When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, a young Arab garage mechanic comes to her rescue. Out of this meeting develops a friendship that turns to love. But soon, despite his attempts to make the most of Julie's wealthy connections, Abdu is deported from South Africa and Julie insists on going too — but the couple must marry to make the relationship legitimate in the traditional village which is to be their home. Here, whilst Abdu is dedicated to escaping back to the life he has discovered, Julie finds herself slowly drawn in by the charm of her surroundings and new family, creating an unexpected gulf between them… ‘As gripping as a thriller and as felt as a love song' IRISH TIMES

Mark Haddon, author of the international bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, returns with a collection of unsparing short stories.In the prize-winning story "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty.45; in "The Island," a mythical princess is abandoned on an island in the midst of war; in "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear," a cadre of sheltered artistocrats sets out to find adventure in a foreign land and finds the gravest dangers among themselves. These are but some of the men and women who fill this searingly imaginative and emotionally taut collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, that weaves through time and space to showcase the author's incredible versatility.Yet the collection achieves a sum that is greater than its parts, proving itself a meditation not only on isolation and loneliness but also on the tenuous and unseen connections that link individuals to each other, often despite themselves. In its titular story, the narrator describes with fluid precision a catastrophe that will collectively define its victims as much as it will disperse them — and brilliantly lays bare the reader's appetite for spectacle alongside its characters'. Cut with lean prose and drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his three novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.

A dazzling, spellbinding novel set in a mythical Jewish community by the acclaimed author of the New York Times Notable Book The Book of Mischief.It's the late 1960s. The Pinch, once a thriving Jewish community centered on North Main Street in Memphis, has been reduced to a single tenant. Lenny Sklarew awaits the draft by peddling drugs and shelving books — until he learns he is a character in a book about the rise and fall of this very Pinch. Muni Pinsker, who authored the book in an enchanted day containing years, arrived in the neighborhood at its height and was smitten by an alluring tightrope walker. Muni's own story is dovetailed by that of his uncle Pinchas Pin, whose epic journey to North Main Street forms the book's spine. Steve Stern interweaves these tales with an ingenious structure that merges past with present, and his wildly inventive fabulism surpasses everything he's done before. Together, these intersecting stories transform the real-world experience of Lenny, whose fate determines the future of the Pinch, in this brilliant, unforgettable novel.

"An Icelandic-punk version of Catcher in the Rye." — Dallas Morning News"If there were more people like Jón Gnarr the world wouldn't be in such a mess." — Oliver SacksThe second book in a trilogy chronicling the troubled childhood of international sensation Jón Gnarr, The Pirate revisits his teenage years with sincere compassion and great humor: bullied relentlessly, Jón receives rebellious inner strength through the Sex Pistols and Prince Kropotkin — punk rock and anarchy offer the promise of a better and more exciting life.Jón Gnarr, the most famous comedic actor in Iceland, founded the Best Party, ran for mayor of Reykjavík as a joke and won, and served as mayor of Reykjavík 2010–2014, in the process becoming an international sensation and symbol of true alternatives to the political process worldwide.

The Pisstown Chaos is the story of a family’s dislocation in the midst of chaos, disease, and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an “American Divine,” who revels in the sufferings of others as he spouts platitudes to the ever-on-the-move masses. As chaos rages on and parasitic infestations spread, the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, utterly without mercy. This is the final book in the cult trilogy.

A modern retelling of the Camus classic that posits its story of infectious disease and quarantine in our contemporary age of social justice and rising inequity.

At first it was the dead rats. They started dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph nodes. The citizenry reacts in disbelief when the diagnosis comes in and later, when a quarantine is imposed on the increasingly terrified city.

Inspired by Albert Camus’ classic 1947 novel, Kevin Chong’s The Plague follows Dr. Bernard Rieux’s attempts to fight the treatment-resistant disease and find meaning in suffering. His efforts are aided by Megan Tso, an American writer who is trapped in the city while on a book tour, and Raymond Siddhu, a city hall reporter at a daily newspaper on its last legs from the latest round of job cuts.

Told with dark humor and an eye trained on the frailties of human behavior, Chong’s novel explores themes in keeping with Camus’ original vision—heroism in the face of futility, the psychological strain of quarantine—but fraught with the political and cultural anxieties of our present day.

