two adult sons and now lives in rural South Norfolk with her husband and two young daughters.

From the Dust Jacket: Blood Brothers is M.J. Akbar’s amazing story of three generations of a Muslim family—based on his own—and how they deal with the fluctuating contours of Hindu-Muslim relations.

Telinipara, a small jute mill town some 30 miles north of Kolkata along the Hooghly, is a complex Rubik’s Cube of migrant Bihari workers, Hindus and Muslims; Bengalis, poor and “bhadralok”; and Sahibs who live in the safe, “foreign” world of Victoria Jute Mill. Into this scattered inhabitation enters a child on the verge of starvation, Prayaag, who is saved and adopted by a Muslim family, converts to Islam and takes on the name of Rahmatullah.

As Rahmatullah knits Telinipara into a community, friendship, love, trust and faith are continually tested by the cancer of riots. Incidents—conversion, circumcision, the arrival of plague or electricity—and a fascinating array of characters—the ultimate Brahmin, Rahmatullah’s friend Girija Maharaj, the workers’ leader, Bauna Sardar, the storyteller, Talat Mian, the poet-teacher, Syed Ashfaque, the smiling mendicant, Burha Deewana, the sincere Sahib, Simon Hogg, and then the questioning, demanding third generation of the author and his friend Kamala—interlink into a narrative of social history as well as a powerful memoir.

Blood Brothers is a chronicle of its age, its canvas as enchanting as its narrative, a personal journey through change as tensions build, stretching the bonds of a lifetime to breaking point and demanding, in the end, the greatest sacrifice. Its last chapters, written in a bare-bones, unemotional style, are the most moving as the author searches for hope amid raw wounds with a surgeon’s scalpel.

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About the Author: M.J. Akbar, founder and editor-in-chief of The Asian Age, a multi-edition daily newspaper, and the Deccan Chronicle is a leading journalist and author. After successfully launching and establishing a weekly news magazine, Sunday, and a daily newspaper, The Telegraph, in the ’70s and ’80s, he briefly interrupted his career in journalism to enter politics in November 1989 as an elected representative in Parliament. He returned to writing and editing in 1993.

His last book, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity, has gone into several editions, and has also been successfully published in the U.K. and U.S. His biography of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nehru: The Making of a Nation, is a classic that remains in print more than a decade after it was first published, as does his analysis of the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, Kashmir: Behind the Vale. His other books include India: The Siege Within, Riot After Riot, and a collection of his articles, Byline.

From the Dust Jacket: Rome’s great hero Julius Caesar has been brutally murdered by his most trusted allies. While these self-appointed Liberatores seek refuge in the senate, they have underestimated one man: Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, a man whose name will echo through history as Augustus Caesar.

Uniting with his great rival Mark Antony, Octavian will stop at nothing to seek retribution from the traitors and avenge his father’s death. His greatest hatred is reserved for Brutus, Caesar’s childhood friend and greatest ally, now leader of the conspirators.

As the people take to the streets of Rome, the Liberatores must face their fate. Some flee the city; others will not escape mob justice. Not a single one will die a natural death.

And the reckoning will come for Brutus on the sweeping battlefield at Philippi.

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About the Author: Conn Iggulden is one of the most successful authors of historical fiction writing today.

His two No.1 bestselling series, on Julius Caesar and on the Mongol Khans of Central Asia, describe the founding of the greatest empires of their day. Conn Iggulden lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and their children.

From the Dust Jacket: Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the newly settled Mississippi river valley, The Blood of Heaven is a brutal, heartrending exploration of revolution and religious zeal, love and brotherhood, and is an astonishing first book by a twenty-six-year-old writer.

