From the Dust Jacket: This spectacular saga begins with the attempted kidnapping of a young Italian princess by an impoverished gardener. The abduction fails, but the love affair that grows between Princess Sylvia and Franco is the genesis of a story that spans one hundred years in the lives of an American family and their Italian cousins. Franco’s orphaned younger brother is adopted by one of the princess’s rich American friends, and becomes Victor Dexter, heir to a great banking fortune.

As Stewart focuses on this two-branched family, he penetrates Fifth Avenue’s early mansions, where passions hide behind habit and decorum ... the Brooklyn ghettos that spawn the Mafia who prey on struggling immigrants ... Hollywood of the twenties, heyday of the moguls, sexy sirens and the silver screen ... the treasure-filled palaces of the Vatican. Across four generations and two world wars, Stewart chronicles the fortunes of a turbulent clan: Victor, American son, powerful financier, passionate lover; Lucille, spoiled darling of the social set; Fausto, disillusioned fascist; Tony, a Vatican prelate, tempted by love but true to his vows; Gabriella, ugly duckling turned swan—sensual, loving, the true inheritor of her grandfather’s Italian blood.

Century is a saga in the great tradition, teeming with the lives and desires of: unforgettable people—the story of an island in time, of our past, of violent ends and brilliant new beginnings.

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About the Author: Fred Mustard Stewart was born and raised in Indiana. He later moved east and went to Lawrenceville and Princeton, where he received a degree in history. He spent several years in the Coast Guard, then began writing novels in 1965. His previous titles include The Mephisto Waltz, The Methuselah Enzyme, The Mannings, Six Weeks and A Rage Against Heaven. Mr. Stewart and his wife live in northwestern Connecticut.

From the Dust Jacket: In Drums Along the Mohawk Walter D. Edmonds told the valiant story of what it felt like to live through the Revolution in the Mohawk Valley. In other stories and novels he has recaptured those robust and colorful days which saw the building of the Eric Canal. In Chad Hanna he tells a story of the year 1836, a story of the Canal country when that teeming waterway was one of the main currents in American life.

To this new book Mr. Edmonds has devoted three years. The result is a narrative which will be read with gusty delight by those who love history and American character. Chad Hanna himself was brought up in an orphanage from which he ran away to become a horse boy on the Erie Canal. The opening chapter of the story finds him a husky youngster working as an hostler at the Yellow Bud Tavern, Canastora, New York, and wondering what life has to offer outside his tiny, fly-specked village. His best friend and adviser is Elias Proops, veteran of the Revolution and the only man in Canastota who, from a sitting position, can spit from the hotel porch into the Canal. When Huguenine’s circus comes to town, its moth-eaten lion, Oscar, its equestrienne, Lady Lillian, its superb clown, Ike Wayfish, capture Chad’s imagination as indeed they do that of the countryside. With the circus Chad wanders in and out of the tiny villages that border the Canal and for it he fights and performs with all the courage of young manhood.

Here is a romance, warmhearted and full of laughter, a novel whose picaresque details mirror American life as it was a century ago.

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About the Author: Walter D. Edmonds was born in 1903 in New York State. His 1936 novel, Drums Along the Mohawk, was a bestseller for two years. His later works received major literary awards, including the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. He died in 1998.

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Compiler’s Note: The book was adapted as a motion picture by the same name, starring Henry Fonda as Chad Hanna and Dorothy Lamour as Albany Yates, in the early 1940s.

From the Dust Jacket: The Civil War robbed fourteen-year-old Ann of everything. During the siege of Vicksburg a bomb blast destroyed her home. The same blast killed her mother and nearly killed Ann. Rescuers pulled Ann’s shattered body from the ruins and rushed her to a makeshift hospital where doctors amputated her arm to save her life.

Years later, orphaned and disabled, Ann finds herself in the midst of the exodus to the West.

While traveling the Oregon Trail, she aids four orphaned children stranded in a Conestoga wagon. Together they fight the hardships of the wild frontier: abominable weather, hostile Indians, and the specter of starvation.

Along the way Ann meets and marries Chalk ... and her real adventure begins.

Chalk’s Woman begins with the story of Ann’s struggle for survival and independence, and is ultimately a tale of her journey to discover the meaning of family.

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About the Author: David Ballantine lives in Bearsville, New York. A longtime dealer in many of the antique firearms used on the Western frontier, he switched gears to work for fifteen years as the editor of the Bantam War Book series. Chalk’s Woman is his first novel with Forge Books.

