Boy American follows an American couple, Eric and Kate, on their tense journey to Russia to adopt a little boy. After they bring him home, their new son Sasha develops a talent for magic—and an unshakeable resolve to return to Russia, to find out the truth about his birth mother. Boy American picks up Sasha’s story as he travels to the orphanage town of Kolkayichi. He performs illusions for Olga, his old caretaker at Detski Dom 8, as she reveals information about his infant past. Throughout, Sasha’s relationship to his adopted father, Eric, remains the emotional core of his story, revealing truths—sometimes bleak, sometimes funny—about the connections between parents and children, and the power of shared history.

From the Dust Jacket: Nasdijj’s critically acclaimed, award-winning memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, took the literary world by storm. “An authentic, important book,” raved Esquire. “Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect.” Now this celebrated Native American writer has given readers a powerful, brave, and deeply moving memoir of the unconditional love between a father and a son.

Eleven-year-old Awee came to live with Nasdijj carrying a brown paper bag containing all his belongings, a legacy of abuse, and AIDS. But this beautiful, loving, and intelligent little boy also had enormous hope for his new life. The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is the heartrending but also joyous story of this untraditional family, filled with love and laughter, but also with great pain, as Awee becomes progressively more ill.

Nasdijj writes about their motorcycle trip to see the ocean for the first time, about baths and baseball, about Awee’s “big brother” Crow Dog, and his dog, Navajo, but also about the brutal realities of reservation life and the challenges of dealing with a sometimes hostile medical establishment that often lacks the knowledge to treat pediatric AIDS. In the end, Nasdijj must find his own way of alleviating Awee’s suffering—and of helping him maintain his dignity in the face of a disease that gradually robs him of himself.

By turns searing and searching, lyrical and raw, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is ultimately transcendent—for in the end Awee got what he wanted most in his short life: a real dad.

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About the Author: Nasdijj was born in the American Southwest in 1950. He grew up partly on a reservation—his mother was Navajo—and partly in migrant camps around the country. He has been writing for more than two decades, making ends meet by reporting for small-town papers, teaching, and doing migrant labor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and winner of the Salon Book Award. “Nasdijj” is Athabaskan for “to become again.” He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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By the Same Author: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams (2000, Houghton Mifflin).

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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 Publisher: Scott Morgan and Vallie Taylor are two young, gay men who decide they want nothing more than to adopt a child. They contact Happy Home Adoption Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to find out what their chances might be to adopt.

They are investigated, finding out they do qualify. Prepared to adopt a newborn or toddler of any race, they find a fourteen-year-old gay teenager, Nicholas, desperately needs a home. They take the time to get to know him and decide to make him their new son. Nicholas is elusive, never smiling and does not make eye contact, but he agrees to be adopted.

Nicholas starts high school and begins having trouble with a bully. Scott, Vallie, and the rest of their family do what they can to help. Nicholas goes through a frightening experience, which helps him finally realize what a real family is and how much his new family really loves him.

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About the Author: John Boyd Brandon (seated in photo) is an artist who lives in Jemez Springs, NM, with his partner of 26 years, Roy Joe Lee. He earned an M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University. John has enjoyed painting and printmaking as well as writing for many years, creating some interesting pieces. The Boy at the Window is his second novel, a sequel to his first, Appropriate Applause (2004).

A Boy Named Wish recounts the story of young Edward Wilson, who finds himself in foster care when his grandfather falls ill. A lesson in cautious optimism, Edward sometimes fears the worst but always hopes for the best...including the chance to be part of a real family.

From the Back Cover: Alfred King, wealthy, retired, and in his seventies is traveling in Kenya on a photo safari when he meets Koro, a small Masai boy at a roadside stop who wants to “practice his English.” On a sudden impulse, King asks him if he would like to go to America. The boy is overjoyed and takes King to his village to receive permission from the tribal elders. They tell him that Koro has a unique gift: he hears strange music that often leads him to people needing help. The elders tell King that Koro is very special to his tribe, but if the boy wants to go they will regretfully give permission.