The unsolved murder of a farm family still haunts the white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after the vengeance exacted and the distortions of fact transformed the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation.Part Ojibwe, part white, Evelina Harp is an ambitious young girl prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

When he reads about a mysterious explosion, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes.

In a recent interview with Steve Martin on NPR's Fresh Air, host Terri Gross asked her guest: "Do you remember the point in your career, when people started to realize that you are smart?" The host was referring, of course, to Martin's zany comedic roles that qualify him as a loveable nut. After all, it is tough to equate "King Tut" from Saturday Night Live, as an author of fairly serious repute. Martin, in reality, is an immensely talented writer; his "Shouts and Murmurs" and other brief pieces in the New Yorker were enjoyable and set his writing reputation even before his first novella, Shopgirl was released. His latest, another slim volume, The Pleasure of my Company, emphasizes Martin's status as a promising and talented writer.Martin's protagonist is a thirty-something single guy, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose life is constrained by his obsessive-compulsive behavior. Daniel informs us that his middle name originates from the pecan plantation his "granny" owns in Southern Texas, but we realize it is a fitting name for a "nut." Daniel is a cute one though, even despite his many quirks. His biggest obstacle, one that prevents him from venturing out on long walks anywhere, is his fear of curbs. To avoid them, he searches for opposing "scooped out driveways" in his California town, and draws mental maps that will take him successfully to his favorite hideout-the local Rite Aid. The Rite Aid with its clean lines and atmosphere is like heaven to Daniel and he never tires of walking the aisles, checking out supplies and the cute pharmacist, Zandy. "The Rite Aid is splendidly antiseptic," explains Daniel, "I'll bet the floors are hosed down every night with isopropyl alcohol. The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth." Among Daniel's other obsessions are ensuring that the total wattage of all the bulbs in a house equal 1125 and periodically having to touch all four corners of copiers at the local Kinko's.No wonder then that Daniel finds his love life a bit constrained. He keeps himself happy by eyeing Elizabeth, the real-estate agent who often works across the street, by mixing drinks for his upstairs neighbor, Phillipa, and with his weekly visits by his caseworker, Clarissa. Of course, there is Zandy at Rite Aid. All along, Daniel supports himself on generous gift checks sent him by his grandmother in Texas.Daniel is anything but an average guy but amazingly he wins the "Average American" contest sponsored by a frozen pie company. Daniel is such pleasant company, because for the most part, his outlook on life is always sunny and bright. For a brief moment, when he meets the other finalists of the essay competition, he is sad. "We weren't the elite of anything," he notes, "we weren't the handsome ones with self-portraits hanging over their fireplaces or the swish moderns who were out speaking slang at a posh hotel bar. We were all lonely hearts who deemed that writing our essays might help us get a little attention." However, this sinking feeling is only temporary and Daniel reminds himself that he only wrote the essay at the Rite Aid to have a "few extra Zandy-filled minutes."It is hard not to make comparisons between Daniel and the autistic protagonist Christopher of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Like Christopher, Daniel has some curious insights about the world around him and these casual observations woven into the text make for delightful reading. Referring to his caseworker, Clarissa, Daniel observes: "She's probably reporting on me to a professor or writing about me in a journal. I like to think of her scrawling my name in pencil at the end of our sessions-I mean visits-but really, I'm probably a keyboard macro by now. She types D and hits control/spacebar and Daniel Pecan Cambridge appears. When she looks at me in the face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar."Towards the end of The Pleasure of my Company, the story moves along quickly. Daniel becomes involved with Clarissa in a way and they travel to Texas, both for their individual private reasons. By novel's end, Daniel has conquered his fear of curbs and Clarissa has accommodated his obsession with bulb wattage.The Pleasure of My Company is a delightful novel as warm as the California sun. Martin has managed to capture in Daniel, the essence of a likeable zany man. Daniel's eventual success at having a happy life despite his many handicaps, is uplifting because it reminds us that life is not all bad all the time. It is always fun to root for the underdog and have him win. It might take some doing but Martin shows us that there are indeed "takers for the quiet heart."

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family – and for a million such families all over the country – during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

Amazon.com ReviewOprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate-teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. -Alix WilberFrom Publishers WeeklyIn this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel.

The Polish Boxer covers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his Polish grandfather’s past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden heritage; a Mayan poet is torn between his studies and filial obligations; a striking young Israeli woman seeks answers in Central America; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can’t find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator — a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon — pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, The Polish Boxer marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.

