From the Back Cover: Set in the Wyoming of the late 1990s and laced with memories of an earlier era, Burning of the Marriage Hat: A Novel of High Plains Women by Margaret Benshoof-Holler is the attention engaging story of a woman who travels to lay her grandmother’s ghost to rest and to understand the genesis of her own ambivalence toward men.

On the journey, she learns of how women who became pregnant out of wedlock were once treated and what it meant to come of age in Wyoming in the 1960s.

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About the Author: Margaret Benshoof-Holler grew up in Wyoming in the 1960s. She is a journalist and a writer of fiction and poetry. She has worked as a freelance writer and op ed columnist for various newspapers and magazines writing about U.S. culture, women’s issues, life in Wyoming, and California community college education. She has also written abut post-traumatic stress disorder, race and domestic violence. She lived and taught in Boulder, Colorado, Jakarta, Indonesia, Malmo, Sweden, and Madrid, Spain before moving to San Francisco in 1990 where she currently writes and teaches at City College of San Francisco. Burning of the Marriage Hat is her first book.

From the Back Cover: Michael Delaney was tired of living with the wolves. Orphaned at a young age by a mysterious car explosion, he had grown up the adopted son of a vicious small-time crime family. Forced to learn their treacherous ways in order to survive, Michael never felt he belonged. In his heart he knew there was a better way. His real parents had taught him that. Desperate and determined, he concocts a scheme to leave his life of crime behind him forever. But something goes terribly wrong. Michael’s attempt at escape ends in a fiery disaster from which he is bummed beyond recognition. He wakes up months later with a new face, a new identity, and no memory of his previous life.

Burning Sand follows Michael into his new life as pro Beach Volleyball champion Quinton Squid. It is the early 1990s, and the sport is entering a new heyday.

As Michael struggles to live up to the dead man’s legendary stature, he walks a tightrope of celebrity and trepidation. Coming to grips with his innermost demons, he strives to create a new self with which he can live, all the while unaware that the dark forces of his past are closing in behind him. His struggle brings him to a standoff from which there can be no tuming back--the knowledge of what really happened to his parents, his true identity, and his very life hang in the balance...

From the dimly-lit alleyways of Boston’s North End to the sun-drenched beaches of Southem Califomia, BURNING SAND is the action-packed, soul-awakening journey of a man who discovers who he is, only after forgetting who he thought he was.

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About the Author: Burning Sand is the first novel from R.J. Ruggiero, a screenwriter and playwright living near Boston. R.J. has written and developed screenplays for the Academy Award-winning producers of Rocky, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, and Ender’s Game, and was a comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

From the Dust Jacket: It was while One Reed meditated in solitude outside the city, piercing his arms and legs with thorns of the maguey plant as was the custom, that it happened. Frightened and in awe of what he saw, the young boy came upon the startling figure that had seemingly hurtled from the heavens. Unlike his own kind, surely this man was a god—with his fair skin, blue eyes, and hair the color of flames. Could it be Quetzalcoatl, god of light, of peace and plenty, returning to the Aztec people as promised?

Acclaimed by some in the city of Tenochtitlan as Quetzalcoatl and questioned by others, this strange, godlike man called Burning Star is seen as a threat to his own power by the recently crowned and arrogant young king, Wild Grass. For Burning Star, whether he is truly Quetzalcoatl or not, adopts the teachings of this peaceful god and attempts to persuade the people to give up their ceremonies of human sacrifice. It is the young boy One Reed, companion to the compassionate but foreign god, who finds himself caught in the growing antagonism between his vengeful king and Burning Star.

What becomes One Reed’s fate is woven into a dramatic and compelling story full of the richness of the Aztec culture. A thorough researcher, the author has the admirable ability of capturing a specific time and place in her descriptions and in her characters.

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About the Author: Eth Clifford lives in Indianapolis, where she works as an editor and writer for a small publishing company. She is the author of several books for young readers, including two historical novels, The Year of the Three-Legged Deer, for which she won The Friends of American Writers Award 1973, and Search for the Crescent Moon.