It is 1799, and the recently formed United States is gradually spreading westward. Angel Woolsack, the son of a firebrand preacher, flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, who is proselytizing to the early settlers of Missouri. With his adopted brother, Samuel Kemper, Angel descends into the fractious world of the southern borderlands, where he falls in with a charismatic highwayman. At a brothel in the backstreets of Natchez, he finds Red Kate, the woman who will be the love of his life and a fellow “child of desolation.” Kate leaves her life to follow Angel to the disputed lands of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spanish and the French. Here, embroiled in the moneymaking schemes of the landed gentry, Angel witnesses the brutal system. of slave labor, which is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering. The scene shifts from backcountry wilds to the smoky anterooms of colonial New Orleans, where scherners, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries are plotting to break away from the young United States under the banner of their renegade founding father, Aaron Burr. With Red Kate by his side, bearing arms and a troubled child for him, Angel becomes the leader of a band of brothers in a land ripe for insurrection. But is he truly the master of his own fate?

The Blood of Heaven is a searing portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of an emerging America where anything was possible.

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About the Author: Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans in 1986, attended Louisiana State University, and received his MFA from Florida State University. He was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, which was judged by Amy Hempel. Wascom lives in Tallahassee, Florida. The Blood of Heaven is his first novel.

From Dust Jacket: Naomi Novik’s beloved Temeraire series, a brilliant combination of fantasy and history that reimagines the Napoleonic wars as fought with the aid of intelligent dragons, is a twenty-first-century classic. From the first volume, His Majesty’s Dragon, readers have been entranced by the globe-spanning adventures of the resolute Capt. William Laurence and his brave but impulsive dragon, Temeraire. Now, in Blood of Tyrants, the penultimate volume of the series, Novik is at the very height of her powers as she brings her story to its widest, most colorful canvas yet.

Shipwrecked and cast ashore in Japan with no memory of Temeraire or his own experiences as an English aviator, Laurence finds himself tangled in deadly political intrigues that threaten not only his own life but England’s already precarious position in the Far East. Age-old enmities and suspicions have turned the entire region into a powder keg ready to erupt at the slightest spark—a spark that Laurence and Temeraire may unwittingly provide, leaving Britain faced with new enemies just when they most desperately reed allies instead.

For to the west, another, wider conflagration looms. Napoleon has turned on his former ally, the emperor Alexander of Russia, and is even now leading the largest army the world has ever seen to add that country to his list of conquests. It is there, outside the gates of Moscow, that a reunited Laurence and Temeraire—along with some unexpected allies and old friends—will face their ultimate challenge ... and learn whether or not there are stronger ties than memory.

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About the Author: Naomi Novik is the acclaimed author of His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles, Tongues of Serpents, and Crucible of Gold, the first seven volumes of the Temeraite series, which has been optioned by Peter Jackson, the Academy Award-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In 2007, Novik received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention. A history buff with a particular interest in the Napoleonic era, Novik studied English literature at Brown University, then did graduate work in computer science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. She is also the author of the graphic novel Will Supervillains Be on the Final? Novik lives in New York City with husband Charles Ardai and daughter Evidence, and an excessive number of purring computers.

From the Dust Jacket: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams transports readers to the majestic landscapes and hard Native American lives of the desert Southwest and into the embrace of a way of looking at the world that seems almost like revelation. Born to a storytelling Native mother and a roughneck, song-singing cowboy father, Nasdijj has always lived on the jagged-edged margins of American society, yet hardship and isolation have only brought him greater clarity—and a gift for language that is nothing short of breathtaking.

Nasdijj tells of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, of the young boy’s struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome, and of their last fishing trip together. It is a heartbreaking story, written with great power and a diamond-like poetry. But whether Nasdijj is telling us about his son, about the chaotic, alternately harrowing and comical life he led with his own parents, or about the vitality and beauty of Native American culture, his voice is always one of searching honesty, wry humor, and a nearly cosmic compassion. While Nasdijj struggles with his impossible status as someone of two separate cultures, he also remains a contradiction in a larger sense: he cares for those who often shun him, he teaches hope though he often has none for himself, and he comes home the the land he then must leave.