From the Dust Jacket: On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, a young neo-Nazi named Vincent Nolan walks into the Manhattan office of World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights foundation headed by a charismatic Holocaust survivor, Meyer Maslow. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change in his life. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger who claims to have read Maslow’s books, who has Waffen-SS tattoos under his shirtsleeves, and who says that his mission is to save guys like him from becoming guys like him?

As he gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do that, Vincent also transforms those around him: Maslow, who fears that heroism has become a desk job; Bonnie Kalen, the foundation’s fund-raiser, a divorced single mother and a devoted believer in Maslow’s crusade against intolerance and injustice; and Bonnie’s teenage son, Danny, whose take on the world around him is at once openhearted, sharp-eyed, and as fundamentally decent as his mother’s.

Masterfully plotted, darkly comic, A Changed Man illuminates the everyday transactions in our lives, exposing what remains invisible in plain sight in our drug-addled and media-driven culture. Remarkable for the author’s tender sympathy for her characters, A Changed Man poses the essential questions: What constitutes a life worth living? Is it possible to change? What does it mean to be a moral human being? The fearless intelligence, wit, and humanity that inform this novel make it Francine Prose’s most accomplished yet.

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About the Author: Francine Prose is the author of thirteen books of fiction, including the novel Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent book is The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, she was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.

From the Dust Jacket: Charlie and the Children is a novel about an American soldier who goes to war, fathers a son, and abandons him. He is taken captive by the Viet Cong and held in a cave in a tunnel underground. Sick, starving, and alone, he gradually loses his grip on reality and becomes convinced that one of his captors is his lost son. In clear, lyrical prose, Joanna C. Scott has written a book that is at the same time mythic and believable. Although a number of fine Viet Nam war novels have been published, Charlie and the Children is unique in its concern and its surpassing quality.

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Charlie and the Children evolved out of an earlier book, Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which I wrote while living in the Philippines at the end of the Marcos regime. At the time there was a large refugee camp up in the mountains of Bataan. There I met a young Amerasian whose father called him Freddy and abandoned him in Vietnam. Freddy knew both his father’s identity and address in the United States but was too proud to ask for his help, preferring to make it on his own in his new life. He also refused to give me permission to contact him to ask for an interview. However, Freddy’s father fascinated me and eventually I wrote this fictional account of what happened in Vietnam that caused father to abandon son.

—Joanna C. Scott

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About the Author: Joanna C. Scott was born during an air raid over London, raised in Australia, and migrated to the United States in 1976 where she now lives and writes on a hill in semirural Maryland. She has a first-class honors degree from the University of Adelaide and a Masters in Philosophy from Duke University. She is the author of Indochina’s Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and two novels, Charlie and the Children and Pursuing Pauline. She is at work on a third novel. Ms. Scott’s poetry has appeared in such journals as The Southern Poetry Review, The Ledge, California Quarterly, PoetLore, Passager, Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature, Bogg: A Journal of North American and British Writing, The Baltimore Review and The Lyric. Her chapbook, New Jerusalem, was an award winner in Baltimore’s Festival of Arts Literary Arts Competition. She has also won awards in the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition, the National Writer’s Association Competition, the Passager Poet Competition and the Treasure House Dedicated Poet’s Competition, and has been Director’s Choice at the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Festival Poetry Competition in Greensburgh, Pennsylvania. Steve Parish Publishing, Australia, features a selection of her poetry in a photographic calendar. Ms. Scott has three Australian children and three Korean, one large hairy dog, one small hairy dog, one tall cat, and one tolerant husband.

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By the Same Author: The Lucky Gourd Shop (2000, MacMurray & Beck) and Birth Mother: A Lyrical Companion to The Lucky Gourd Shop (2000, Longleaf Press), among others.

Mia is beautiful, talented and has the world at her fingertips. But what makes her different than the average college student who juggles a heavy workload and a rat of a boyfriend? Many years ago she was born to an unknown family in China but soon discarded to fend for herself in a busy train station. Fate stepped in when Mia was taken to the local orphanage and adopted at the age of four by her American family. Life has been good for her, or at least as much as she has allowed it to be while pushing her deep feelings of abandonment to the back of her mind. Finally she has decided that in order to move forward, she must confront her past. Mia takes a journey to the mysterious land of her birth and embarks on a mission to find answers. As she follows the invisible red thread back through her motherland, she is enamored by the history and culture of her heritage—strengthening her resolve to get to the truth, even as Chinese officials struggle to keep it buried. With her unwavering spirit of determination, Mia battles the forces stacked against her and faces mystery, danger, a dash of romance, and finally a conclusion that will change her life.

From the Back Cover: They have one summer to find what was lost long ago.