Back in America, where King owns a large cattle ranch in Utah, Koro quickly adapts to his new lifestyle under the care of King and his rowdy ranch hands. Koro’s music leads him to help several people and he soon earns admiration from the everyone he meets.

In school, Koro encounters prejudice, but also the friendship of an American Indian girl. In the meantime, he has grown to a tremendous height, as many of his people do, and in high school he becomes a star basketball player. Everyone expects him to pursue the sport professionally, but he surprises them all by following a much different dream.

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About the Author: Robert Barlow Fox served in the Navy in the Pacific and the Army in Europe. He was also a missionary for three years among the Maori people of New Zealand. He earned Bachelor and Master’s degrees and did other graduate studies at the University of Utah and Utah State University and is now a retired educator. He is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and has published short stories, articles, poetry, and essays in many magazines and journals. He also won three Freedom’s Foundation Awards. One, an essay on Abraham Lincoln, was read into the Congressional Record by then Senator Wallace F. Bennet of Utah.

Once when Robert and his wife were traveling in Kenya and Tanzania, they met a small Masai boy who wanted to “practice his English.” Fox saw the beginning of a story, and, like many writers, he asked the question: “What if...?” This mystical book is the result.

Robert Fox is also the author of To Be a Warrior, Inherited Family, and The Seeker, all from Sunstone Press.

From the Dust Jacket: Chip Neighbors has hated all Indians since his parents were massacred by Comanches. When his adopted father, Major Robert Simpson Neighbors, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, asks him to work on an Indian reservation, Chip has plenty of reservations of his own. But loyalty to the man who raised him persuades Chip to take the job.

When a young Tonkawa brave named Tosche saves him from a gang of horse thieves, Chip has some thinking to do. Then there is Taka, the very pretty and spunky half-Indian girl, whose parents were also killed by Comanches.

Chip shows Tosche how to round up cattle and Tosche teaches Chip all the tricks of a Tonkawa scout. Meanwhile, Chip is getting lessons of another type from the randy Widder Jones and learning about real love during sweet times alone with Taka. But Texas in the late 1850s is not an easy place to be, what with a civil war brewing in the East and hostile tribes on the warpath.

Chip and Tosche together take on Comanche warriors. Then another Indian agent, John Baylor, begins killing peaceful Indians, driving them off the reservations, and turning the Texans against them with false accusations of cattle stealing. Now Chip realizes where his true loyalty lies and knows he must make his stand.

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About the Author: Winner of the 1988 Saddleman Award for his lifetime contribution to Western literature from the Western Writers of America, Don Worcester is a professor of history at the University of Texas, and a renowned expert on that state’s history. He lives in Aledo, Texas, where he raises Arabian horses.

From the Dust Jacket: Inge was thirteen, and her brother Dolph (a defensive form of “Adolf”) was fifteen, when on a December morning in 1938 their parents put them on a train that took them out of Nazi Germany—and away from all that was familiar to them. They arrived safely in England, an alien land. They never saw their parents again.

Karen Gershon, too, arrived in this country as a refugee from Nazism, and only someone who has herself endured, as a teenager, the loneliness of exile, could be so deeply understanding of Inge’s condition, could comprehend her every trembling hope and fear and confusion.

For years, already, Inge had lived on her nerves, a Jewish child facing the ostracism of schoolmates, the contempt of teachers. In wartime England, she has a new problem: too many people do not distinguish between refugees and other Germans—they’re all enemy aliens. She grows suspicious even of kindness, and masochistically derides herself as “Jewish trash”. Over-sensitive and over-defensive, she is quick to misinterpret people’s reactions. Yet she is a girl of courageous and independent spirit. She not only endures, she fights back—even if she’s often fighting the wrong battle.

