"In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a tennis vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world's number one money launderer. Dima wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an all-night interrogation by the British Secret Service, which also needs their help. Their acquiescence will lead...
"When she hears about the suicide of a Buenos Aires train driver who has left a note confessing to four mortal 'accidents' on the train tracks, journalist Veronica Rosenthal decides to investigate. For the police the case is closed (suicide is suicide), for Veronica it is the beginning of a journey that takes her into an unfamiliar world of grinding poverty, crime-infested neighborhoods, and train drivers on commuter lines haunted by the memory of...
"FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE and THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE. George Washington Black, or "Wash," an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is terrified to be chosen by his master's brother as his manservant. To his surprise, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even...
In this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of the "haunting, twisting thrill-ride" (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the jungle of Bolivia, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to help people with problems in their lives. Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs...
"Predominantly set in the late nineteenth-century aspiring world of Rio de Janeiro-a city in the midst of an intense transformation from colonial backwater to imperial metropolis-the postcolonial realism of Machado's stories anticipates a dominant theme of twentieth-century literature. Readers witness the bourgeoisie of Rio both at play, and, occasionally, attempting to be serious, as depicted by the chief character of “The Alienist,” who makes...
"From a critically acclaimed and beloved storyteller comes a sweeping novel set aboard the Morning Light, a Nova Scotian merchant ship sailing through the South Pacific in 1912. Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea travels to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay...
This is a universal love story, a family saga, and a journey through Chinese history, myth, and culture. Following a young Chinese couple as their love grows, and is tested, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, this novel provides a rare and personal glimpse into the birth of modern China. When the Kitchen God is challenged by the Jade Emperor to fathom the workings of the human heart, he chooses to follow the life of Jinyi and his wife Yuying, from...
This is a tale "told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the...
Hemingway's triumphant yet tragic story of an old Cuban fisherman and his relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream combines the simplicity of a fable, the significance of a parable, and the drama of an epic.
Chief detective Carl Mørck, recovering from what he thought was a career-destroying gunshot wound, is relegated to cold cases and becomes immersed in the five-year disappearance of a politician.
On November 25, 1960, three sisters are found assassinated after visiting their husbands, jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The sisters became martyrs, known as "Las Mariposas." They had a fourth sister who lives, and Alvarez tells the story of the sisters, framed by the surviving sister.
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, friends since serving together in World War II, deal with the problems of love, lust, and the other challenges of raising their families in 1970s London.
This work is a novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years, walking the streets of Rome and reimmersing themselves in their lost past. Miranda and Adam, high school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, where they once spent a summer deeply in love, blissfully living together. At an awkward reunion, the two, who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven't...
"From the award-winning author of Dust comes a vibrant, stunningly global novel about a young woman struggling to find her place--a poignant exploration of fate, mortality, love, and loss. On the small island of Pate, off the coast of Kenya, lives a girl named Ayaana. She is solitary and stubborn--she and her mother, Munira, are outcasts from the insular local society--and her kitten is her main companion. When a wizened sailor named Muhidin, also...