The Blood Runs Luke a River Through My Dreams is the memoir of a man who has survived a hard life with grace, who has taken the past experience of pain and transformed it into a determination to care for the most vulnerable among us, and who has found an almost unspeakable beauty where others would find only sadness. This is a book that will touch your soul.

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About the Author: Nasdijj is told he was born in a Navajo hogan in 1950. His mother was a Navajo, his father a cowboy. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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By the Same Author: The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (2003, Ballantine).

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Compiler’s Note: Due to the allegations of fraud against the author, I have classified his books as fiction. See also, “Navahoax,” a lengthy exposé about the author’s alleged Native American heritage published in LA Weekly in 2006; and Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young (2017, Graywolf Press).

From the Dust Jacket: From the day the little girls pricked their fingers and swore they’d be blood sisters forever, through the wild and hopeful years of college, the four friends thought they’d be inseparable:

Helen, the up-and-coming academic;

Jen, the prettiest girl around, who wants nothing more than to settle down with her high school sweetheart;

Bonnie, the aspiring reporter and devout feminist; and

Libby, the ringleader—the sexy, elusive, icy ballerina who binds them together forever.

One by one the girls marry and begin new lives as wives and mothers—all except Libby, who is left painfully on her own. And secretly, she hates it. Then one day, Libby disappears, tearing a hole in the fabric of her three friends’ lives. And as Helen, Jen, and Bonnie begin the search for their lost friend the clues they uncover make them wonder whether they ever knew Libby at all—clues that make the question their friends and their husbands. Only the three of them hold the key to Libby s secret--and only they can discover what really did happen to her.

A moving story of four women coming of age in 1970s Colorado, Blood Sisters is a chillng novel about the deadly secrets that even the best of friends keep from one another. Combining the terrific storytelling that has become Wall’s hallmark and the page-turning intensity of the best psychological suspense, Blood Sisters is a riveting novel that probes the boundaries between jealousy and deceit, friendship and betrayal, intimacy and its terrible unsuspected limits.

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About the Author: Judith Henry Wall is also the author of Love and Duty and Handsome Women. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

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By the Same Author: My Mother’s Daughter (2000, Simon & Schuster); The Surrogate (2006, Simon & Schuster); and Family Secrets (2007, Simon & Schuster), among many others.

Gerhardt Klinsmann, a German guard stationed at Auschwitz concentration camp, anguishes over the man he has become. He despises the camp and his job, and, responding to an attack of conscience, he helps a pregnant prisoner escape. After the war, Klinsmann returns to his home in Kassel, Germany, determined to start life over. But he is accused of war crimes and becomes a man on the run, fleeing from a brutal past that haunts him at every turn. Seventeen years later, Mikhail Krol, a boy living in communist Poland, learns from a drunken uncle he was adopted as a toddler and that his biological father was a German soldier. Devastated by this shocking revelation, Mik feels his whole life has been a lie. He vows to find his biological father and his birth mother, described to him as a mysterious, dark-skinned foreigner who sang to him in a strange language. Mik’s commitment to discovering his heritage takes him to East Berlin and Paris during the height of the Cold War and eventually to Buenos Aires, Argentina—a journey that confirms his worst suspicions when he uncovers the shocking truth about his parents.

From the Dust Jacket: The Bloodworth Orphans is a big juicy novel about the lives and interconnected relationships of the bastards and orphans—both black and white—sired by members of a slave-owning family named Bloodworth.

We are introduced to the Bloodworth line of orphans by Rachel Carpenter (Flowers), also known as Mother-Witness, church mother of River Rock of Eden. Toward this blind, righteous prophetess (part of whose mission is the care and instruction of orphans) gravitate Regal Pettibone—a foundling whom she adopts and who grows into a fascinating “street man” —and La Donna Scales, a refugee from a Catholic convent. They fall in love, these two, before they discover they are brother and sister and before their half brother, Otis Thigpen (another Bloodworth Orphan), can turn his rage on them.

