Summer fiction: Home

Includes: Author's postscript for the American ed. -- Translator's postscript -- preview of: The dark forest / Cixin Liu.

"... part one of this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning book from China's most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision"

This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect everyone. It's about the legacy of a war and the end of innocence. It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won. It's about how 140 characters can make fools of everyone. It's about living in a city where bankers 'need' cinemas in their basements while others need food banks.

In this sequel, the narrative follows the lives of a number of characters in fictional North Bath, NY over the course of a Memorial Day weekend.

David Whitehead and Ben Kipling are the top of the elite, both influential men with jobs in the media and finance, both traveling back to New York on a private jet after a vacation with their families, and both with secrets that could ruin their lives. Invited on a whim by David's wife, Scott Burroughs, a middle-aged painter, finds himself on their plane - he needs to visit New York for a meeting that could spark a revival in his failed career. But sixteen minutes into its journey the plane crashes into the sea, Scott and the Whiteheads' four-year-old son are the only survivors. With a little boy's life in his hands Scott begins to swim - an epic journey to the coast. In the rectifying hours, he cannot imagine how his life will be changed forever. With the SEC, FBI and National Transportation Safety Board investigating what happened to the plane, and the lives of everyone on board - the Whiteheads, the Kiplings and the crew - it is not long before their secrets start to come into the light. It seems as though the crash might be more than a tragic accident ...

This novel begins in New France in the late 18th century as Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman makes his way from Northern France to the homeland to seek a living. Bound to a 'seigneur' for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship and violence, always in awe of the forest he is charged with clearing. In the course of this epic novel, the author tells the stories of Rene's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as the descendants of his friends and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing brutal conditions - war, pestilence, attacks by Native Americans, the revenge of rivals.

An international backgammon hustler, who has amassed a fortune through psychic tomfoolery, develops a large tumor on his face that compromises his vision and eventually threatens his life, forcing him to pursue an experimental surgery and contemplate existential questions.

Pilgrim Jones' husband has just left her for another woman, stranding her in a small Swiss town where she is one day involved in a tragic accident. Overcome with guilt, she alights for Africa, befriending a series of locals, each with their own tragic past and each isolated in their own way. Mysteriously, one day a witch doctor's curse is carried into town, setting everyone in the remote Tanzanian outpost on edge. Pilgrim can't shake the feeling she's being followed ...

Postcard -- Noche -- Aubade -- Cavity -- Nevertheless -- See that you remember -- Not his best -- Hedgehog -- Clean -- Wet -- Arrangement -- No -- Moms -- Cozy -- Story -- If picked or uprooted these beautiful flowers will disappear -- Dresser -- This is not a maze -- Perhaps a kind of cake? -- This time -- Coat -- Some difference -- And you are-- -- Nid duw ond dim (without God there is nothing) -- Veracity -- Satisfaction -- A good reason -- Abandon all hope -- Ignorance -- Satan's leathery wing -- Society -- Shaken -- Irreducible -- Tragedy has obligations -- Just a rumor -- Dearest -- The brain -- Actually -- Buried in Colorado all alone -- Señor Xólotl -- Jail -- Pretty much the same, then -- Her eyes were set rather close together, which gave her an urgent air -- The individualist -- Numbers -- Preference -- Get out as early as you can -- Participation -- Naked mind -- Buick LeSabre -- Significance -- Doll house -- Peggy -- Divine -- Neglect -- Giraffe -- Dew -- Sartre to Camus -- Looking good -- Party -- Museum -- Essential enough -- Apropos of nothing -- I pity the fool -- Dull -- Rebirth -- Forgiveness -- ) ( -- Inoculum -- Driveshaft -- Fog -- Whale -- A little prayer -- Walk-in -- Transition -- Whatever is happening? -- Elephants never forget God -- The fourth wife -- Example -- Opportunity -- Businesswoman -- Polyurethane -- Crazy Injuns -- Winter -- Early practice -- Infidelity -- Plot -- A flawed opinion -- Phew -- Compline -- This is the way that night passes -- Distinction -- Fathers and sons -- If you feel you must -- Sibling -- Plenary -- Bread -- A new arrangement -- The darkling thrush.

A literary thriller set in Indonesia about a former mercenary dealing with the consequences of his dark past, and with the real secret of what he did during the massacres of the Communists and ethnic Chinese in 1965.

In this debut novel a cast of women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village. Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, the author pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas ...

In sixteenth century Venice, the famed makers of Venetian glass faced death if they tried to leave the island... but one man schemes to outwit the enforcers of the edict. In 1958 Venice Beach, California, and in today's Venetian casino in Las Vegas, other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret. As the three stories weave together through time and space, the reader is drawn into a world of violence, and obsession.

Saying goodbye to Yang -- The cartographers -- Heartland -- Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary -- Moksha -- Children of the new world -- Fall line -- A brief history of the failed revolution -- Migration -- The pyramid and the ass -- Rocket night -- Openness -- Ice age.

Short stories presenting a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.

When their adopted eight-year-old son Max suddenly turns feral, Maya Shulman convinces her husband, Alex, to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents, which results in unexpected consequences and life-altering changes.

The hero is Johnny Porter, an Oxford-educated Canadian Indian who is an accomplished linguist and master of disguise. The CIA sends him to Russia to obtain information on a genetics program. He enrolls as a Korean deckhand on a ship in Japan, crosses Siberia as a truck driver - in which capacity he meets beautiful Dr. Tanya Komarov - picks up the information and in a hail of bullets dashes home across the Bering Straits.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other peoples' babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense nonprofit organisation where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate it in this one. When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl's world explodes. And yet it is Clee who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

When a wanted war criminal, masquerading as a healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell and in this novel, the author charts the consequence of that fatal attraction. This is a story about love, the artifice of evil and the terrible necessity of accountability in our shattered, damaged world.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent, a great red rift has been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries. But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes - those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon - are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back. She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

"The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone - and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts - and shapes - their family's future..."--

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.

"A Lee Boudreaux Book."

It's 1944. Twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as 'Mengele's Zoo', the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain ...

For August, running into an old friend sets memories in motion and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had left behind: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything. August and her three friends shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were beautiful, talented, and with a future that belonged to them. But beneath that hopeful promise there was another Brooklyn: a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where mothers disappeared, where fathers found religion, and where madness was never far away. This novel illuminates the formative period when a child meets adulthood - when precious innocence meets the perils of growing up--Adapted from book jacket.

Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war's end, the city is still in ruins. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a deal with the CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment - to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved.

Peter Leigh is called on a journey of a lifetime, a highly unusual humanitarian mission into deep space. One that will take him light-years from his beloved wife, Bea. As Peter pushes up against his own limits, word reaches him that Bea's world back home is falling apart.

A family shattered by the abduction of an older son endures the fallout of four nightmarish years when he is found alive and returned to them badly traumatized.

"Meet Lord Doyle. His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau. His game: 'baccarat punto blanco'. In these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak. But Lord Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater"--Back cover.

When Ettie's husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that her mother give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life, but can't seem to get it right. She irritates the maid, hangs food outside the window because she mistrusts the fridge and, in her naivety and loneliness, invites a prostitute in for tea. This novel is the story of a woman who loses her life's companion and a mother trying to get close to a daughter whom she has never truly known. It is about the meeting of the old-fashioned and the modern worlds and the beliefs built up over a lifetime.

Late summer in North Dakota, 1999: a tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture.