Mildred L. Batchelder AwardTorn from their homeland, two Jewish sisters find refuge in Sweden.It's the summer of 1939. Two Jewish sisters from Vienna -12-year-old Stephie Steiner and 8-year-old Nellie-are sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. They expect to stay there six months, until their parents can flee to Amsterdam; then all four will go to America. But as the world war intensifies, the girls remain, each with her own host family, on a rugged island off the western coast of Sweden.Nellie quickly settles in to her new surroundings. She’s happy with her foster family and soon favors the Swedish language over her native German. Not so for Stephie, who finds it hard to adapt; she feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who’s as cold and unforgiving as the island itself. Her main worry, though, is her parents-and whether she will ever see them again.

A small Georgia town, filled with a curious assortment of losers, anticipates the promise of bizarre new possibilities with the upcoming rattlesnake hunt.

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

In A Flash of Green John D. MacDonald brings his storytelling magic to a larger and more ambitious theme than any he has yet considered. The question is this: Can a town resist the pressures of irresponsible get-rich-quick operators, or arc “progress” and crowding and ugliness inevitable? The answers strike deep into one particular community’s roots and arouse some strong emotions — from acrimonious town meetings to blackmail, assault, and even attempted murder.

The scene is a beautiful and unspoiled Florida Gulf Coast town, with beaches, fishing, and wild life close at band. But some real-estate promoters descend with a plan to fill in part of the bay and throw up hundreds of jerry-built houses. It means the ultimate destruction of every natural beauty that has meant so much to the townspeople.

The proposal is presented so enticingly, with so many financial opportunities for everyone, that the majority is won over. But they have a stiff battle on their hands from the opposition: the conservationists and the few farsighted people who can see the suburban slums of the future in the making. As the tension mounts, friends become enemies and lovers fall out of love. In an explosive climax one man dares to resist the malevolent local politician who is the power behind the scenes.

John D. MacDonald has written a fast-paced exciting story that has something important to say to every American who cares about the community he lives in.

With the publication of the "Recognitions" in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, "J R" (winner of the National Book Award) and "Carpenter's Gothic," have secured his position among America's foremost contemporary writers. Now "A Frolic of His Own," his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. "Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." So begins this mercilessly funny, devastatingly accurate tale of lives caught up in the toils of the law. Oscar Crease, middle-aged college instructor, savant, and playwright, is suing a Hollywood producer for pirating his play Once at Antietam, based on his grandfather's experiences in the Civil War, and turning it into a gory blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Oscar's suit, and a host of others — which involve a dog trapped in an outdoor sculpture, wrongful death during a river baptism, a church versus a soft drink company, and even Oscar himself after he is run over by his own car — engulf all who surround him, from his freewheeling girlfriend to his well-to-do stepsister and her ill-fated husband (a partner in the white-shoe firm of Swyne & Dour), to his draconian, nonagenarian father, Federal Judge Thomas Crease, who has just wielded the long arm of the law to expel God (and Satan) from his courtroom. And down the tortuous path of depositions and decrees, suits and countersuits, the most lofty ideas of our culture — questions about the value of art, literature, and originality — will be wrung dry in the meticulous, often surreal logic and language of the law,leaving no party unscathed. Gaddis has created a whirlwind of a novel, which brilliantly reproduces the Tower of Babel in which we conduct our lives. In "A Frolic of His Own" we hear voices as they speak at and around one another: lawyers, family members, judges, rogues, hucksters, and desperate

Living in crumbling Brooklyn apartments, holding down jobs as actors and writers and eschewing the middle-class sensibilities of their parents, graduates of the prestigious Oberlin College, Lil, Beth, Sadie, Emily, Dave and Tal believe they can have it all.

When the group come together to celebrate a marriage, anything seems possible. But soon the reality of rent, marriage and family will test them all. For this fortunate age can’t last for ever, and the group must face adulthood, whether they are ready for it or not.

Sprawling and richly drawn, A Fortunate Age traces the lives of the group during some of the most defining years of modern America—from the decadence of the dot com boom through to the sobering events of September 11 and the trailing years that followed—this brilliant, ambitious debut novel perfectly captures the hopes, anxieties and dreams of a generation.

At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father's body will never be found. As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand 's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative-thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments-sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.

From Publishers WeeklyHa Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an émigré writer's woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan's literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel's opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nan -amid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schooling-slowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivago isn't coincidental: while Ha Jin's novel lacks Zhivago's epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution.***From the award-winning author of Waiting, a new novel about a family's struggle for the American Dream.Meet the Wu family-father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan 's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. But severing all ties-including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth-proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

The author of City of Refuge returns with a startling novel of race, violence, and identity.The year is 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he lives by his wits and earns money performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass — leader of the Virginia Harmonists, a minstrel troupe struggling to compete with dozens of similar ensembles — who senses that Henry's skill and magnetism could restore his show's sagging fortunes. The problem is that black performers are not allowed to appear onstage, even in Philadelphia. Together the two concoct a dangerous masquerade to protect Henry's identity, and he creates a sensation in his first appearances with the Harmonists. Yet even as the troupe's fortunes begin to improve, a brutal slave hunter named Tull Burton has been employed by Henry's former master to track down the runaway and retrieve him, dead or alive.A Free State is both a riveting chase novel and a searing parable of liberty and its costs. Charged with narrative tension and unforgettable characters, A Free State is a thrilling work by a novelist at the height of his powers.