“Never settle for less than the truth,” she told him. But when you don’t even know your real name, the truth gets a little complicated. It can nestle so close to home it’s hard to see. It can even flourish inside a lie. And as Chase Walker discovered, learning the truth about who you are can be as elusive—and as magical—as chasing fireflies on a summer night. A haunting story about fishing, baseball, home cooking, and other matters of life and death.

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About the Author: Charles Martin’s novels have been acclaimed by reviewers and readers alike. He lives a stone’s throw from the St. John’s River in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife and their three boys.

From the Publisher: A black child to be cherished while her parents pursue their professional dreams. An advert in a newspaper. A white family willing. A dog called Nigger. After a young life-time with Lil, who becomes her (white) mother, and with white grandparents: a snuff-taking gran and doting grand-dad, does it matter that Cherish is Black. Or has her upbringing in effect made her White? Yet, Cherish finds when she must return to her parents, that the norms of her white home invariably spark conflict in her black family. How should she adjust to Fola and Simi, her Nigerian birth parents, and would Simi, Cherish’s biological mother, tell a story of trans-racial fostering that is different from that told by her daughter? Cherish is a story of love, race, class and heartbreak. Based on child-rearing practice prevalent post-1960s, the novel, Cherish, begs some crucial questions about the fostering of black children. Yinka Sunmonu’s narrative, Cherish, explores the disturbing texture of key tensions which, though not new to contemporary British life, have been seldom revealed. As a result, these issues are currently searingly topical. This story has long been waiting to be told. Cherish represents, at long last, a crucial breaking of silence.

From the Dust Jacket: An imaginary, utterly absorbing record of the investigations of the Committee on Education, Welfare, and Public Morality of an unnamed state senate into the activities of Mr. Wissey Jones, who has come to the town of Pequot on what he says is urgent defense business.

The hearings develop the suspense of a bizarre trial. It soon becomes clear that Mr. Jones buys for his corporation children of a certain sort, and that he is eager to acquire a ten-year-old named Barry Rudd, who manifests the breathtaking, prickly, sometimes obnoxious, but also deeply moving precocity of a potential genius. The dramatic conflicts exposed during the hearings revolve around the questions of exactly why Mr. Jones’s company buys children, and whether he will succeed in buying Barry.

The Child Buyer is a biting commentary on some aspects of American education, on the uses of high intelligence, and on the means of defending democracy. Mr. Hersey makes fine use of the classical weapons of satire—humor and high spirits, sweet dream and nightmare, grotesqueness in the heart of normalcy—to attack not any single theory of education, but the notions that education can be an exact science; that superior minds can be set free by a national crash program; that children can be regarded as weapons; and that talent can be processed and stored for profit and defense.

Although these extraordinary hearings end in a kind of horror, involving the slide into Corruption or rascality or apathy of almost everyone connected with them, nevertheless the book leaves in the reader’s mind a powerful affirmation—a case for individuality, freedom of thought, integrity, faith in the young, and, above all, a better understanding of human needs in a darkling world.

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About the Author: John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914, and lived there until 1925, when his family returned, to the United States. He was graduated from Yale in 1936 and then attended Clare College, Cambridge, for a year; upon his return from England he was private secretary to Sinclair Lewis during a summer. His first novel, A Bell for Adano, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. Since 1947 he has devoted his time to fiction and has written The Wall (1950), The Marmot Drive (1953), A Single Pebble (1956), The War Lover (1959), and The Child Buyer (1960).

Mr. Hersey brought to The Child Buyer more than a decade of interest in American public education. He has been a member of a local school board and of a town school study committee; chairman of a state committee on the problems of gifted children; member of the National Citizens’ Commission on the Public Schools; delegate to the White House Conference on Education; member of the National Citizens’ Council for Better Schools; and consultant to the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

From the Dust Jacket: One minute, twenty-four-year-old Sophie Hansa is in a San Francisco alley trying to save the life of a strange woman. The next, she is flung into the warm and salty waters of an unfamiliar world. Glowing moths fall to the waves around her, and the sleek bodies of unseen fish glide against her submerged ankles.

The world is Stormwrack, a series of island nations with a variety of cultures and economies—and a language different from any Sophie has heard.

Sophie doesn’t know it yet, but she has just stepped into the middle of a political firestorm and a conspiracy that could destroy the world she has just discovered ... her world, where everyone seems to know who she is, and where she is forbidden to stay.

But Sophie is stubborn, smart, and refuses to be cast adrift by people who don’t know her, yet wish her gone. With the help of a sister she has never known, and a ship captain who rather she had never arrived, she must navigate the shoals of the highly charged politics of Stormwrack and win the right to decide for herself whether she stays in this wondrous world ... or is doomed to exile.