This novel, with its strong autobiographical undertones, is a fascinating portrayal of a teenager struggling to come to terms with a new and so different world: the foster-parents, well-meaning but lacking understanding; the schoolteacher, with her barely concealed anti-semitism; the first job, as an exploited living-in servant; the first bitter taste of independence in a bedsitter. And there are such positive and demanding people in her life: her brother Dolph, an ardent Zionist, addicted to wild plans; her best friend, Rudi, who is a homosexual; Sebastian, the RAF officer whom she comes near to marrying, quixotically, when he is dying; Dolph’s self-declared girlfriend, Hansi, and Hansi’s brother, the understanding Hamish—none of them able to save Inge from herself.

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About the Author: Karen Gershon writes with delicate discernment and wry humour, and her novel is enchanting, poignant and intensely human. Karen Gershon herself came to England with a children’s transport in 1938, hoping to move on to what was then called Palestine. However, the war kept her in this country, and she earned her living as, among other things, a domestic servant, a chorus girl, a mill hand, and as a housemother in a progressive school. She started writing poetry at thirteen, and has been writing ever since. She married a schoolmaster and, after some years in Jerusalem, they now live in Cornwall. They have two sons and two daughters and seven grandchildren. She has published two books about the life of refugees, several volumes of poetry, and one previous novel and has won several awards for her writing.

From the Dust Jacket: Sam and Ed are living the good life. Ed is an editor at an Italian art magazine, Sam a successful chiropractor. Though devoted to one another, they have no longings for the joyful mysteries of parenthood.

But when eleven-year-old Scot’s mother dies suddenly, the couple is determined to make good on a wine-soaked promise made years before. Plunging into a flurry of activity, they do their best to prepare themselves and their home for Scot’s arrival. They hang a tire swing in the front yard, rearrange their furniture and their work schedules, and call the neighborhood school to arrange for enrollment. None of their well-intended preparations, however, can ready them for Scot.

“Sam and I first met Scot when he was two and his hair was thin and pinkish, a condition optimistically referred to as strawberry blond. He spent most of that weekend under an oak table playing with everyone’s shoelaces. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it is true that Scot treated every movable object as a hat. He tried on upholstered pillows, stray socks, notepads, and even a roasted chicken leg.”

Breakfast With Scot is a joyride into the unknown, a fast-paced comic novel with resonance for everyone trying to raise children in our relentlessly sophisticated culture.

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About the Author: Michael Downing is the author of three previous novels, Perfect Agreement, Mother of God, and A Narrow Time, and a play “The Last Shaker.” He teaches creative writing at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the Dust Jacket: Who is Brendan Wolf? It all depends on who you ask.

• To the staff of a Minneapolis nursing home, he’s the devoted partner of a much older man who’s recently suffered a debilitating stroke.

• To the women of a conservative, Christian pro-life organization, he’s the tireless volunteer grieving over the recent loss of his wife and their unborn child.

• To one gay activist, he’s the unaffectedly charming, yet directionless and unemployed, man that he’s fallen hopelessly in love with.

• To his brother and his brother’s wife, he’s the lynch-pin of a scam that will net them enough money to start their lives over somewhere new.

• To the general public, he’s an armed and dangerous fugitive.

All of these people—and yet none of them—Brendan Wolf is an ambivalent lover, reluctant conspirator, counterfeit Christian, and, most of all, an unemployed daydreamer obsessed with a dead man.

From the author of the award-winning The Year of Ice, this is a tour de force—a compelling, hilarious, heartbreaking novel about one utterly typical, and completely original, figure: Brendan Wolf.

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About the Author: Brian Malloy’s debut novel, The Year of Ice, won the American Library Association’s Alex Award, was a Booklist Editors’ Choice for the “Best of 2002” and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award and the Violet Quill Award. His first novel for young adults, Twelve Long Months, will be published in 2007. He has taught creative writing at the University of Minnesota, the Loft Literary Center, and Emerson College.

From the Back Cover: Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place, particularly for women. Traveling alone from the isolated mountain village where he was born, a tribal man takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the glittering city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, he makes his fortune and a home for the two of them. Yet as the years pass, he grows nostalgic for his life in the mountains, and his fifteen-year-old daughter envisions a romantic landscape, filled with tall men who roam the mountains like gods. Impulsively, the man promises his daughter in marriage to a man of his tribe. But once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate as the bride of an inscrutable husband impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no-return.

