Adding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times.Finale captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal-arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel’s memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, Jr. (Reagan’s would-be assassin), and even Bette Davis, with whom the president had long ago appeared onscreen. Several figures — including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan (on the verge of a terrible realization) — become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and a political revolution.At the center of it all — but forever out of reach — is Ronald Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.Finale is the book that Thomas Mallon’s work has been building toward for years. It is the most entertaining and panoramic novel about American politics since Advise and Consent, more than a half century ago.

Two birdwatchers survive a nuclear holocaust.

Seguimos al narrador de esta espléndida novela durante su última semana en Italia antes de regresar a su Granada natal y reencontrarse con su padre. Se despide de algunos de los personajes que han configurado su experiencia italiana: la limpiadora Francesca, con quien el último mes ha mantenido una aventura; el marido de ésta, Fulvio, ex boxeador; monseñor Wolff-Wapowski, polaco-alemán, encargado de la casa papalina en la que el narrador se aloja; Stefania Rossi-Quarantotti, profesora boloñesa de semiótica y antigua maestra y amiga, traumatizada por la relación que mantiene su marido con una chiquilla romana; el marido de la profesora, Franco Mazotti, prestigioso e íntegro economista de un gobierno corrupto, temeroso de que salga a la luz esa relación; o Carlo Trenti, el exitoso escritor de la novela cuya traducción el narrador está a punto de terminar a la vez que su estancia en Roma. De momento el narrador deberá regresar a Granada y cortar por fin el cordón umbilical que le une a su padre viudo. La consagración definitiva de uno de los escritores españoles más imprescindibles.

After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel — a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world.Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy’s immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients — including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel.As winter descends, the hospital’s fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.

One of Elle's "Must-Read Titles for Your Book Club." Chosen by The Millions and Flavorwire as one of the most-anticipated books of 2016.The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called “folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,” and these 40 new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny.Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams’s spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction’s grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.

SAVE THE DATE: Tuesday, June 23, 2009EVENT: The next Stephanie Plum novel, in which complications arise, loyalties are tested, cliffhangers are resolved, and donuts are eaten.WHERE: Wherever books are sold across AmericaWHAT TO BRING: Sunglasses, insect repellant, a flotation device, suntan lotion, cheez-doodles, extra-large towel, fire extinguisher, baseball bat, lip balm, monkey leash, sixty three pieces of chewing gum, and one canister of oxygen (don't ask). Hey, it's a Stephanie Plum novel!

Nevykėlis BBC prodiuseris Džiuljenas Treslou ir žymus žydų filosofas, rašytojas Semas Finkleris yra mokyklos laikų bičiuliai. Nors jų gyvenimai susiklostė skirtingai, jie niekada nesiliovė draugauti. Taip pat jie bendrauja su savo buvusiu mokytoju Liboru, kuriam nuoširdus ryšys su žmonėmis yra svarbiau už viską. Patyrę įvairiausių sukrėtimų draugai ima mąstyti apie draugystę ir netektį, bendrumo jausmą ir vienatvę, apie brandą ir išmintį. Tai žydiškos išminties ir nuoširdaus humoro kupinas romanas, priversiantis, kaip sako pats autorius, juoktis ir verkti vienu metu.

Fire Hides Everywhere is a speculative fiction novel exploring a question central to identity: do we exist beyond our subject positions? Following an apocalypse in which all except those just born or about to die disappeared, Julian Feeld’s novel sets out to explore the eternal Buddhist question: “Who is born? Who dies?” As the young are left to define their ‘selves’ untethered, an old man begins to enlist them as placeholders for those no longer present. When he suffers a violent stroke and loses his capacities as a caregiver, he continues to operate structurally in the lives of the young people left to fend for themselves, begging the question: do structures live on beyond the lives of those inhabiting them?