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About the Author: A.M. Dellamonica is a recent transplant to Toronto, Ontario, having moved there in 2013 with her wife, Kelly Robson, after twenty-two years in Vancouver. She has been publishing short fiction since the early nineties in venues like Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, as well as numerous anthologies. Her 2005 alternate history of Joan of Arc, “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic,” was short-listed for the Sidewise Award and the Nebula.

Her first novel, Indigo Springs, won the 2010 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic; she is also a Canada Council grant recipient.

Dellamonica teaches writing courses through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Child of a Hidden Sea is her third novel.

From the Publisher: Middle-aged Mira Fenn knows she has an uncomfortably exotic past. As a small girl, she lived in a ornate old house in tiny Las Vegas, New Mexico, tended by oddly silent servant women and ruled by her coldly flamboyant mother Colette. When Mira was nine, Colette went on one of her unexplained trips, only this time she never returned.

Placed with foster parents, Mira was raised in Ohio, normal save for her passion for color. On gaining adulthood, she learned that she still owned the New Mexico house. She also learned that, as a condition of being allowed to adopt her, Mira’s foster parents had agreed to change their name, move to another state, and never ask why.

Years later, going through family papers after the deaths of her elderly foster parents, Mira finds documents that pique her curiosity about her vanished mother and the reasons behind her strange childhood and adoption.

Traveling back to New Mexico, she finds the house is and isn’t as she remembers it. Inside, it’s much the same. Outside, it’s been painted in innumerable colors. As Mira continues to investigate her mother’s life, events take stranger and stranger turns. The silent women reappear. Even as Mira begins to suspect the power to which she may be heir, the house itself appears to be waking up.

Shot through with magic and the atmosphere of the Southwest, this singular fantasy novel has all the storytelling vigor of Jane Lindskold’s very popular Firekeeper series.

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About the Author: Jane Lindskold lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her Wolf novels include Through Wolf’s Eyes; Wolf’s Head, Wolf’s Heart; The Dragon of Despair; and Wolf Captured. Her other novels include The Buried Pyramid, Changer, and, with the late Roger Zelazny, Lord Demon and Donnerjack.

From the Publisher: As a child, she was Baby Celeste, the one thing that kept her mother in touch with reality. But now her mother is in an institution, damaged by years of lies and secrets, and sixteen-year-old Celeste Atwell is alone in the world. Adopted by a wealthy couple, Wade and Ami Emerson, Celeste has everything a girl could desire: designer clothes, luxury cars, even a handsome boyfriend. But her new life is shrouded in mystery.

Ami acts more like a girlfriend than Celeste’s adoptive mother—what mother would encourage her daughter to flirt outrageously and dress in racy outfits? Wade, meanwhile, stoically accepts his wife’s wild spending sprees and over-the-top behavior. Celeste is about to discover the true price of having it all—because the secrets hidden within the Emerson household are too dangerous to keep under wraps.

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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); Cat (1999); Into the Garden (1999); Rain (2000); Lightning Strikes (2000); Willow (2002); Hidden Leaves (2003); Daughter of Darkness (2010, Gallery Books); Secret Brother (2015, Gallery Books); and Sage’s Eyes (2016, Gallery Books), among many others.

This novel tells the story of an unwanted baby boy, left by his parents, during the period of the First World War and the years of Russian civil war. First in an orphanage and then adopted by a charitable woman, he experiences terrible deprivation and abuses, he witnesses atrocities occurred in a chaotic surrounding. After being adopted by a loving family and living in comfort, he is eager to find his biological parents and his true identity. Disappointed, he has to face an unknown destiny.

From the Back Cover: Anne Cameron, combining the best of The Journey and Daughters of Copper Woman, takes us onto the plains of North America and reveals the skills and spiritual teachings necessary for survival there.

CHILD OF HER PEOPLE

—Found, as a small white baby, in a covered wagon by the side of her dead mother

—Taken to a band of the People, who adopt and nurture her

WOMAN WALKS SOFTLY

—Teacher of spiritual lessons and the reason Child Of Her People is alive

—The woman who calls Child Of Her People her daughter but knows she must lose her to life’s hard lessons

Child Of Her People, returning from a vision quest, to her home and the life she now shares with her husband and three children, is shattered by what she finds.

When the kidnapping of her daughter repeats a nightmare from her own young life, Child Of Her People draws on every skill, emotion and action she has learned from the People to seize control of her destiny a that of her children.