Prescient and provocative in its assessment of the plight of women in tribal society in Pakistan, the first of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels is a story of marriage and commitment, of the conflict between adherence tradition and the indomitable force of a woman’s spirit.

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About the Author: Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely celebrated as the finest novelist produced by her country. She is the author of several novels, including The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, Cracking India, and, most recently, Water. Among her many honors, Sidhwa has received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Sitara-i-Imti Pakistan’s highest honor in the arts. She lives in Houston, Texas.

In present day China, an old woman’s house sits opposite an ancient bridge. Not just any bridge—but a special one because it has always been known as The Lucky Bridge. In olden days it was said that to walk over it during a marriage ceremony, or at the beginning of the New Year would bring the traveler good luck. Because of its reputation, over the years it has also become a popular place for young mothers to abandon their children. What to some may seem cruel is in reality their final gift to their offspring—one last chance to send them off to their new destinies with luck on their side. Jing, an old woman, is the unofficial and often reluctant guardian of the bridge. When no one else will, Jing steps in to prevent the children from frostbite, abuse and hunger, and then she delivers them safely to the orphanage. This has been her routine for many years, but what does Jing do when the latest child, a blind boy, burrows deep into her heart?

Where three rivers meet in middle Tennessee is a small rural community named Rock Island. The rivers form a lake, and across it stands a steel span bridge, the Bridge Over Calm Water. On a nearby farm, fifteen-year-old Rea Wilson is haunted throughout her childhood by a nightmare about the bridge. The youngest in her family, Rea is expected to marry and supply her father with cheap farm labor. Until then, Rea must work the farm in place of her two brothers, who left home for college. Isolated, she has few friends. Rock Island’s doctor, Robert McKinney, gives Rea a ride to high school every day and also a part-time job in his clinic. The doctor’s generosity is both a blessing and a curse, as the steel bridge stands between her and the McKinney home. In 1941, Rea’s childhood nightmare becomes reality when she is attacked on the bridge. In a world torn by war, Rea faces the shame of an unwanted pregnancy. She can give the baby girl up to the doctor and his wife, or raise baby Lilly on the farm. She keeps her attacker’s identity a secret, but it’s one reason she eventually gives her daughter to the McKinneys. A condition set by the doctor’s wife forces Rea to move away, deep into the Appalachians. Within those mountains, Rea struggles to survive, and to accept the new life awaiting her there.

Claire Mason’s life seemed to be on track. She was a successful artist and she had a good marriage to a loving husband. Then, almost overnight, a succession of events turn her entire life upside down. How will she deal with it? Will she emerge from the maelstrom that threatens to destroy her mind, or will she succumb and thus implode emotionally and mentally? How do visits to Greece play a part in her navigating her way through the tangle of events that threaten to destroy her sanity? As with The View From Kleoboulos, there are twists aplenty here. In Claire Mason’s life, will she ever glimpse a brief moment of sunshine?

After a childhood spent drifting between foster homes and the care of his criminally inept father, Easton McNeil embarks on a search for all the “beautifully ordinary” things he’s never had. Along the way, he’s confronted by unexpected curves. He’s a single man who becomes a father. A humanistic dreamer who becomes a business journalist. A practical man who ends up leaving his stable career for a humiliating gig as a sidekick to the notorious shock jock, Cooper Ross. Encouraged by Ross’s oddball fans, Easton plans a cross-country road trip to interview them. Now an empty-nester, the man who’s always loved the idea of home sells his and embarks on a wholehearted mission to say yes.

From the Back Cover: Ellen O’Malley, together with her natural daughter Mary and adopted daughter Louisa, helps tend the wounds of the soldiers who have fallen in battle. In the killing fields of Virginia she toils, not realising that her estranged son, Patrick, and Lavelle, the husband she desperately seeks, are on opposing sides of the terrible conflict. Meanwhile, Lavelle and Ellen’s former lover, Stephen Joyce, likewise seek her out—and each other—with tragic repercussions. The inspiring story of Ellen’s race against the ravages of war is a tale of great loves, impossible choices and the triumph of the human spirit against all odds.