From the Dust Jacket: Of the Black Death, they said it was the end of the world; I knew better. The world can withstand the sickness of the body, but it remains to be seen whether it will survive the sickness that eats at the souls of our persecutors....

So professes Mother Marie Francoise, born Sybille, a poor midwife who is taught pagan ways and magic by her grandmother and is forced to take refuge among the Franciscan sisterhood as the Inquisition threatens. Her extraordinary life story unfolds when a monk is charged with determining whether the mysterious abbess is a saint or a witch.

Sybille is possessed of exceptional powers, and she is in full command of them—practicing white and black magic, winning the hearts of people with her wisdom, and terrorizing church authorities with her cunning. But even witches are not immune to earthly love, and Sybille embarks on a passionate, dangerous quest to be reunited with her beloved. As she confronts an exceptional destiny—one that will require her to face the flames in order to save others like her—she relates a tale of impossible triumph that forever changes the inquisitor who hears it.

The Burning Times brilliantly weaves the mythology of the Knights Templar, witchcraft, and gnosticism against a backdrop of actual historical events: the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and the catastrophic defeat of France by England. Demonstrating the same meticulous research and page-turning plotting that made her Diaries of the Family Dracul series a success, Jeanne Kalogridis crafts a vivid portrait of this turbulent and fascinating period in world history and, at the same time, delivers a searing love story with a redeeming moral of its own: The greatest magic is that of compassion.

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About the Author: Jeanne Kalogridis is the author of The Diaries of the Family Dracul, a historical trilogy about Vlad the Impaler. She lives in Southern California.

From the Back Cover: For as long as she could remember, Janet’s world had been the orphanage, full of cruel jokes and silent wishes for the day she’d have a family of her own. She could hardly believe it when Sanford and Celine Delorice chose her to be their daughter, whisking her away from her tragic past.

Her new father is handsome and kind, and though Celine is confined to a wheelchair, she is the most beautiful and elegant woman Janet has ever seen. Soon Janet learns the routines of their grand estate, including those of the studio where she takes ballet lessons from a strict teacher. Celine is convinced Janet will one day dazzle audiences as a ballerina, just as she did before her accident. Eager to bring sunshine to all their days, Janet tries with all her might to please them. But she is dancing on a fragile web of happiness, never knowing what might happen if one glittering strand should break ...

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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); Crystal (1998); Brooke (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.

When Amber Asmundsen climbed into the stranger’s car on the mountain road outside the church camp, she shouted down the warning voice in her head. She only had room for the pain of not belonging. She did not belong in camp. She did not belong in her loving adopted family. She definitely did not belong in the safe suburban world she had entered when a hit and run driver killed her unknown Indian birthmom. Now in four short, terrifying minutes, she was going to find out she did not belong in this stranger’s car. Amber, an adopted teen, tries to connect with the native American heritage of her birth mother. This fictional coming-of-age story can be read by moms and daughters as it describes a tight-knit Christian family working together to solve hard problems related to adoption and ethnic heritage. Set in contemporary Seattle, Northwest Washington and southern British Columbia with a backdrop of many native cultures including Haida and Nooksack as well as Norwegian and Scottish.

From the Back Cover: San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive family, and her quest to track down her birth mother--which has led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. Confronted with this new self—“I have no idea what it means to say, I’m a Jew”—the patient finds her search stalled.

Obsessed and enraptured. the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient once contacted. When, through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by his news, he starts to unearth more clues and invest more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship among himself, the patient, and her therapist.

With ferocious intelligence and enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes a major writer.

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About the Author: Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her experience as a rare female programmer during the early years of the personal computer era. She lives in San Francisco.

Addie Lockwood believes in books. Roland Rhodes believes in blues guitar. Coming of age in the small-town South of the 1970s, they form a friendship as extraordinary as it is unlikely. They meet again in their disillusioned thirties, this time in California, where Roland’s music career has landed him. Venice Beach is exotic, a world away from North Carolina and Addie’s cloistered life as a bookstore clerk. But when her whirlwind reunion with Roland leaves Addie pregnant, reality sets in. Conflicted, unready to be a mother, she gives birth to a son—Byrd—and surrenders him for adoption without telling Roland, little imagining how the secret will shape their lives. Told through letters and sharply drawn vignettes, Byrd is an unforgettable story about making and living with the most difficult, intimate, and far-reaching of choices.