Firefly is a dream-like evocation of pre-war Cuba, replete with hurricanes, mystical cults and slave-markets. The story is the coming-of-age of a precocious and exuberant boy with an oversized head and underdeveloped sense of direction, who views the world as a threatening conspiracy. Told in breathless and lyrical prose, the novel is a loving rendition of a long-lost home, a meditation on exile, and an allegory of Cuba’s isolation in the world.

First Among Equals is the story Jeffrey Archer was born to write, with his detailed political knowledge and past experience as a member of Parliament. We follow the careers of four ambitious new MPs who take their seats at Westminster for the first time in the early sixties: all are high-flyers destined for great office. We watch their political struggles over thirty years, in government and in opposition, as their lives cross in the battle for power.Raymond Gould, the Leeds grammar school boy born above a butcher’s shop, stuck with a small-town wife; Andrew Fraser, the son of a Conservative Lord Provost who joins the Labour party to capture his father’s seat in Parliament; Simon Kerslake, President of the Oxford Union, a career Conservative backed by his doctor wife; Charles Seymour, the ruthless Tory landowner who will stop at nothing to reach No. 10 — which one of these four men will become Prime Minister?

Either First Novel is a darkly funny examination of the relative attractions of creative writing courses and suburban dogging sites, or it's a twisted campus novel and possible murder mystery that's not afraid to blend fact with fiction in its exploration of the nature of identity. Paul Kinder, a novelist with one forgotten book to his name, teaches creative writing in a university in the north-west of England. Either he's researching his second, breakthrough novel, or he's killing time having sex in cars. Either eternal life exists, or it doesn't. Either you'll laugh, or you'll cry. Either you'll get it, or you won't.

“Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it.”

— The Wall Street Journal

A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami.

The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.

Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory… all with a signature Murakami twist.

Winner of the 1997 Whiting Writers’ Award: Taut, persistent, and brilliantly cadenced, First, Body is a testament to the breathtaking virtuosity of Granta-acclaimed author Melanie Rae Thon.Through nine searing works of fiction, Melanie Rae Thon looks to the people who live in the borderlands, turning a keen and compassionate eye to those marginalized by circumstance and transgression. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, from dance halls to hospital morgues, these urgent tales careen between the faults of the body and those of the mind, exploring the irruption of the past through the present, the sudden accidents and misguided passions that make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street. Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a work of pure augury, of the channeling and re-spoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.

Hailed by the New York Times as "wildly ambitious" and "the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Wasteland,' Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones," Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

‘Fists’, ‘Horses’ and ‘The Monkey’: three powerful coming-of-age stories about boys confronting reality, and fighting to stay alive in a man’s world. In ‘Fists’, a teenage amateur boxer steps into the ring for the first time, and finds himself in a face-off with Life in all its muscular force; in ‘Horses’, two brothers embark on their first forays into adulthood, each learning to play a man’s game in his own painful way; and in ‘The Monkey’, a young man realizes that in order to stay sane and survive in this world, we have to sacrifice our childhood dreams.Told in a spare and powerful voice reminiscent of Hemingway and Salinger, Grossi’s stories explore the rite of passage each of us faces in our youth — and what it means to be a man in our time.

Summer, 1981. Medve, sixteen years old and six foot three in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a semi-derelict hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Devon. There’s nothing to do but paint novelty Thatcher mugs, dream of literary murderer Jack Henry Abbott, and despair of her gothically unprepossessing family — including Mo, her sex toy — inventing mother; Poodle, her shamefully flat-chested sister; and four-year-old Feely, who wants to grow up to be a bulimic (he thinks it's a vet who specialises in livestock). Until one day a ginger-headed stranger arrives, stinking of antiseptic. .One of our most enjoyably unconventional contemporary writers, Nicola Barker, roots out the darkly surreal in a forgotten corner of England, with results that are hilariously original and poignant.

The magical new novel from the author of the Number One be Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake – but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface. This is where Framboise, a secretive widow named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the creperie – and lets memory play strange games. Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew – a profiteering Parisian – attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses. As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past. Joanne Harris has looked behind the drawn shutters of occupied France to illuminate the pain, delight and loss of a life changed for ever by the uncertainties and betrayals of war.