Base on true events, this brilliantly rendered novel recounts a dramatic tale of survival, and a woman’s determination to triumph over a harrowing fate.In 1908, Mexican captain Ramón Arnaud and his young bride, Alicia, set sail for Clipperton, a tiny Pacific atoll once dubbed "Isle of Passion" by Spanish explorers. Accompanied by eleven soldiers and their families, the captain is under orders to defend the isolated but strategically well situated island against an improbable French invasion. With its treacherous coral reef and stagnant lagoon, Clipperton is a dire, forbidding place for the new inhabitants. Rigid military order soon gives way to more informal island living, but under Ramón's guidance and inspired by Alicia's determination the group manages to create a viable community. There are a food store, pharmacy, lighthouse, even dinner parties. But then, amid political upheaval at home and the first rumblings of World War I, the Clipperton residents are forgotten. The supply ship slated to come every two months comes every third, then sixth, then not at all. Left to the mercies of nature and each other, they fall victim one by one to scurvy, hunger, despair, rivalry, lust and, ultimately, violence.Alicia, steadfast and resourceful, becomes a beacon of strength for the remaining castaways, whose collective survival will depend upon her courage and cunning. Drawing on historical records, archives and interviews, prize-winning novelist Laura Restrepo has reimagined the incredible true story of love and war, hardship and endurance, adventure and hope on the Isle of Passion. In prose that is lush, evocative and utterly beguiling, she brings to life a bizarre, moving episode in Mexican history and its extraordinary, unforgettable heroine.

In Bad Blood, the second book in the Gibbons and Tozzi thriller series, FBI agents Mike Tozzi and Cuthbert Gibbons get into deep trouble when they investigate a deadly partnership between the Mafia and the Japanese yakuza. Gibbons takes a severe beating from a deranged assassin who believes he's the reincarnation of an ancient samurai, and Tozzi vows revenge. But the sword-wielding madman is itching to turn Tozzi into sushi. The Godfather meets The Seven Samurai spiced with wasabi-strength humor."Explosive…Inspired plotting that just keeps ratcheting up the tension and the comedy!" Kirkus Reviews"Everything a suspense novel should be—a highly credible, tautly paced stunner." Publishers Weekly

Finalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossomsSimons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina, in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother (known to local blacks as the Duchess), who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate and literary as any English professor.When Taurus, a soft-spoken African-American stranger, moves into the cabin recently vacated by the Manigaults' longtime maid, a friendship forms. The lonely, excitable Simons and the quiet, thoughtful Taurus, who has appointed himself Simons's guide in the ways of the grown-up world, bond over the course of a hot Southern summer.But Taurus may be playing a larger role in the Manigaults' life than he is willing to let on—a suspicion that...

A NEW REIGN OF TIMELESS TERROR Snatched by Satan himself from the fiery stake of a Salem witch-burning, a warlock lands right in the middle of 20th-century Los Angeles. His age-old quest to bring about the reign of ultimate evil leaves a trail of blood and terror across America. Only one man can stop him, a witch hunter who has come from the past to stop the warlock and prevent the ultimate horror that will change the fate of the world.

SUMMARY:Norlund is offered his granddaughter's life in exchange for his services in a mysterious enterprise. He finds himself a draftee in a war between a future as we foresee it--and one in which Hitler's Reich has survived for thousands of years!

From Publishers WeeklyWitty, weird and highly enjoyable, this gothic British tale is aptly titled. The set-up is macabre: a distinguished paleontologist is brain-damaged and slowly turning into a vegetable. He cannot speak, but narrates an interior monologue of all he sees and hears: a lot of sexual shenanigans and a particularly grisly murder, all centered around "Fledge," the butler, who has ambitions. The stylistic joke is that all these horrors take place in a quaint, genteel English country setting, where the village is "Pock-on-the-Fling," the pub, "The Hodge and Purlet" and the barrister, "Sir Fleckley Tome." However deadly the deed, the language is always decorous and impeccably mannered. The result is strangely hilarious--as if a Stephen King story were being told in the manner of a latter-day Anthony Trollope. From Scientific AmericanMagnificently grim ... [McGrath] serves up this cold slice of modern Gothic with the deranged relish of a Poe but also the acrid irony of a Waugh.

Before the War of the Lance.The Companions have gone their separate ways, each vowing to return with news of the growing darkness in Ansalon. Sturm Brightblade, a warrior whose honor is his life, and Kitiara, a passionate woman of uncertain loyalties, travel north in search of Sturm's long-lost father.Before they reach their destination, a band of gnomes begs for their help. But nothing with gnomes ever goes as planned. The two adventurers are soon thrown into a perilous adventure that will take them beyond the realms of Ansalon, through love and hate, to darkness and light.