From the Dust Jacket: Edward Carter is a bully of a man, who instills fear in the hearts of all who meet him.

After years under her husband’s reign of terror, Adam Carter’s mother is too cowed to protect herself or her son. Adam is twelve years old, bright and caring, but without friends or self-confidence he’s all alone. His only support is Phil Wallis, the school bus driver.

Then one afternoon, when Adam is his last drop of the day, Phil makes a life-changing decision to accompany Adam along the darkening woodland lane to his house.

But, a terrible tragedy is unfolding in the house at the end of the track, and it is one that will bind them together forever.

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About the Author: Josephine Cox was born in Blackburn, one of ten children. At the age of sixteen, Josephine met and married her husband Ken, and had two sons. When the boys started school, she decided to go to college and eventually gained a place at Cambridge University. She was unable to take this up as it would have meant living away from home, but she went into teaching and started to write her first full-length novel. She won the “Superwoman of Great Britain” Award, for which her family had secretly entered her, at the same time as her novel was accepted for publication. Her strong, gritty stories are taken from the tapestry of life. Josephine says, “I could never imagine a single day without writing. Its been that way since as far back as I can remember.”

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By the Same Author: Whistledown Woman (1990, Macdonald & Co.) and Jinnie (2002, Headline), among many others.

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Compiler’s Note: I was able to read the text of this book online at archive.org, where I had initially discovered it. In the course of my efforts to ascertain the relevance of adoption to the story, I discovered a number of what I can only describe as “inconsistencies.” For example, in many summary descriptions, it is stated, “It’s 1954 and Adam Carter is twelve years old,” whereas, in the opening chapter, it’s stated explicitly that it’s 1952 and Adam is seven years old. The fact that Adam is described as a 12-year-old on the dust jacket may be the source of his being so identified in descriptions of the book, but where they get the idea that it’s 1954 is unclear. The jacket description also implies that the pivotal event occurs when Adam is 12, whereas, in fact, it happens in the opening chapter, in 1952, when he’s seven. (Someone at the company that published the large-print edition in 2015 must have noticed these discrepancies, because they were corrected in the description on the back cover of that edition.)

Less significant, but definitely more mysterious, is the fact that many online descriptions of the book unaccountably identify the bus driver as “Jake” rather than Phil.

Deena Bouknight’s debut contemporary novel, Broken Shells, explores how boundary lines are tampered with and buried pains are unearthed when an aging white woman discovers that her long-time elderly black servant is dying. Two seemingly separate narratives become more obviously interwoven as the stories unfold. There is drama and humor in this southern tale—a heartfelt look at human frailties, and the importance of forgiveness and spiritual renewal. If you liked The Help or Driving Miss Daisy, you will enjoy Broken Shells as an endearing novel. About the Author: Deena Bouknight lived in Western North Carolina for 10 years and now resides in South Carolina with her husband and two adopted children.

From the Dust Jacket: Meet everyman Moses Teumer, whose recent diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia has sent him in search of a donor. When he discovers that the woman who raised him is not his biological mother, he must hunt down his birth parents and unspool the intertwined destinies of the Teumer and Savant families.

Salome Savant, Moses’s birth mother, is an avant-garde artist who has spent her life in and out of a psychiatric ward. Her son and Moses’s half-brother, Alchemy Savant, the mercurial front man of the world-renowned rock band The Insatiables, abandons music to launch a political campaign to revolutionize 2020s America. And then there’s Ambitious Mindswallow, aka Ricky McFinn, who journeys from juvenile delinquency in Queens to being The Insatiables’ bassist and Alchemy’s Sancho Panza. Bauman skillfully weaves together these characters’ voices, the threads that intertwine them, and the histories that divide them, to create a vision of America that is at once sweeping, irreverent, and heartbreaking.