From Kirkus Reviews: A Southern summer and the impact of its events on Jim Daigre, aged eight, form the core of this implicit, rather than overt, emotional landscape. His birthday brings him four love birds, whose resultant fate, when one female kills the other two to get the male, clouds his mother’s sense of responsibility; he is taught Greek by old Mr. Aristo whose adopted son, Luke, laviesa and sham as he may be, constitutes a sort of hero for Jim. Surrounded by gossip, of grandmother, neighbours, aunts and uncle, aware of the strain between his parents, Jim has only the outspoken, uninhibited memories of his Grandfather as signals for his own integrity when he is thrown into a more personal world when his mother evades the real world in sickness. The old boom, Luke’s grand gestures of wealth, an unsatisfactory friendship with another boy, and the cumulative climax of Luke’s death and Mr. Aristo’s madness, wind up the near-tragedy of desertion and dissolution. There’s a feeling of in theme as well as writing, there is a dissection of event in terms of effect that mark this for a discriminating audience.

From the Dust Jacket: Continuing in the exuberant tradition of Six of One, Bingo, and Loose Lips, New York Times bestselling author Rita Mae Brown returns to her much-loved fictional hamlet of Runnymede, whose memorable citizens are welcoming both the end of the Great War and the beginning of a new era.

The night a riot breaks out at the Capitol Theater movie house—during a Mary Pickford picture, no less—you can bet that the Hunsenmeir sisters, Louise and Julia, are nearby. Known locally as Wheezie and Juts, the inimitable, irrepressible, distinctly freethinking sisters and their delightful circle of friends are coming of age in a shifting world—and are determined to understand their place in it. Across town, the well-to-do Chalfonte siblings are preparing for the upcoming wedding of brother Curtis. But for youngest sister Celeste, the celebration brings about a change she never expected and a lesson about love she’ll not soon forget.

Set against the backdrop of America emerging from World War I, Cakewalk is an outrageous and affecting novel about a small town where ideas of sin and virtue, love and sex, men and women, politics and religion, can be as divided as the Mason-Dixon Line that runs right through it—and where there’s no problem that can’t be cured by a good yarn and an even better scotch. With her signature Southern voice, Rita Mae Brown deftly weaves generations of family stories into a spirited patchwork quilt of not-so-simple but joyously rich life.

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About the Author: Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of the Sneaky Pie Brown series; the Sister Jane series; the Runnymede novels, including Six of One and Cakewalk; A Nose for Justice and Murder Unleashed; Rubyfruit Jungle and In Their Day; as well as fifty-six other books. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia, and is a Master of Foxhounds.

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

From the Dust Jacket: California’s Over leads us down an unmarked road to the coast and then deep into the rotten, labyrinthine house where James Farmican, the famous poet, shot himself to death years ago, leaving behind a legacy of adulation and bankruptcy. Now his family is leaving, and the young narrator—who calls himself Baelthon—has been hired to haul the furniture onto the lawn and sort through the attic and basement. But as Baelthon excavates, he also discovers layers of family mystery and comedy and cruelty, all of it piled too deeply for anyone to sort out: the unexplained disappearance of Farmican’s ashes, the unfinished novel that may actually be his suicide note, the opera about cannibalism that his son is writing to rescue himself from obscurity, and, finally, the family’s migration to the Nevada desert to claim their inheritance.

And Baelthon discovers Wendy, Farmican’s sixteen-year-old daughter who keeps her checkers pieces taped to the board where she and her father left them before he died. Emerging from her chrysalis of baby fat and self-loathing, Wendy is destined to be both the love of Baelthon’s life and the object of his betrayal.

Twenty-five years later, from the perspective of midland middle-class life, Baelthon recalls the mistaken selves he and the Farmicans once inhabited. What he doesn’t expect—or think he deserves—is the redemption and abiding against-all-odds love that await him.