Hoagy discovers a rock god’s deadly side is more than an actFrom the first time they played on the Ed Sullivan Show, Us was the hottest band on earth. For more than a decade, the group tore through the charts and indulged in an endless cycle of drugs, women, and violence, until two musicians died—the drummer by drugs, the guitarist by a crazed gunman. Once the band was finished, lead singer Tristam Scarr retreated to the English countryside, hiding from the world until the day he hires an American to ghostwrite his memoirs. Stewart Hoag arrives in London in the company of Lulu, his ever-hungry basset hound, to find the rock idol of his youth reduced to a wheezing, frail fortysomething. The first thing Starr tells him is that their drummer never overdosed—he was murdered. And as their interviews progress, Hoagy learns that working for a rock star is almost as dangerous as being one.

For a brief but explosive period in the mid-seventies, the young, the unemployed and the homeless of Italy’s cities came together in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy. Against the austerity programmes and social discipline of the ruling Christian Democrats and their would-be partners in the Communist Party, the movement developed a “politics of refusal”—expressed in school occupations and factory sabotage, mass shoplifting and violent street protest, combined with carnivalesque creativity. But the movement was soon divided, especially over the issue of armed struggle, while its opponents united behind the most repressive measures ever seen in postwar Italy.Nanni Balestrini, himself a victim of that repression, follows in spare but vivid unpunctuated prose Autonomy’s trajectory through the eyes of one working-class protagonist—from high-school rebellion, squatting and attempts to set up a free radio station, to arrest and the brutalities of imprisonment. This is a powerful and gripping novel: a rare evocation of the intensity of commitment, the passion of politics.

“Yer eyes’ll shine when ye see the rivers runnin’ silver in Mithril Hall!” Bruenor the dwarf, Wulfgar the barbarian, Regis the halfling, and Drizzt the dark elf fight monsters and magic on their way to Mithril Hall, centuries-old birthplace of Bruenor and his dwarven ancestors. Faced with racism, Drizzt contemplates returning to the lightless underworld city andmurderous lifestyle he abandoned. Wulfgar begins to overcome his tribe’s aversion for magic. And Regis runs from a deadly assassin, who, allied with evil wizards, is bent on the companions’ destruction. All of Bruenor’s dreams, and the survival of his party, hinge upon the actions of one brave young woman.

SUMMARY:Bored with his life in the dull state of Speakinghast, Rimble the Trickster, the youngest god of the Greatkin family, decides to perform the ultimate prank, unraveling time and creating his own warped sense of temporal reality called "Shiftime"

HEIR FINEST HOUR,OR THEIR FINAL DAYS...The First Empire has entered what may very well be its last crisis: the Emperor is dead by assassination and has left an infant heir. Worse, the imperial mystique is but a fading memory: nobody believes in empire anymore. Indeed nobody believes in much of anything beyond the boundaries of self. There are exceptions, of course, and to those few falls the self-appointed duty of maintaining a military-civil order that is corrupt, despotic—and infinitely preferable to the barbarous chaos that will accompany its fall.One such is commander Anson Merikur.This is his story.

Colonel Anthony "Muddy" Waters has a mission: to mold a company of poorly trained rogues and misfits into heroes. His assignment is one that no other officer in the United States Air Force would touch. But Waters has a fabled stubbornness and dedication unparalleled in the armed services ... and the will to make the impossible possible.The Warbirds is the breakthrough novel that captures the saga of the F-4 Phantom and the men who made it a legend: like "Muddy" Waters, who must transform the men and women under his command — Including a superbly talented pilot but loose cannon named Jack Locke-into a fighting force to be reckoned with. Because their country could ask them at any time to fly their F-4s into the eye of the firestorm, to face an overwhelming enemy and brave the flames of hell itself without question and with no support.Tomorrow that call will come.And there will be no turning backwhen the heavens explode.

Once Guy and Leonora were lovers. Now it's over but Guy can't forget...or forgive. Every day he calls Leo with fantasies about their love and their future. All she wants is him out of her life. But Guy isn't about to oblige. Then Leo announces her engagement and finds out just how sick he is. When Guy tries to kill two members of her family, she gets in touch with her own peril. "Rendell is a master of depicting the long, slow ride into madness, making each tiny step toward the abyss resound with chilling logic." (Publishers Weekly)