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About the Author: Bruce Bauman is the award-winning author of the novel And The Word Was, an instructor in the CalArts MFA Writing Program and Critical Studies Department, and the Senior Editor of Black Clock literary magazine. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, BOMB, Bookforum, and numerous anthologies and other publications. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Suzan Woodruff.

From the Back Cover: Brooke was an orphan, abandoned long ago by a mother she barely knew. And though her new family seemed to offer the promise of a fresh beginning, a dark voice in her heart told her that she was now more alone than ever....

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About the Author: Virginia Cleo Andrews, who became a bestselling author with the publication of her breakthrough novel, Flowers in the Attic, in 1979, died in 1986. Since then, new books, written by a “carefully selected writer, inspired by her genius,” have been published under her moniker(s) by her estate. The ghostwriter has since been identified as thriller novelist Andrew Neiderman.

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By the Same Author: Tarnished Gold (1996); Butterfly (1998); Crystal (1998); Raven (1998); Runaways (1998); Cat (1999); Into the Garden (1999); Rain (2000); Lightning Strikes (2000); Willow (2002); Hidden Leaves (2003); Child of Darkness (2005); Daughter of Darkness (2010, Gallery Books); Secret Brother (2015, Gallery Books); and Sage’s Eyes (2016, Gallery Books), among many others.

From the Dust Jacket: We all need to know where we come from, where we belong. But for David and Nathalie, this need to know is more urgent than for most people, because they are adopted. Brought up by the same parents, but born to different mothers, they have grown up, fiercely loyal to one another, as brother and sister.

Their decision, in their late thirties, to embark upon the journey to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter. It affects, acutely and often painfully, their partners, the people they work with and, most poignantly, the two women who gave them up for adoption all those years ago, and who have since then made other lives, even borne other children.

Exploring her subject with imagination and humanity, Joanna Trollope once again works her magic. In this rich narrative, at once gritty and graceful, she exposes the extraordinary challenges that arise at the heart of ordinary lives.

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About the Author: Author of eagerly awaited and sparklingly readable novels often centred around the domestic nuances and dilemmas of life in contemporary England, Joanna Trollope is also the author of a number of historical novels and of Britannia’s Daughters, a study of women in the British Empire. In 1988 she wrote her first contemporary novel, The Choir, and this was followed by A Village Affair, A Passionate Man, The Rector’s Wife, The Men and The Girls, A Spanish Lover, The Best of Friends, Next of Kin, Other People’s Children, Marrying the Mistress and, most recently, Girl From the South. She lives in London and Gloucestershire.

From the Dust Jacket: “I can remember so much: the blood and screams of the settlers at Cherry Valley as we cut scalps through to hard skull bone, and cut much else; the scent of pomade and fresh linen as I walked down Berners Street in London on my first visit with Guy Johnson; the wet, warm smell of spring livening the woodlands around Johnson Hall and wrestling with Walter Butler, his bare torso as brown as my own, and Ganundagwa watching, her brown belly beneath the British shirting so soft to touch, and London again with my Lady Frances’s body glaring white in the shrouded dark stillness of the inn...”

So begins the story of that great Mohawk, Chief Joseph Brant, who stood between two worlds when both were in turmoil, and helped shape them both.

Born in 1742, Brant earned a warrior’s name while still a boy. He left his tribe at thirteen to live with his sister Molly and her lover, the wealthy and powerful Sir William Johnson, His Majesty’s Indian Superintendent. Schooled in the language and ways of the colonial Christians, he still valued his Mohawk heritage, and in his own lifetime he became a legendary figure to both sides.

Brant grew to be a loyal ally to the British, yet a fierce avenger of his people’s pride. He served as a colonel in the King’s forces, providing scouts for the Redcoats. Tales of his vengeful raids—the burnings, the scalpings—struck fear into American revolutionary hearts and inspired awe among the London elite.

The Mohawks recalled that as a small boy, then called Small Turtle, he had been visited in a clearing by an enormous owl that spoke to him in the owl tongue, and Small Turtle replied in the same language. “And I say, brothers, there is meaning here, and Small Turtle is given powers beyond what we may know!”