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About the Author: “We live on seven acres of rain forest, in which we have managed to clear a small meadow which we have planted to wild flowers and sweet clover for the honey bees who live in two hives just far enough from the house to allow me a feeling of safety; I’m allergic to stings, and thus am terrified of bees. My Sweetie tells me the bees have other things on their minds and are too busy working to be bothered wasting their time and their lives chasing after me. She must be right, the bees and I have co-existed for five years and while I have been chased (at speeds up to, I’m sure, 45 miles per hour), I have not yet been stung. We have chickens, turkeys, rabbits, cats, and dogs. Every year there are more toads, frogs, and butterflies, every year the gardens are better. This year we had saved up enough money to buy kayaks; they are wonderful. No gas fumes, no motor noise, we have been able to come up on a small deer frolicking in the waves on a hot day, an otter sunning herself on a large rock in the sea, an eagle feasting on a fish on the beach; in each case the wild one thought we were just logs floating on the waves, and ignored us. It was wild! We were so close to the eagle we could hear the fish bones crunching.

“I am researching the myths and poetry of the Celtic peoples, with a view to doing a book focusing on the female figures, too many of which have been patriarchalized or ignored since the christianization of the Celtic areas.

“Completion of this novel was made possible by a grant from the Canada Council. My sincere thanks to the Council and the tax payers of Canada for their financial support and their encouragement. Meegwetch!”

Child of Sorrow is based on a true story of one 17-year-old girl’s struggle to survive an unplanned pregnancy in a time when abortion was not a legal option. Like many in 1959, she was secreted away to a home for unwed mothers and forced to surrender her baby for adoption. Most who endured such a heart-rending experience were scarred by it for life, and their future relationships suffered as a result. This book is dedicated to all of them.

From the Publisher: Confluence: an artificial world orbiting an obscure star beyond the edge of the galaxy, a flat strip twenty thousand kilometres long, bounded on one side by the Rim Mountains, on the other by the Great River. As a baby, Yama was found on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat floating on the Great River. Raised by an obscure bureaucrat in an obscure town in the midst of a disused metropolis, destined to become a clerk in Confleunce’s vast theocratic civil service, he attracts the attention of schemers who have discovered that he has the ability to control the fabric of the world. In order to reconcile his human nature with his dangerous powers, Yama must journey to the ancient capital of Confluence. He must unravel the riddle of his birth before he can understand whether he is to be the saviour of Confluence or its nemesis.

From Back Cover: Rat is no ordinary thief. A feral, filthy and malnourished child; he survives on what he can steal. But he creates his own shadows and hides within them, though he’s completely unaware of his use of magic. When a clan of powerful wizards sees his shadowmagic they adopt him, because they want such magic in the clan. Perhaps that’s a good thing for Rat, as long as they don’t kill him in the process.

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About the Author: J.L. Doty was born in Seattle, but he’s lived most of his life in California, though he did live on the east coast and in Europe for a while. From a very early age he made up stories in his head, but he never considered writing. In his family you went to college, got a degree in something useful and got a real job. So he got a Ph.D. in optical engineering, and went to work as a research scientist. But he was till making up those stories in his head, so a couple decades ago he started writing them down. He’s been addicted to the craft of writing ever since, and writes full-time now.

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By the Same Author: The SteelMaster of Indwallin (2013); The Heart of the Sands (2013); and The Name of the Sword (2015).

From the Back Cover: Who is Will Sawnet? After his father’s death, a young man learns that his mother was Native, and that he was adopted. Shocked and disoriented by the sudden discovery that his past was a lie, Will quits his newspaper job and takes to the road in a desperate search for his real mother. This is a satisfying, compelling novel filled with humour, poignancy, and tragedy, as Will drives north to the Red Clay Reserve, teetering between selves: is he Will Sawnet, the name his white parents always called him, or Billy Childforever, the ironic name his Cree girlfriend, Agnes, has given him? In Childforever, Cree-Scottish writer lan McCulloch has created a powerful, urgent exploration of crisis in identity.

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About the Author: Ian McCulloch, the author of Moon of Hunger, The Efficiency of Killers, and Parables and Rain (all Penumbra Press, 1983-1993), was born in Comox, B.C., in 1957. His early years were spent as an Air Force gypsy travelling from base to base. His father eventually retired in North Bay, Ontario, where McCulloch and his son, Matthew, reside. McCultoch comes from mixed European and Cree parentage, and his Native heritage has always been a source of great pride. Many social factors in his life and in the lives of his ancestors, however, made his a somewhat abstract inheritance. In the early eighties, McCulloch worked on several reserves in northern Alberta, an experience that became the genesis for his first collection of poetry and for the novel Childforever.