But the Bloodworth line is tortuous. It has spawned young white girls who are raped by their own brothers, Rachel’s own illegitimate sons: Industrious and Carl-Rae; gamblers, doctors, prostitutes, journalists—all of whose lives touch. Bound by the past, they are hamstrung by destiny.

Viewed through the perceptive vision of Nathaniel Witherspoon—this is a driven story that builds, climbs and tunnels through many lives: a Muslim leader afraid for his life; a blind musician housed in an asylum; a Victorian Negro lady in love with her dead brother; a 350-pound diabetic swathed in diapers; and midwives who write thousand-page records of the passion-ridden Bloodworth Orphans.

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About the Author: Born in Illinois and educated at the University of Chicago, Leon Forrest is an experienced journalist, formerly editor-in-chief of one of the largest black newspapers in the country. He is now teaching in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Northwestern University. This is his second novel.

From the Dust Jacket: This true life story of David Wayne Heidecker will tear at your heart as it leads you through both the perils and triumphs of being a child born into the wasteland of unwanted babies in urban America.

We, as an American people, like to think that most children are born into a loving family, but David was neglected and abandoned in infancy. He spent the first seven years of his life in foster homes and institutions lacking love, affection, or any sort of emotional support and stimulation so essential for the development of a young life.

Dick and Shirley Heidecker were anxious for the child they could never have and David was desperate for the family he had never known. The Heideckers and David became each other’s salvation in September 1972 and together they would survive four years of emotional turmoil, rejection and frustration before being able to form an official family unit. David would spend the rest of his youth in Baltimore and Carroll County, Maryland.

David’s story will enable you, as a reader, to enter the heart, soul, and mind of a child who at the young age of 13 months was physically underdeveloped and already labeled as having severe emotional problems. You will follow him through the sometimes self-made obstacles of his youth and watch an unconditional love be established by his parents that certainly could not be surpassed by any natural family bonding.

Follow David’s thoughts as he becomes a senior in high school and must choose between his options for the future—college, military, or a job. Join in his feelings as he builds a relationship that would endure all time with Gidget, a red-haired teenage girl with more class than anyone he had ever dated before and who had captured his heart in one short month. His decision to join the military and this girl would alter his life forever.

This book shows how his life obtained a new dimension by completing his basic training as a part of Company E, 5th Battalion, 1st Infantry Training Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia.

He becomes a further source of pride for the Heideckers when he becomes assigned to the 101 st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He was a member of Alpha Company of the 3rd Battalion, 502d Infantry Regiment of the Division, known as the “screaming eagles.” The Division received their first of many honors during World War II for being the first to reach the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day Invasion of 1944.

As a reader, you’ll watch him begin a new phase of his life as he marries Gidget only two days after her high school graduation and hear the plans for their future together. You’ll also feel the pain of having to part with her only 5½ weeks after their marriage for his assignment in the Sinai Desert on an international peace-keeping mission between Egypt and Israel.

David’s tour of duty in the Sinai Desert would end three days before his 21st birthday and he and Gidget would have their whole lives ahead of them—or would they?

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About the Author: Ann Turnbull is a magna cum laude graduate of Goucher College. She broke the gender barrier in Baltimore as one of the first women lawyers to join a large law firm, and later became its first female partner.

Joseph Wase went to St. John’s College in Annapolis and was involved in civil rights early in his career. In the 1970’s he was an Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, Violent Crimes Unit and Felony Trial Unit.

The authors, who are husband and wife, are practicing attorneys in Baltimore, Maryland.

Ann Turnbull and Joseph Wase are well known among Maryland lawyers as the authors of a professional book for divorce attorneys.