A prophecy realized, Chief Joseph’s story offers an illuminating portrait of colonial America in a fascinating fictional memoir.

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About the Author: The late Al Hine was born in Pittsburgh, graduated from Princeton, and lived in Connecticut and Rome with his wife, Sesyle Joslin, and their three daughters. His previous novels include Lord Love a Duck, The Unfound Door, The Birthday Boy, and Signs and Portents.

From the Dust Jacket: At the height of China’s Cultural Revolution a powerful general fathered two sons. Tan was born to the general’s wife and into a life of comfort and luxury. His half brother, Shento, was born to the general’s mistress, who threw herself off a cliff in the mountains of Balan only moments after delivering her child. Growing up, each remained ignorant of the other’s existence. In Beijing, Tan enjoyed the best schools, the finest clothes, and the prettiest girls. Shento was raised on the mountainside by an old healer and his wife until their deaths landed him in an orphanage, where he was always hungry, alone, and frightened. Though on divergent roads, each brother is driven by a passionate desire—one to glorify his father, the other to seek revenge against him.

Separated by distance and opportunity, Tan and Shento follow the paths that lie before them, while unknowingly falling in love with the same woman and moving toward the explosive moment when their fates finally merge.

Brothers, by bestselling memoirist Da Chen, is a sprawling, dynamic family saga, complete with assassinations, love affairs, narrowly missed opportunities, and the ineluctable fulfillment of destiny.

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About the Author: Da Chen lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and children.

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By the Same Author: My Last Empress (2012, Crown).

Johnny Baxter has been Mike Morgan’s best friend for the last seventeen years and his adopted brother for the last fifteen. They have been attached at the hip since they were kids, all through high school and even through the Army with the buddy system. From being stationed as MPs in Germany to graduating the police Academy and riding in the same patrol car night after night, where one was found, so was the other. They shared everything. Until six months ago ... when Johnny got divorced. Mike’s feelings for his best friend and brother changed; became more than just brotherly love and avoidance was his way of coping. However, the night he traded shifts to avoid his brother, once again, was the night he almost lost him. And more than anything else, that is Mike’s biggest fear. Author Note: Contains m/m sexual practices and is intended for readers of legal age in the country in which they reside.

Folks in Lawrenceville take pride in two things: their high school football team and hometown NFL legend, Bill Bruszynski. The Bruiser. Bruszynski led the Lawrenceville Lions to their last state championship, but that was decades ago. Now the town pins its hopes on the Bruiser’s two sons, Larry and Andy. Larry inherited his famous father’s talent—and that has college coaches salivating. He’s rugged, yet reckless and aloof. Bill’s adopted son Andy may not be built perfectly for knocking heads on Friday nights, but he’s courageous, humble, a natural leader ... and he’s always got his wayward brother’s back. Larry is built as solid as a rock. Andy’s faith in God is rock solid. As the Lions march toward the State Finals, one brother falls prey to a sinister recruiting plot, while the other jeopardizes his freedom, fighting for his convictions. The choices they face off the gridiron have the power to extinguish the town’s hopes ... and cost one of them his very life. The Bruise Brothers are going to have to play with all their hearts and leave everything on the field.

Spence Miller, Jr, is awakened on his 36th birthday by a phone call from a stranger who claims their son is coming to Savannah for a visit. Spence has had few thoughts of the baby he gave up for adoption 18 years before. Instead he has built a life around making art and teaching college students. He enjoys financial success and critical acclaim, but he is unlucky in love. And now his stable life is about to be upended by a young man in search of himself and the birth father he has never known. Come follow Spence and Emerson, the two Bubbas, as they travel from their very different West Tennessee origins to a fateful meeting on the beach at Tybee. Count the dolphins and meet the family.

From the Dust Jacket (U.S. edition): Raja and Nilu are fated to fall in love.

They have both been abandoned—he through his mother’s suicide in the public pond, she through her mother’s constant escape into drink. He has grown up on the streets, she in a crumbling mansion. And yet, they find each other, again and again, First, when they are children. Then, when they are young lovers. And, finally, after they both fear they have lost their marriage. But the events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. And Raja and Nilu’s story is not only their own.