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About the Author: Louis B. Jones is the author of two previous novels, Ordinary Money and Particles and Luck. He lives in California with his family.

From the Dust Jacket: “The Bear-god warriors came like a tsunami from the sea, their poorly made and misshapen outriggers sunk so deeply in the water that the Boat People only stood on the shore staring, sure that a wave would swamp the dugouts before the warriors could beach them. Bur the sea gods were asleep....”

So begins the story of the little girl called Daughter as she and the grandfather, Water Gourd, flee their village and promised death at the hands of the Bear-god warriors. At the end of a perilous and daring journey across the North Pacific, they are guided by sea otters to the islands of the Whale Hunters.

Daughter and Water Gourd believe they have found safety, but they are soon ensnared in the plots and schemes of the medicine woman, K’os. She seeks revenge against her son, the warrior-statesman Chakliux, whom she blames for her status as slave-wife among the Whale Hunters.

Unaware of K’os’s plans, Chakliux, with the wisdom and help of his wife, Aqamdax, and brother, Sok, has brought the River People into prosperous times. Their lives revolve around caribou hunting in the spring and fall, fishing in the summer, and storytelling during the winter. But years of peace are shattered by K’os’s planned vengeance, and it is a forbidden love that makes the vengeance possible. Against the wishes of his people, Aqamdax’s brother Ghaden takes the girl Daughter as his wife, giving K’os the opportunity to use the secrets of her poisons and plant medicines to devastate the lives those she hates.

The conclusion of K’os’s story of hatred and revenge is told in a traditional manner, authentic to Native American storytelling that is a unique and stunning departure from modern literature that will both surprise and satisfy the reader.

Call Down the Stars is a series of stories within a story. Daughter’s tale is presented as a duel between two storytellers, the quick-witted female Qumalix and the silver-tongued man Yikaas. As they vie with each other to enchant their tribe with astonishing legends that recall the origins of their people, Qumalix and Yikaas grow in wisdom and, more important, learn that love transcends the boundaries of time and enmity.

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About the Author: Sue Harrison is the author of five previous novels: Mother Earth Father Sky, My Sister the Moon, Brother Wind, Song of the River, and Cry of the Wind. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she taught creative writing at Lake Superior State University. She and her husband, Neil, live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They have two children.

From the Dust Jacket: Camellia Street is one of the major novels of Mercè Rodoreda, a brilliant Catalan writer whose works are widely read and admired throughout the world. This is the story of Cecelia and of the war-torn, disoriented Barcelona of the 1940s and 1950s. It is a profoundly feminist work that etches one powerless woman’s strength in the face of male brutality; it ends on a note of tenuous rebirth.

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About the Author: Mercè Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1909, at a time when Catalonia was autonomous and its citizens were allowed to speak, write, and study their own language. She published five novels between 1932 and 1937, and then fled to Paris and then Geneva from the brutal suppression of Catalan culture. She did not publish again until 1959, when her novels and short stories became a fixture on Catalan best-seller lists. When Franco died, Rodoreda returned to Barcelona, where she stayed until she died of cancer in 1983.

David H. Rosenthal’s 1983 translation of the 15th-century Catalan novel Tirant lo Blanc was the first English publication of that work. He also translated several contemporary Catalan authors, including Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves and My Christina. Rosenthal is also the author of several volumes of poetry, books about jazz, and a book about Barcelona called Flags in the Wind. He earned his doctorate in comparative literature from the City University of New York, and taught at colleges in New York and Spain. Rosenthal died of cancer in 1992.

From the Back Cover: A thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, Can of Worms is a silent graphic novel in the tradition of Masareel, Ward, and Milt Gross. Upon discovering that she was adopted, Catherine Margaret Flaherty searches for her birth mother. She navigates between bureaucratic sleuthing and her profound need to uncover her history. The beautifully modulated visual rhythms give the narrative a uniquely understated eloquence.

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About the Author: Catherine Doherty was born in Toronto in 1965. Her interest in comics began when she discovered the unpublished work of her father in a metal file box in the basement. She currently lives in California. Can of Worms is her first graphic novel.

From the Dust Jacket: Anita Rau Badami’s new novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, tells the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy, over a span of fifty years, sweeping from the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985.