From the Dust Jacket (U.S. edition): Separated from his mother on a boat bound for a new land, David is a boy who is quite literally adrift. The piece of paper explaining his situation is lost, but a fellow passenger, Simón, vows to look after the boy. When the boat docks, David and Simón are issued new names, new birthdays, and virtually a whole new life.

Strangers in a strange land, knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?”

An eerie allegorical tale told largely through dialogue, The Childhood of Jesus is a literary feat—a novel of ideas that is also a tender, compelling narrative. Coetzee’s many fans will celebrate his return while new readers will find The Childhood of Jesus an intriguing introduction to the work of a true master.

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About the Author: J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-one books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to twice win the Booker Prize. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

From the Dust Jacket: “What can you say about the Seventies—except to wish you hadn’t been there. It was probably the most ephemeral decade in the history of the world. Disposable fashion, disposable dances, disposable music. And disposable lives in the warm country where I grew up. Young white boys shot on the border for the good of the nation and the country. Black school children shot in the townships for another nation in the same country.”

Set in that time, Childish Things transforms all that was ephemeral into the stuff of enduring art as it tells the story of coming of age in a country, a culture, and a world coming apart at the neatly stitched seams. Mart Vermaak is a budding teenager trapped in a strict boarding school in the South African outback. Mart relies on her precocious, smart-mouthed roommate Dalena to save her from terminal boredom. Fortified by the novels of Carson McCullers and many dramatic interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, both girls set out to discover what life is really about.

They soon find themselves in over their heads as the full weight of love, sex, and the political realities of their native land bear down on them. In alternating chapters, the adult Mart reflects on her adventures. Through her vivid memories, the vanished becomes visible again: in a marvelous montage of pop songs, rebellion, sex, comic confusions, and tragic casualties, the teenage girls become women playing games of love and lust in which risk runs high. The awkward young men they adore or abhor go off to fight for things they do not believe against foes they do not know. Wry and witty, haunting and elegiac, this novel is very much about South Africa at a crucial crossroads. Yet in its depiction of the struggle between generations, the interplay of friends and lovers, the intoxication of forging one’s own identity, and the pain of paying the price of freedom, it is a story that speaks to all who are or have ever been young in a world they never made, swept toward an unknown future on tides of change they cannot control.

Marita van der Vyver’s previous novel, Entertaining Angels, was a succés de scandale for its sexual candor, frank exploration of female eroticism, and scathing social commentary when it appeared in her native South Africa. It went on to win the country’s highest literary award and worldwide acclaim. With this new novel, she further hones her vision and perfects her voice. It establishes her as a major talent, as lastingly important as she is impudently entertaining.

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About the Author: Marita van der Vyver’s is a popular author of young adult novels in her native South Africa, where she received the nation’s most prestigious literary prize for Entertaining Angels (Plume). She lives in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

From the Dust Jacket: The seventh novel in the Seafort Saga by David Feintuch, recipient of the prestigious John W. Campbell Award, Children of Hope continues the story of a man bound to his duty—and wracked by guilt for all that his duty demands of him. Captain Nicholas Seafort survived alien wars, planetary rebellions, and ecological chaos on Earth, but now something much more ordinary might finally cost him his life—vengeance...

Derek Carr was Stadholder of the colonial planet Hope Nation when Captain Nicholas Seafort ordered him to take command of the U.N. starship Galactic—a mission that ultimately cost Derek his life. It was a tragedy that forever changed the political landscape of Hope Nation and left young Randy Carr fatherless ... and desperate for revenge.

Now a young man bucking against authority, Randy rebels against Hope Nation’s oppressive church-state—and draws the wrath of a powerful and malicious clergy. As he seeks refuge from those who would make an example of him, he sustains himself with dreams of repaying Captain Seafort for the death of his famous father. When the opportunity presents itself, he leaves the U.N.’s most decorated hero and legendary leader fighting for his life—an action that sparks the most explosive trial in starship history.

For Randy Carr, it will be more than a fight for justice. Because what began in the name of duty could suddenly end ... with a death sentence.

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David Feintuch David Feintuch is the award-winning author of the bestselling Seafort Saga: Midshipman’s Hope, Challenger’s Hope, Prisoner’s Hope, Fisherman’s Hope, Voices of Hope, and Patriarch’s Hope, as well as The Still, called “the best fantasy of the year” by Science Fiction Chronicle. An inveterate traveler, he has been a photographer, an antiques dealer, and an attorney. David Feintuch lives in an antique-filled Victorian mansion in Michigan.