Buddha’s Orphans traces the roots of this love story and follows its growth—through time, across the globe, through the loss of and search for children, and through several generations, hinting that perhaps old bends can, in fact, be righted in future branches of a family tree.

Using Nepal’s political upheavals as a backdrop to demonstrate how we are irreparably connected to past and home, Buddha’s Orphans is an engrossing, unconventional love story, a seductive, transporting read, and further evidence that Samrat Upadhyay is one of our finest writers, thoroughly deserving of his acclaim as “a Buddhist Chekhov” and comparisons to Amitav Ghosh, William Trevor, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

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About the Author: Samrat Upadhyay is the author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, which earned him a Whiting Award, The Royal Ghosts, and The Guru of Love, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. Upadhyay directs the creative writing program at Indiana University.

From the Dust Jacket: This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600-1868). In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class, and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers—working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes—in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.

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About the Author: Aiko Kitahara was born in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district. After graduating from Chiba Prefectural Girls’ High School she joined an advertising firm, beginning her creative work on the side. She won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for her debut work, the 1969 Mama wa shiranakatta yo (Mom Didn’t Know). She has gained a widespread following for her elegant style and for her detailed images of the everyday lives of Edo-period Japanese. Many of her works have been adapted for television.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “Eight Tenths a Man,” “No Time for Tears,” and “The Budding Tree.”

Author Jackalene Crow-Hiendlmayr tells an often autobiographical story of an orphaned Native American child. Seven-year-old Jonathon Horse’s father is killed in Iraq. His mother’s grief leads to her death and he is placed in a children’s home. A buffalo robe is his only link to his family. The book contains authentic details of Native American life as it still continues today, including the tribal pow-wow, the history of the drum and dances, and the naming ceremony. For a change, it has a happy ending.

From the Dust Jacket: In northern Vermont, a raging river overflows its banks and sweeps the nine-year-old twin daughters of Terry and Laura Sheldon to their deaths. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the highway patrolman and his wife, unable to have more children, take in a foster child: a ten-year-old African-American boy who has been shuttled for years between foster families and group homes. Young Alfred cautiously enters the Sheldon family circle, barely willing to hope that he might find a permanent home among these kind people still distracted by grief.

Across the street from the Sheldons live an older couple who take Alfred under their wing, and it is they who introduce him to the history of the buffalo soldiers—African-American cavalry troopers whose reputation for integrity, honor, and personal responsibility inspires the child.

Before life has a chance to settle down, however, Terry, who has never been unfaithful to Laura, finds himself attracted to the solace offered by another woman. Their encounter, brief as it is, leaves her pregnant with his baby—a child Terry suddenly realizes he urgently wants.

From these fitful lives emerges a lyrical and richly textured story, one that explores the meaning of marriage, the bonds between parents and children, and the relationships that cause a community to become a family. But The Buffalo Soldier is also a tale of breathtaking power and profound moral complexity—and exactly the sort of novel readers have come to expect from Chris Bohjalian.

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About the Author: Chris Bohjalian is the author of eight novels, including Midwives (a Publishers Weekly Best Book and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery title), Trans-Sister Radio, The Law of Similars, and Water Witches. He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

From the Back Cover: A shot rang out ... the driver slumped over the wheel ... suddenly the Land Rover began a three-hundred-foot dive down the Gambuti Gorge to what should have been certain death for both its passengers, but it wasn’t...

Bunduki awoke in a strange country, dressed in a crudely shaped leopard skin, and armed with primitive weapons. Who had saved him? And why had they bothered to transport him to this alien jungle, far away from Africa? And, more important, had they also rescued his cousin, Dawn, and was she, too, alone somewhere in this foreign land? He had to find her and then maybe together they could solve the mystery of their miraculous survival.

But first he had to overcome the dangers of the jungle—a terrifying prospect for an ordinary man, but not for Bunduki, adoptive son of Lord Greystoke—otherwise known as Tarzan of the Apes...