There is Bibi-ji, who steals the heart of her sister’s fiancé and returns with him to Vancouver, where they become pillars of the Sikh community, and who is haunted by the subsequent disappearance of her sister during the violence of Partition; her neighbour Leela trying to get on with the business of living in this new world of opportunity—who feels herself always a “half and half,” a newcomer struggling to find her way in the colourful “desi” community of Vancouver; and Nimmo, orphaned by the devastation that engulfed India after Partition, who tries to rebuild her life in Delhi. But for all three, the conflicts of the past re-emerge with shattering results.

Rich with Anita Rau Badami’s warmth and humanity, and filled with the daily sights, scents and sounds of both Canada and India, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? vividly reveals the tumultuous effect of the past on new immigrants, and the ways in which memory and myth, the personal and the political, become heartrendingly connected.

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About the Author: Anita Rau Badami’s first novel was the bestseller Tamarind Mem. Her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, was also a bestseller and won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Italy’s Premio Berto and was named a Washington Post Best Book. It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career, Anita Rau Badami currently resides in Montreal.

A trail of excitement is left behind when working parents, Spencer and Pepper Anne, learn their adopted child, Huck, has a manic personality that lends itself to risk taking. His repetitive viewing of the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the TV series The Dukes of Hazzard take his parents on an escalator ride during his teens. As Huck ages, they learn that his serial monogamous relationships with women are a recipe for disaster. Then the parents begin to question their decision to raise a child in today’s society. Humorous and unpleasant circumstances unfold as they progress through the life cycle in both East Tennessee and Southern California between the 1960s and early 21st century. Lifelong observations of ambiguous relationships on the job, in the family unit, and among friends provided the foundation for the story. Historical events and cultural differences shape the lives of the characters, while they enjoy vacations, travel, sports, holidays, and birthdays. Their philosophy for life emerges as they make decisions about involvement vs. noninvolvement, logic vs. emotion, punishment vs. reward, rural vs. big city, and last but not least, to have children or not to have children. Can intropunitive behavior be changed either by society or parents?

From the Publisher: Currie Culver is about fifty-five years old, in good health, living in a comfortable retirement in the Rockies with his wife. In the wake of the Meme Wars that swept the planet two generations before, Currie, his wife, and almost everyone on Earth have in their minds a copy of One True, software that grants its hosts limited telepathy and instills a kind of general cooperation.

In his younger days, Currie hunted “comboys”—people who had unplugged from the global net in order to evade One True, and who hid in wilderness areas, surviving by raiding the outposts of civilization. Now Currie is called back into service to capture the last comboy still at large, a man who calls himself Lobo. With his high tech equipment, thoroughly plugged into the global net, Currie sets out to bring Lobo in.

Instead, Lobo captures Currie, and manages to deprogram him. Thrown back on the resources of his own intelligence, courage, and wisdom for the first time in twenty-five years, Currie finds himself in a battle of minds with his captor ... with results that will change the lives of everyone on Earth.

In the best tradition of John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein, Candle is a novel about individualism and society that will leave readers breathless, arguing, and demanding more.

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About the Author: John Barnes is the award-winning author of Orbital Romance, A Million Open Doors, Mother of Storms, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls, Candle, and many other novels. With Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, he wrote the novels Encounter with Tiber and The Return. He lives in Colorado.

From the Dust Jacket: “I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday I can clearly distinguish among all the rest was my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September that I met the Captain for the first time. I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date so that he looked a little like an actor in costume—an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again.”

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About the Author: Graham Greene if the author of thirty-eight works of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, nearly all of which are available from Viking Penguin.

From the Back Cover: THE BEAST...

Listen—you’ll hear him chasing the frightened night creatures; breathe—you’ll smell the musk of his scent. You know he is not ... but not what he is. A golden bear. A great cat. A more-than-human being who can bend your will to his.
ASSUMES HUMAN FORM...

He becomes a man who knows knot what he is, but still he fights for an identity—while the Beast within uses him, drives him in a search that may kill them both.
AND BECOMES A CAPTIVE!