From the Dust Jacket (U.S. Edition): A midnight phone call awakens a man to inform him that his sister has died in childbirth. He is told he must keep the orphaned baby girl overnight, until her new, adopting parents can collect her. Over the course of that hot night in Calcutta, the man hurriedly writes stories to the baby sleeping on a blue bedspread in the next room: stories of the family she was born into, stories of the mother she will never know. Painting half-remembered scenes, he flits between past and present, recounting tales of the shared childhood of a boy and his sister, who muffled their fears in the blueness of that very same bedspread. As the hours pass, the man gradually divulges a layered and transfixing confession of the darkest of family secrets.

Described by John Fowles as “remarkable, almost a coming-of-age of the Indian novel,” this powerful, penetrating debut by a young New Delhi journalist has already been recognized as an international literary event. In prose that is breathtaking and precise, Raj Kamal Jha discovers the hidden violence and twisted eroticism of an exotic, overcrowded old city. Unlike the lush prose of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Jha’s spare, straightforward style has prompted comparisons to the American realism of Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. The Blue Bedspread is a searingly honest story about the love and hope that can survive in the midst of family violence. It is a first novel of extraordinary power and humanity.

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About the Author: Raj Kamal Jha was born in 1966 and grew up in Calcutta. After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, he received his master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California. He lives in New Delhi, where he is an editor at The Indian Express, India’s largest national newspaper. The Blue Bedspread is his first novel.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a young man called Blue Heron, living in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, chances upon a portal that leads to a futuristic underground kingdom. It was prophesized that the one to find such a portal would be the savior of his people and vanquish the dark Underground kingdom for good. But is the Underground what it seems? Instead of being a dark kingdom full of demons, it is a futuristic, sterile city that had existed beneath the feet of Blue Heron’s people for hundreds of years. He instantly befriends a celebrity image consultant who just happened to be in the room where the portal led. The alcoholic, partying, womanizing, Pizzazz is an unlikely companion for the noble Blue Heron, but somehow they form a deep friendship. Little do they know how their relationship will impact both their worlds—how it will incite murders, maniacal cults, and war itself.

From the Dust Jacket: Continuing the trail of adventures of Bluefeather Fellini, this new novel powerfully illustrates award-winning Max Evans’s firsthand knowledge of all the cultures living in the Southwest and the mystical deserts and mountains that shape the region’s character. Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm also reveals Evans’s piercing insight into the creatures, domestic and wild, real and mythical, that this vast, sometimes overwhelming, landscape of the soul possesses.

A tender love story with a strong, dedicated woman, plus savage battles with the beasts (the worst being man), Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm offers a wondrous, revealing look at what might have created the world and what may bring it to an end. There is also the Underground, which is included in the belief of many Indian nations and pueblos; the power of the stars; and an occasional interference of the gods mixed with a gritty reality slated with humor. The lifetime travels of Bluefeather Fellini give a unique look at the magic of the Southwest and the universality of it all.

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About the Author: Max Evans has been an artist, rancher, working cowboy, mining promoter, trader of antiques, and writer. A native to the Southwest, he is the author of such western classics as The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country. He is the recipient of many awards, including The Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award for Lifetime Achievement and the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the state’s highest honor.

From the Back Cover: Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug of dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade’s stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening. Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks’s debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America’s boomer countercultare.

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About the Author: Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three albums under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a companion album to this novel. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and his son, Jackson. This is his first novel.

From the Back Cover: In one terrifying week, Nick Thomas is torn from his peaceful life and thrown into a supernatural, to-the-death battle.

His wife, Janet, and their unborn son are murdered and he learns a shocking truth; Janet had been a member of a cult known as The Family, led from the grave by her father, Zakarias Adams. She had stayed with The Family until she could no longer endure the suffering they spread as its members preyed upon the living. For Adams, his daughter’s leaving could not go unpunished. He sent his minions to kill her.

When Nick discovers his beloved wife is trapped in the nether-world of the undead, an existence worse than Hell itself, he has to free her, He discovers the portal separating the world of the living from Adams’ world of the dead in the basement of an abandoned house in Bodie, a deserted Texas town.