From the Dust Jacket: The Labour Party has unexpectedly won a narrow majority but the new government is weak and divided, its unpopular leader embattled in the House of Commons. A group of eminent figures from the party’s past Sce an opportunity to rc-establish their grip over its future by replacing the prime minister with a figurehead they can manipulate to their own ends. But who will they choose?

Two possible candidates emerge from the recent intake of MPs: David Petrie, a self-made Scot with a working-class background and a troubled personal history and Caroline Phillips, a high-flying Londoner whose complicated private life could be either her greatest handicap or her greatest asset.

Against a backdrop of intrigue and betrayal at the Palace of Westminster, both must struggle with the sacrifices and compromises they will have to make if they arc to seize the greatest political prize of all.

In his second novel, Andrew Marr draws on his unrivalled inside knowledge of British politics to expose the foibles, duplicities and absurdities of those we elect to govern us.

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About the Author: Andrew Marr is a former editor of the Independent and BBC Political Editor. He currently hosts BBC 1’s Andrew Marr Show and Radio 4’s Start the Week. His acclaimed television documentary series include Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain and Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain. His first novel Head of State was one of the bestselling debut hardbacks of 2014.

From the Dust Jacket: From the award-winning author of Hyperion and Carrion Comfort comes a chilling tale of ancient Transylvanian terrors and modern political nightmares.

Kate Neuman, a brilliant hematologist, is in post-Ceausescu Romania to lend her expertise in the treatment of rare blood diseases. Her most baffling case is that of an abandoned seven-month-old boy who requires biweekly transfusions to survive. Kate soon realizes that baby Joshua is nothing less than a miracle child, and that his unique immune system holds the key to a cure for cancer and AIDS, as well as tremendous potential for extending human lives.

With the assistance of Father Mike O’Rourke, a Chicago cleric also in Romania on a mercy mission, Kate fights the malevolent local bureaucracy and adopts Joshua. Mother and child return home to Colorado, where Kate hopes she can use her medical knowledge and the most advanced technology to reveal the mystery of her new son’s amazing immune system—and save him in the process.

Just when the research promises an astounding breakthrough, terror reaches a cold hand from the dark forests of Transylvania to change Kate’s life forever. Pursued by mysterious, superhuman thugs, she and her friend Father O’Rourke embark on an incredible odyssey that will bring them face to face with the historical Vlad Dracula.

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About the Author: Dan Simmons, formerly a teacher and director of programs for gifted children, now writes full-time. He lives along the front range of the Colorado Rockies with his wife and their daughter, and is currently at work on a new novel.

From the Dust Jacket: It is Amsterdam, 1871, twenty-five years before the start of Stoker’s novel, and twenty-five years following Arkady Tsepesh’s flight from his family’s ancestral castle with his wife and young son, Stefan, after learning that he and his family are bound by an ancient covenant to serve their ancestor, Prince Vlad Tsepesh, who is also known as Dracula. For Vlad is a vampire, and the fated firstborn sons in every generation must bring him the victims he needs to survive. Arkady had tried to break the covenant and failed. He is now a vampire, separated from his beloved wife and son, with one all-consuming desire—to destroy Vlad before he draws Stefan into eternal service through the blood ritual.

But Arkady has come too late to Amsterdam. Vlad kidnaps Stefan, and spirits him away to the castle in Transylvania to undergo the blood ritual. Arkady enlists the help of Stefan’s stepbrother, Abraham Van Helsing, in his thrilling battle against Vlad, as he seeks to free his family and put an end to the age-old blood covenant—even if it means he must destroy his own son.

This spellbinding book, rich in historical detail and told in diary form, like Dracula, is an exciting—and terrifying—continuation of The Diaries of the Family Dracul, the absorbing trilogy that will serve as a prequel to Bram Stoker’s chilling tale. With Children of the Vampire, Jeanne Kalogridis penetrates even deeper into the secrets behind Dracula, illuminating this classic novel in a vivid, compelling, and utterly memorable way.

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About the Author: Jeanne Kalogridis has been obsessed with Dracula since childhood and has done extensive research to write the books in this trilogy. She taught English for eight years at the American University in Washington, D.C. She now lives in California.

From the Back Cover: Still reeling from divorce and feeling estranged from her teenage son, Trish Taylor is in the midst of salvaging the remnants of her life when she uncovers a shocking secret: Her sister is alive. For years Trish believed that her mother and infant sister had died in a car accident. But the truth is that her mother fatally overdosed and that Trish’s grandparents put the baby girl up for adoption because her father was black.

After years of drawing on the strength of her black ancestors, Billie Cousins is shocked to discover that she was adopted. Just as surprising, after finally overcoming a series of health struggles, she is pregnant—a dream come true for Billie but a nightmare for her sweetie, Nick, and for her mother, both determined to protect Billie from anything that may disrupt her well-being.