But the Man-Beast has broken the rule of Solitude ... and now he will become a prisoner of a force even greater than his own—a force all too human for bestial understanding.

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

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By the Same Author: The Orphan (1980) and The Beast (1982).

Young man, adopted by a wealthy and mysterious benefactor, falls in love with a young woman, only to find impediments to marriage.

From the Dust Jacket: This is the story, against an Australian background, of the struggle to possess a small boy, six-year-old “P.S.”

And here are some extracts from Jean Stafford’s review in The Cosmopolitan:

“Mr. Elliott is a storyteller of the first rank. He masterfully sews clues to the sources of the embattled sisters’ passions, and he withholds the significance of the clues until the suspense becomes breath-taking. Through perfectly timed flash-backs, he limns the several disappointing histories of which P.S. is willy-nilly the memorial—his shifts of time and points of view so fluid that the narrative never falters or meanders. His characters, for all their egocentricity and their mindless use of P.S. as the servant of their neuroses, have saving graces that rouse our interest and concern—Vanessa, at her most ruthless, is pitiably vulnerable; Lila, at her most prudish and provincial, has a simple, faithful heart; Vere and Agnes, absurd, Dickensian, have a core of wisdom in their chicken-headedness. And P.S., enmeshed in perplexities (for he is the spy in the employ of both enemies), remains inviolably a child with a child’s appetites and aversions and a child’s sure intuitions. In the end, the child in him begins to depart as disenchantment shows him that he has an identity apart: he has a text of his own and the title he gives it is Bill.

“The scenery against which this contest of wills is played is various and vivid. The glimpses of Australian metropolitan literati are superb, a benefit picnic for indigent writers could stand by iself as a minor masterpiece. Mr. Elliott’s ear is perfect and his prose is a joy; one hopes to read much more of it.”

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About the Author: Sumner Locke Elliott is a native of Australia. He left school there to go on the stage and turned to the writingof plays, one of which had the good fortune to be banned: the resulting to-do not only reached Parliament but assured the play a three-year run.

He has lived in America for some years now. He writes both for the theatre and for television: this is his first novel.

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Compiler’s Note: The book was adapted for film in Australia in 1983.

From the Dust Jacket: In the provocative and visionary tradition of contemporary Chicano fiction, poet and former Catholic priest Benjamin Alire Sáenz passionately explores the need for lasting ties and communities, whether they be of families, lovers, or families of friends.

Beginning with Diego, a deaf-mute Mexican-American barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas, and progressing to the posh suburbs of San Francisco (where Diego’s real sister, “Helen,” has long ago abandoned him and her Chicano roots), Carry Me Like Water is an epic and immensely moving story that bluntly confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing cultures and personal stories of people born in different Americas.

Helen and Eddie Marsh are living the pampered life of a yuppie couple expecting their first child—except that they’ve made a pact never to reveal anything about their childhood backgrounds. Everything seems to move along fine in their idyllic rendition of the world until Helen’s best friend, Lizzie, a dedicated AIDS nurse, begins to discover her own buried past after an unknown patient (who may or may not be her brother) blesses her on his deathbed with his remarkable telekinetic “gift” for out-of-body travel.

Lizzie’s newfound power, in addition to her blossoming friendship with Jake and Joaquin—a young gay couple coping with AlDS—serves as a catalyst, bringing to light long-buried secrets and causing the disparate worlds of pain and privilege to collide.

Carry Me Like Water combines unexpected and startling reunions of brothers and sisters, powerful confrontations with the past, and, more important, a renewed sense of the value of kindness.

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About the Author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz is the author of Dark and Perfect Angels, Flowers for the Broken, and Calendar of Dust, the recipient of an American Book Award. In 1993, he was awarded a fellowship from the prestigious Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles. He lives with his wife in El Paso, Texas.

From the Dust Jacket: A man kills his wife’s lover—almost. The criminal is Gideon Banks, a sculptor of modest success who has finally realized that he is incapable of repairing his broken marriage. Now on the run from the law, Gid is joined by Merit—his adopted, introverted son—and John Frederick White, an old turnip grower, the singer of a thousand songs, and Merit’s best friend.