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About the Author: William Kercher spent four years as a Medic in the Air Force, during which time his duty stations included Wright Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, and Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage, Alaska. Following his discharge, he earned a Master of Science degree in geology from Wright State University, after which he worked in the as a Petroleum Geologist. When his career prospects in the oil industry seemed unpromising, he took up writing.

In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape—from her husband’s demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different. Then a new family moves in across the street. Ted and Eva Wilson have three children and a fourth on the way, and their arrival reignites long-buried feelings in Billie. The affair that follows offers a solace Billie has never known, until her secret is revealed and both families are wrenched apart in the tragic aftermath. Fifty years later, Ted and Eva’s son, Johnny, contacts an elderly but still spry Billie, entreating her to return east to meet with him. Once there, Billie finally learns the surprising truth about what was lost, and what still remains, of those joyful, momentous summers. About the Author: T. Greenwood is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels. She has received numerous grants for her writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives with her family in San Diego, California, where she teaches creative writing, studies photography, and continues to write. Her website is www.tgreenwood.com.

From the Dust Jacket: In her brief introduction to The Bone People, Keri Hulme writes, “To those used to one standard, this book may offer a taste passing strange, like the original mouthful of kina roe. Persist. Kina can become a favourite food.” This “taste passing strange” is the result of the presence, in a single novel, of an astounding array of literary themes and human elements. Blending love and hate, violence and tenderness, myth and reality, and Maon (New Zealanders of Polynesian descent) and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent), Hulme challenges the conventions of the novel and produces a remarkable work of fiction.

The Bone People is set in the harsh environment of the South Island beaches of New Zealand. The principal! character, Kerewin Holmes, is a primarily Pakeha, part-Maori painter in self-exile, living in a tower she has built with money she won in a lottery. Kerewin is drawn out of her isolation by Simon, a mute boy who is cast up on the beach, the only survivor of a shipwreck. Joe, a Maori factory worker who becomes Simon’s foster father and both fiercely loves and ferociously batters the boy, completes the trinity of characters at the center of the novel.

As Kerewin, Joe, and Simon struggle with their mixed heritages and their charged relationships, the bonds between them loosen and tighten, break and re-form. These characters play out the tensions between the foundering of the Maori culture and the hope for its salvation through the assertion of mauri, the life principle that protects the power and vitality of the Maori. The elements of destruction and anger in The Bone People are counteracted by elements of love and unity that ultimately endure. There are rays of hope for the Maori culture as well. In a sense this novel calls up the bones of Maori ancestors in the form of myths and dreams, and projects their possible regeneration in the future.

Like her subject, Keri Hulme’s prose is simultaneously coarse and lyrical. She employs many Maori words and phrases and includes a glossary of these at the end of the book. The Bone People makes for rich and engaging reading. It is likely to prove not only a “favourite food,” but a nourishing one as well.

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About the Author: Keri Hulme was born in 1947 in Christchurch and is of Maori (Kai Tahu), Orkney Scots and Lancashire English ancestry.

Her poems and short stories have been published in many magazines and broadcast on radio and television. Several stories have been translated into other languages, including Swedish and Japanese.

A book of poetry and prose, The Silences Between: Moeraki Conversations, was published in 1982 by Auckland University Press, and a collection of short stories, The Wind Eater, is due from Victoria University Press.

Keri Hulme has been the recipient of many literary grants and awards, and has been invited to the East-West Centre in Hawaii and the Adelaide Festival.

The Bone People won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the Mobil Pegasus Award for Maori Literature, and its author has been awarded the University of Canterbury Writer’s Fellowship for the second half of 1985.

From the Dust Jacket: On the eve of her departure to find the bones of the walking whale—the fossil that provides a missing link in our evolution—Zubaida Haque falls in love with Elijah Strong, a man she meets in a darkened concert hall in Boston. Their connection is immediate and intense, despite their differences: Elijah belongs to a prototypical American family; Zubaida is the adopted daughter of a wealthy Bangladeshi family in Dhaka. When a twist of fate sends her back to her hometown, the inevitable force of society compels her to take a very different path: she marries her childhood best friend and settles into a traditional Bangladeshi life.