Though Trish longs to connect with her long-lost sister, Billie’s feelings of betrayal are waters too deep to cross. But when both women are forced to confront their personal and familial demons, they begin to realize that each may have what the other needs. Like “children of the waters”—the Buddhist concept that celebrates those who are always in a state of becoming—they must release the past in order to embrace the future.

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About the Author: Carleen Brice was recently named 2008 “Breakout Author of the Year” by The African American Literary Awards Show for her debut novel Orange Mint and Honey, which was also a selection of the Essence Book Club. She is also the author of Walk Tall: Affirmations for People of Color, and Lead Me Home: An African American’s Guide Through the Grief Journey and edited the anthology Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife. She lives in Denver, CO, with her husband and two cats.

From the Back Cover: What happened to the children?

The year is 2043, and humans have been mysteriously unable to reproduce for almost thirty years. To prevent panic and keep the population from dwindling to nothing, global authorities offer a Lotto, where a few winners each week can enter a time portal and bring back adopted children from the future. They’re never allowed to talk about what they saw.

The exception to this system is Los Angeles resident and reluctant celebrity Rachel Harris, the only woman of her generation to naturally give birth. Years of medical tests and treatments have been unable to explain or replicate her pregnancy, and the whole world grieved when Rachel’s daughter died in a tragic accident.

When Rachel wins the Lotto, she’s shocked, and then elated. She can be a mother again. But the baby she meets in 2108 carries a secret that will shatter Rachel’s reality and endanger everyone close to her. Now Rachel must race across time to save her life and her child, even as she discovers that nothing—and no one—are what they seem.

From the Dust Jacket: Will Shetterly has created a dark and intriguing future for this novel, a world of genetic engineering and cloning. where human and animal genes can be melded to create chimeras, more often referred to as “critters.” These beings are human, for all practical purposes. They think, they feel, they love, and they dream. But they still have some of the qualities of the animals that they are bred from.

Most important, they are not granted the rights of humans. They are property. Slavery has been revived in America.

But there is also a movement for Abolition, for the granting of legal rights to chimeras. Zoe Domingo is a jaguar-woman, created to be a sex-slave. Instead, she became the property of an abolitionist, and was freed, though she remained as her former owner’s companion., But on a trip to Los Angeles, Zoe’s mentor is murdered under violent and mysterious circumstances,.and Zoe is accused of the crime.

Chimera has a classic film noir plot with the rough power of Raymond Chandler and the complex sensibilities of the Philip K. Dick film, Blade Runner.

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About the Author: Will Shetterly is a novelist and television writer who lives in Los Angeles, California.

From the Dust Jacket: For Allison Turk, the journey to China to claim the daughter she is adopting had been a trying experience, a series of false starts and long waits. Forced to travel without her husband, she makes the trip with her nine-year-old stepson. She hopes it will be a bonding experience, but so far this hasn’t happened.

When she finally holds the little girl in her arms, however, she knows that the trip has been worth all the effort and aggravation. In only two days, she will board a plane for home, taking with her the greatest pride and joy she has ever known.

Then suddenly everything unravels. Summoned to an emergency meeting of the adoptive parents, Allison is told a mistake has been made—a “clerical error.” The Americans have been given healthy infants rather than children with special needs, for which they are technically qualified, and they are told they must exchange their babies for different children. Allison is faced with a terrible decision: Should she capitulate and surrender the child she has come to love intensely, or risk an attempt to reach the American consulate in Shanghai, where she might at least have a chance to negotiate and keep her baby?

Joining with several other American couples caught in the same dilemma, Allison chooses to run. There is a more sinister reason underlying the nightmare than they know about, and their flight spawns a massive manhunt led by a ruthless police colonel wielding all the terrifying apparatus of a police state. What ensues is tense, dramatic, and totally believable—a race in which Allison not only struggles with her infant daughter and recalcitrant stepson, but is caught in a political tug-of-war that forces her to display a depth of courage and a strength of will she had never known she possessed.

Inspired by a true-life incident, China Run takes the reader on a breathtaking chase across China that is gripping, compulsively readable, and frighteningly real.

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About the Author: David Ball is the author of Empires of Sand. He lives in the mountains of Colorado with his wife and two children.

A story about a Chinese-born girl adopted by Germans.

A novel by a white guy about a white lawyer/swinger/bachelor who conquers his growing disillusionment when he gets “turned up inside by becoming daddy via the adoption route to 3-1/2-year-old Afro-headed Charlie.”