For the length of a college football season the unlikely trio embarks on a quest along the highways and back roads of Alabama, laying bare in the process a landscape of poverty and isolation. This rural setting erodes when a rich stranger in Birmingham is enamored by their tale and agrees to take them in. Sheltered in a grand house, ever so close to being caught, Gid, Merit, and John Frederick must now confront both their personal struggles and a shocking past they have come to share.

Prescient in its grasp of politics and social discontent in the present-day South, Carry My Bones is a bracing debut by a writer of rare empathy.

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About the Author: J. Wes Yoder grew up in Franklin, Tennessee. After college, he worked at several newspapers in the South before moving to New York. Carry My Bones is his first novel.

From the Back Cover: Jake has married his emperor, but happily ever after is for fairy tales.

The empire is restless. The nobility isn’t hiding their distaste for Jake, the unclass who married the emperor. The unclass see him as proof that they can be more, and they’re not going to sit by and wait any longer.

And someone is trying to kill Jake.

As friends become enemies, and enemies become allies, Jake has to discover the catalyst that has his world cascading into chaos, and protect those he loves, even the ones he doesn’t know about yet. And he has to do it before the empire comes crashing down ... or the assassin stalking him succeeds.

From the Back Cover: “I felt like I was going to my own execution...”

Cat had listened patiently as the other three girls in Dr. Marlowe’s therapy group shared their innermost feelings. They had described their broken families honestly, to the point of pain. If Cat doesn’t tell her own tale, the others will see it as a betrayal. So she has no choice.

Or does she? Maybe she could lie—just make something up. Anything would be better than the truth. For Cat has the darkest, most horrifying secret of them all....

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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); Brooke (1998); Raven (1998); Runaways (1998); 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.

The turbulent saga of Ash, a troublesome, twelve-year-old, trans-racially adopted British-Asian boy, sent to live on a Kent farm by a mother too ill to cope, during the long, hot summer of 1976. There, he discovers a buried WWII Spitfire engine and determines to rebuild it with his Grandfather. But where’s the rest of the aeroplane? 1941: Trinidadian fighter pilot Rudy finds himself reflecting on life, somewhere over the coast of France, limping back to Blighty in a wounded Spit. 2014: St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. As Ash surveyed his own son Tom’s broken body, he wondered how much he was willing to share, now Tom was old enough to ask awkward questions... Spanning over 70 years, Cathedrals in the Sky is a tightly woven coming-of-age psychology of love, loss, parenthood and identity, told from a series of five very different perspectives.

From the Dust Jacket: Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the civil rights movement in Boston in the 1970s. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can’t be sisters: while Cole looks like her father’s daughter, Birdie appears to be white. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness.

Then their parents’ marriage falls apart. Their father moves in with his black girlfriend, who won’t even look at Birdie, and their mother seems to be more and more out of control, giving her life over to the movement. At night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive at their house with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night, through the attic windows Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never have in the States. And the next morning, in the belief that the Feds are after them, Birdie and her mother have left everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity.

Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother drive through the Northeast, eventually making their home in New Hampshire. Desperate to find her sister, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world and the pains of adolescence—until she is finally prepared to set off in search of her sister.

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About the Author: Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. Caucasia is her first novel.

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By the Same Author: You Are Free: Stories (2011), among others.

From the Publisher: Imagine London, 1972: freedom, sex, and no commitment. Contrast this carefree scene, with that of a bland, London suburb, where at 18, unloved and unnoticed, your silent days are passed in sedate preparation. The unloved part doesn’t matter, you don’t really like people, and certainly not to share. The unnoticed is very convenient, too. You specialise in quiet, need to, because, actually there is someone—will be soon—a very special person, exclusively for you. Now travel to that dreadful moment you foolishly hadn’t planned for, when a stranger arrives and steals that person away. Finally, alone and grief stricken, imagine what you would do? You can’t answer that. You are not Marlene Rose.