While her family is pleased by her obedience, Zubaida seethes with discontent. Desperate to finally free herself from her familial constraints, she moves to Chittagong to work on a documentary film about the infamous beaches where decommissioned ships are destroyed and their remains are salvaged by locals, who depend on the goods for their survival. Among them is Anwar, a shipbreaker whose story holds a key that will unlock the mysteries of Zubaida’s past—and the possibilities of a new life. As she witnesses a ship being ripped down to its bones, this woman torn between the social mores of her two homes—Bangladesh and America—will be forced to strip away the vestiges of her own life ... and make a choice from which she can never turn back.

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About the Author: Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in Paris, Bangkok, and New York. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. She is the author of the Bengal Trilogy—A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, and The Bones of Grace—which chronicles three generations of the Haque family, from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day. She lives in London, England.

From the Dust Jacket: The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.

His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.

Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.

In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.

It is a confession of his most intimate relationships with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan whose own radicalism so reproaches him.

It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.

It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them, and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.

It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.

It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grandmothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pentagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humanity, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.

It is The Book of Daniel.

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About the Author: E.L. Doctorow was born in 1931 in New York City and was educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University. His earlier novels are Welcome to Hard Times and Big as Life. Formerly editor-in-chief of a prominent New York publishing house, he was most recently writer-in-residence at the University of California at Irvine. He lives in Westchester County with his wife and three children.

From the Dust Jacket: Young Adelrune is a likable little boy oppressed by his strict stepparents, who are in turn under the thumb of a narrow and harsh religious rule. Finding privacy in his stepparents’ attic before he has even learned to read, Adelrune discovers a dusty copy of The Book of Knights. The pictures enchant him and obsess him to the point where he is motivated to learn to read, so that he can have access to the words of this secret treasure as well. The years of his young childhood are made bearable by the ideas and images of the book, and he resolves to run away and become a knight—a story that will enchant readers the way Adelrune himself was charmed and entertained.

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About the Author: After establishing a reputation as one of the finest young SF writers in French Canada, Yves Meynard has been writing and publishing SF and fantasy stories since the mid-1990s in English. The Book of Knights is his first fantasy novel written in English, with the same color and imagery that have made his short fiction distinctive.

He has been the literary editor of the SF magazine Solaris since 1994.

From the Dust Jacket: Having lost her mother at a young age, Sara Leader has created a space around her father Richard that is sacrosanct, their relationship having excluded all others. But now that Sara has decided to adopt a child of her own, she finds herself facing a genealogical blank slate with which to start her new family. Her mother’s family was decimated by the Nazis and she knows nothing of her father’s pre-war journey out of Europe on the Quanza, a boat full of refugees fleeing the onset of the Holocaust. She also asks him no questions, as this is his one command: to leave the past to the dead.

But as Sara works on her manuscript of the great critic, philosopher, and translator Walter Benjamin’s work, details from her father’s life start to float into her periphery, and even as she tries not to give in to curiosity they gather and overwhelm her until she is at his door, demanding answers.

In this richly woven telling, Victoria Redel brings equal amounts of poignancy and fortitude to her symbiotic storylines, lending both characters the kind of strength only survivors can embody. For even as she leads Sara about her mission, Redel reveals young Richard’s story, told from letters that he writes from the boat to a sympathetic Eleanor Roosevelt. And in a feat of literary excellence, Redel teases these details of Richard’s past through Sara’s present, deftly dropping them around her and driving her quest for answers at an increasingly hypnotic pace.

A magnificent novel of truth and daring—of heartbreak and disappointment, of healing and understanding—The Border of Truth bares a heart and soothes a wounded soul.