“The greatest political saga, the one that has it all, that gets to the real heart of American politics, is the John Edwards story… This isn’t just politics, it’s literature. It’s the great American novel, the kind that isn’t written anymore.” -Michael Wolff on John Edwards's trajectory, on VanityFair.comThe underside of modern American politics – raw ambition, manipulation, and deception – are revealed in detail by Andrew Young’s riveting account of a presidential hopeful’s meteoric rise and scandalous fall. Like a non-fiction version of All the King’s Men, The Politician offers a truly disturbing, even shocking perspective on the risks taken and tactics employed by a man determined to rule the most powerful nation on earth.Idealistic and ambitious, Andrew Young volunteered for the John Edwards campaign for Senate in 1998 and quickly became the candidate’s right hand man. As the senator became a national star, Young’s responsibilities grew. For a decade he was this politician’s confidant and he was assured he was ‘like family.” In time, however, Young was drawn into a series of questionable assignments that culminated with Edwards asking him to help conceal the Senator’s ongoing adultery. Days before the 2008 presidential primaries began, Young gained international notoriety when he told the world that he was the father of a child being carried by a woman named Rielle Hunter, who was actually the senator’s mistress. While Young began a life on the run, hiding from the press with his family and alleged mistress, John Edwards continued to pursue the presidency and then the Vice Presidency in the future Obama administration.Young had been the senator’s closest aide and most trusted friend. He believed that John Edwards could be a great president, and was assured throughout the cover-up that his boss and friend would ultimately step forward to both tell the truth and protect his aide’s career. Neither promise was kept. Not only a moving personal account of Andrew Young’s political education, THE POLITICIAN offers a look at the trajectory which made John Edwards the ideal Democratic candidate for president, and the hubris which brought him down, leaving his career, his marriage and his dreams in ashes.

This award-winning historical novel deals with the stormy life of the outstanding Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, using historical sources, and particularly material from the writer's works, to construct the personal and intellectual universe of a fourteenth-century genius. The dominant concern of the novel — the uneasy relationship between intellectuals and political power, between scholars and authority — addresses our times through the transparent veil of history. In the first part of the novel, we are introduced to the mind of Ibn Khaldun as he dictates his work to his scribe and interlocutor. The second part delves into the heart of the man and his retrieval of a measure of happiness and affection in a remarriage, after the drowning of his first wife and their children at sea. Finally we see Ibn Khaldun as a man of action, trying to minimize the imminent horrors of invading armies and averting the sack of Damascus by Tamerlane, only to spend his last years lonely and destitute, having been fired from his post as qadi, his wife having gone to Morocco, and his attempts at saving the political situation having come to nil.

Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other.

An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor.The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage — the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist — find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul — the product of good hippies who were bad parents — finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma — an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone — or something — else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

A hilarious and dazzling debut novel about a master impressionist at risk of losing his true self.All his life, Giovanni Bernini has possessed an uncanny gift: he can imitate anyone he meets. Honed by his mother at a young age, the talent catapults him from small-town obscurity to stardom. As Giovanni describes it, “No one’s disguise is perfect. There is in every person, no matter how graceful, a seam, a thread curling out of them. . When pulled by the right hands, it will unravel the person entire.” As his fame grows, Giovanni encounters a beautiful and enigmatic stage singer, Lucy Starlight — the only person whose thread he cannot find — and becomes increasingly trapped inside his many poses. Ultimately, he must assume the one identity he has never been able to master: his own.In the vein of Jonathan Lethem’s and Kevin Wilson’s playful surrealism, Jacob Rubin’s The Poser is the debut of a major literary voice, a masterfully written, deeply original comic novel, and the moving story of a man who must risk everything for the chance to save his life and know true love.

The Post-War Dream is the eighth book by American author Mitch Cullin and was published by Random House in March 2008.Initial reviews of the novel were mixed, with Kirkus calling it "a misstep in Cullin's unpredictable, adventurous and, alas, frustratingly uneven oeuvre," and Publishers Weekly dismissing the work as "sterile." But subsequent pre-publication reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and The Denver Post were positive.In the March 16 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and, simultaneously published, the Chicago Tribune, critic Donna Seaman praised the book, stating: "In this exacting, suspenseful, elegiac yet life-embracing novel, Cullin reminds us that no boundaries separate the personal and communal, the past and present, the false and true."