Three disparate sets of lives are glimpsed through a tale of obsession and loss: a mesmerised young man, an empty marriage, the family whose sudden good fortune proves less than fortunate—and Marlene Rose, who imagines it is she who controls their collective fate. Strangers mysteriously converge in bland suburbia—some move ahead, some glance, unseeing, but when certain others tangle too much, Marlene hatches another plot. A cause that perhaps she always had in mind.

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About the Author: Rebecca J. Cunningham is a British fiction writer and illustrator. Work includes psychological noir, satire, alternative history and a semi-autobiographical account of life in 1960s Birmingham.

Cunningham’s delivery is provocative and versatile—her stories veering from the comic to the macabre. She often places her extraordinary characters in familiar, well regarded communities, creating both a sense of discomfort and of the absurd.

On what makes her write, she says: “It’s the company I keep.”

Ms. Cunningham lives in West London and has two children.

From the Dust Jacket: In the distant Northern Territories, fortress cities cling to barren peaks, fierce clans hunt the frigid steppes, arctic wastes are the last refuge of an enigmatic, ancient people—and an apocalyptic destiny has begun to unfold...

Once in a thousand years an innocent is born with the uncontrollable power and need to reach across the barrier of worlds, into the realm of the dead—and release the Endlords from their eternal prison, to annihilate all life.

Now, after a millennium of truce, war erupts between the cold giants of the far north. As the great and ancient clan of Blackhail brings war to the Dog Lord of Clan Bludd, two warriors are caught in the bloodshed. Raif and Drey Sevrance are brothers and clansmen alike, but soon the cold-blooded schemes of their new chief will tear them apart and brand Raif a traitor to his clan.

Meanwhile, in the cool limestone caverns of Mask Fortress, Ash March stumbles upon an old and terrible evil hidden away from the light. Penthero Iss, uncrowned king of Spire Vanis and the man who calls himself Ash’s father, has discovered a monstrous way to steal magic from his captives. And Ash fears she will be next.

Suddenly, Raif and Ash are each helped to escape by Angus Lok, whose amiable manner belies his mysterious past. But Angus is acting on the raven-sent message of a distant shaman, there’s nothing accidental about his intervention and his mission to guide Raif and Ash on a treacherous journey to A Cavern of Black Ice.

Passionately envisioned and filled with richly evoked new characters, this story is the beginning of J.V. Jones’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

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About the Author: J.V. Jones is the bestselling author of The Book of Words trilogy and The Barbed Coil. Among other things, she has worked as a marketing director for a software company and as a barmaid in an English pub. She lives in Southern California, where she indulges her interests of natural history, social history, and computer games. She is currently working on Book 2 of Sword of Shadows.

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By the Same Author: A Fortress of Grey Ice (1999, Tor Books) and A Sword from Red Ice (2007, Tor Books), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: Jerome is a promiscuous homosexual. Venetia is an impulsive and eccentric heiress. David, their adopted son, is the rejected child of a Spanish terrorist. Together they travel round Europe and America, committed only to each other and to change, exploring the world around them and developing bonds of love independent of familial or sexual ties.

The first part of The Centre of the Labyrinth is a dazzling intellectual entertainment. Like his hero, Philip Lloyd-Bostock was a polymath and a lover of words. His range of reference embraces Hollywood movies and hermetic philosophy, the gossip of seventeenth-century courts, the comically elaborate semiotics of gay fashion and the metaphysical implications of architectural postmodernism. The novel is not only a sympathetic and often very funny account of an unconventional relationship but also a glittering compendium of jokes, meditations and vignettes set against the hectic background of 1970s gay culture.

In the second part of the novel, the tone changes abruptly. Jerome has become infected with the AIDS virus; the same flamboyantly original intelligence is at work, but engaged now in an account of the anguish of ostracism, of illness and of death.

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About the Author: Philip Lloyd-Bostock was still working on this book when he died, soon after his fortieth birthday. Had time not run out on him so cruelly he would no doubt have revised it, correcting inconsistencies and reconciling the narrative’s two endings. Rather than guess at his intentions, the publishers have judged it best to present the text as he left it. The work necessary to transform it from a fragmented, largely handwritten manuscript into a connected, legible book has been done, but nothing has been added and only a few repetitive or obscure passages have been taken away.