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About the Author: Victoria Redel is the author of the novel Loverboy, the story collection Where the Road Bottoms Out, and two volumes of poetry, Already the World, and Swoon. She lives in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews: This is a story which might very well be classified simply as ladies’ magazine fiction (it is a woman’s book) were it not for the credibility of its characters and the intelligence of the author’s observations. Its main event is inherently dramatic and is very similar to an actual case; a custody fight for an adopted child. But the overall story concerns Liz Banion, (the very name belongs in the ladies’ magazines), her family, and the development of her marriage with Tommy, a promising and then successful architect. Liz and left her Catholic faith (though she married in the Church to conceal the fact from her parents) and when, after four years of marriage, she and Tommy decided to adopt a child they managed it privately through Liz’s mother who worked at a Catholic foundling hospital. When their daughter was four years old the child’s mother sued for her custody claiming that the Banions, having become Unitarians, adopted the child illegally. After considerable legal and religious argument (during which Liz seems to be more the college debater than the harassed mother, though it’s in keeping with the character) the Banions win the right to keep their child. The end of the trial also marks the end of an affair Liz had been having with their lawyer. There’s a particularly revolting but interesting characterization of Liz’s brother, Joe, who wanted to be a priest but gave it up for what he called “the pleasures of the flesh.” Joe, a guilt-ridden pious hypocrite, had managed over the years to warp his son’s personality (the boy becomes a psychopath), wreck his marriage, nearly ruin the Banion’s case and destroy himself. If the ingredients which go into the story are not particularly elevating neither are they merely sordid. It’s a controlled and very readable book.

From the Back Cover: Kayla “Bossy” Tucker is a bona fide product of the streets, spending her time on the grind and settling scores. Years after forming alliances with a couple of the city’s most notorious gangsters, she creates a formula to cook cocaine with a potency most dealers would pay top dollar to get their hands on.

Now in her prime, “Bossy” has gotten tired of looking over her shoulder and watching her own back. The death of her mentor hastens her decision to walk away from the hustle until a new enemy forces her to fight one final battle. Can “Bossy” make it off the streets before it’s too late or will the streets claim her like they have all the rest?

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About the Author: Tysha is a devoted wife and mother of four. She is a native of Youngstown, Ohio currently residing in Columbus, Ohio. Tysha’s passion for journal writing led her to becoming an author. She is hard at work on her next project, Keepin’ It in the Family.

From the Publisher: In the summer of 1980, sixteen-year-old Kaia Matheson travels from her home in Berkeley to a small island off of Cape Cod for a family vacation. Kaia hopes to confront her divorced mother, Jean, about abandoning her in California, ostensibly to pursue a high-powered career in New York. However, Jean remains aloof and offers no apology for leaving Kaia in the custody of her controlling, alcoholic father. Intrigued by her rugged and intelligent cousin, Mark Karadonis, Kaia turns to him for companionship. Despite his misgivings, Mark is irresistibly attracted to his young cousin.

When Mark arrives in Berkeley to start law school, the two cousins’ involvement deepens. Kaia’s father enters a relationship with Chandi Gupta, a lawyer who handles cases of child neglect and abandonment. Through Chandi, Kaia becomes interested in children’s rights and a legal career. Eventually a devastating secret is revealed that threatens to unravel the lives of Kaia and Mark.

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About the Author: Christine Z. Mason has published award-winning short fiction as well as numerous articles and book reviews. She is the author of a children’s book, The Mystery of Nan Madol.

Christine graduated from UCLA with a degree in English Literature and served in the Peace Corps in Micronesia as an art and photography instructor. She subsequently earned her J.D. at the University of California, Davis, and practiced appellate and constitutional law. She lives with her husband in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California; they have a son and a daughter.

Kat Kahn is a young woman, seeking to connect with her birth parents. Charles Prinzmetal is a respected, Shakespeare-quoting senior psychoanalyst with a dark secret. They are on a collision course in this suspenseful tale of deception and murder. Engaging characters, humor, a fast-moving plot, and an insider’s view of psychoanalysis make Boundary Violations a compelling and entertaining read.