Set partially in the 1980s and 90s and partially in the year 2025, T.C. Boyle's gripping new novel offers a provocative vision of the near future. Boyle tells the story of Tyrone Tierwater, a manager of a suburban shopping center in Peterskill, New York, whose life is completely turned upside down when, late in the 1980s, he meets and then marries Andrea Knowles, a prominent environmental activist. The couple moves to California with Sierra, Ty's daughter from a pervious marriage, and Ty takes up the life of the environmental agitator himself, until he lands in serious trouble with the law. The novel flashes back and forth between this period and the year 2025, which finds the now 75-year old Tyrone seeking out a living in Southern California as the manager of a popstar's private animal menagerie — holding some of the last surviving animals in that part of the world, for by then the rhinos and elephants are extinct and global warming has led to unremitting meteorological cataclsyms. Boyle dovetails these two stories together, examining the ups and downs of Ty's life as a monkeywrencher, the saga of his daughter Sierra who trees its for three years, and revealing what happens to Tyrone in 2025 when Andrea, who had divorced him, comes back into his life.

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius’s ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends’ joie de vivre. In this, his second novel — written in the ’50s and never before published — Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner AwardFinalist for the Orange Prize for FictionChosen as a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star, Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Real SimpleTwenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, has come to a university town as a student. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny for a mysterious and glamorous family, she finds herself drawn deeper into their world and forever changed. Told through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America.

Co można zrobić z siedzącą w waszej szafie nieznajomą kobietą? Poprosić, żeby sobie poszła? Ale to nie takie proste, zwłaszcza dla przystojnego architekta, Arthura. Bo, po pierwsze, ta kobieta jest młoda i czarująca, po drugie, twierdzi, że jej ciało znajduje się zupełnie gdzie indziej – leży pogrążone w głębokiej śpiączce w szpitalu. Lauren uważa, że tylko Arthur może jej pomóc, jako jedyna osoba, która ją słyszy i widzi w cielesnej postaci. Chociaż zaintrygowany mężczyzna ma mnóstwo podejrzeń i wątpliwości, ostatecznie poddaje się urokowi ślicznego "ducha" i przyjmuje wyzwanie. Tymczasem lekarze, zniechęceni długą, daremną walką o życie pacjentki, planują eutanazję. Przerażony Arthur wykrada ze szpitala ciało ukochanej. Następuje seria nieoczekiwanych zdarzeń…

The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.On the eve of Angolan independence an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls.Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers.A General Theory of Oblivion is a perfectly crafted, wild patchwork of a novel, playing on a love of storytelling and fable.

The second novel from the critically acclaimed New York Times—bestselling author Chang-rae Lee.His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent.A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community — and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.

Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable — but it is always a revelation.Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny — and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

Bestselling author Nikki Grimes, author of Dark Sons, Barak Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, and Voices of Christmas, presents the story of Mister, a teenage girl who honestly and poignantly tells her story of temptation and teenage pregnancy through free verse, and who finds support and forgiveness from God through a book of poetry presented from the virgin Mary's perspective.

A collection of short stories by the author of Madensky Square reveals the writer’s ability to write funny and erudite historical fiction.From Publishers WeeklyKnown for her neatly fashioned romance fiction, Ibbotson (Madensky Square) here collects 19 decorous stories of love gained and lost. With settings that range from the early 1990s to the present day, they generally feature surprise endings, some of them sadly contrived. In the title story, Max, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor in pre-WW I Vienna, attends the opera, where Helene, a singer of Wagnerian heft, is hurt in an onstage accident. She hires Max to file suit; they marry; later, Max takes a mistress. On his wife’s death he is free to marry his paramour, but Helene’s will dictates otherwise — she knew that forbidden fruit is sweetest. The London grocer in “Doushenka” is obsessed by Russia. Traveling to St. Petersburg, he falls in love with a young ballerina, but their relationship is ended by his sacrifice on her behalf, and for the rest of his life he must be content with the memories of his Great Love. A Great Love is the essential element in these old-fashioned tales, of which “Sidi” is the most celebratory-and blatantly sentimental. Eschewing the angst and alienation discussed in much contemporary fiction, Ibbotson offers leisurely details of a more genteel era whose passing she obviously laments. Her stories, however, are oversweet and ultimately cloying.From Library JournalWomen who enjoy romantic fiction will enjoy these heartwarming stories, first published in Great Britain in 1984. Ibbotson concentrates on the infinite variety of Great Love-its discovery, development, recognition, loss, and denouement. Her characters, males and females of all ages and professions, are frequently seen during the Christmas season and in prewar Vienna and Russia. In many stories, people find and lose each other-often with an O. Henry twist. Ibbotson, a winner of the Romantic Novelists Association award, writes charmingly about love, forgiveness, loss, and happiness. Highly recommended.Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.

First published in 1963, A God and his Gifts was the last of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels to be published in her lifetime and is considered by many to be one of her best. Set in the claustrophobic world of Edwardian upper-class family life, it is the story of the self-willed and arrogant Hereward Egerton. In his marriage to Ada Merton he maintains a veneer of respectability but through his intimate relationships with his sister, Emmeline, and his son's future wife, Hetty, he steps beyond the bounds of conventional morality with both comic and tragic results…

July 1914. Young Englishwoman Vivian Rose Spencer is running up a mountainside in an ancient land, surrounded by figs and cypresses. Soon she will discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure, and the ecstasy of love. Thousands of miles away a twenty-year old Pathan, Qayyum Gul, is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army.July, 1915. Qayyum Gul is returning home after losing an eye at Ypres, his allegiances in tatters. Viv is following the mysterious trail of her beloved. They meet on a train to Peshawar, unaware that a connection is about to be forged between their lives — one that will reveal itself fifteen years later, on the Street of Storytellers, when a brutal fight for freedom, an ancient artefact and a mysterious green-eyed woman will bring them together again.A powerful story of friendship, injustice, love and betrayal, A GOD IN EVERY STONE carries you across the globe, into the heart of empires fallen and conquered, reminding us that we all have our place in the chaos of history and that so much of what is lost will not be forgotten.