You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A thought-prooking thriller and a literate page-turner, Stephen Amidon's The New City takes aim at the suburban American dream and captures the real nightmare behind it. It is 1973, the Vietnam War is winding down and the Senate Watergate hearings are heating up. But Newton, Maryland, is a model community, an enclave of harmony and prosperity. Through years of cunning legal maneuvering and smooth real-estate deals, the white lawyer Austin Swope has made the dream of this new city a reality. His best friend is Earl Wooten, the black master builder who raised Newton from its foundations. Their teenaged sons, Teddy and Joel, each the repository of his father's deepest hopes for the future, are inseparable buddies. But cracks begin to appear in this pristiine and meticulously planned community, and an innocent misunderstanding is about to set the two men who control its quiet streets on a fateful collision course.
A lyrical history of the human heart draws on scientific, religious and literary sources to reveal the heart's role in human imagination and culture from the ancient world to today. Co-written by the author of Human Capital.
It's the spring of 2001. Drew Hagel has spent the last decade watching things slip away - his marriage, his real estate brokerage, and his beloved daughter, Shannon, now a distant and mysterious high school senior. But, as summer approaches, Drew forms an unexpected friendship with Quint Manning, the manager of a secretive hedge fund. Drew sees the friendship leading to vast, frictionless wealth, but Drew doesn't know that Manning has problems of his own: his Midas touch is abandoning him, his restless wife has grown disillusioned, and his hard-drinking son is careening out of control. As the fortunes of three families collide, a terrible accident gives Drew the leverage he needs to stay in ...
Everything is neat and peaceful in Stoneleigh. Bad things don't often happen, and when they do, the residents trust the forces of law and order to deal with them efficiently and with minimum fuss. But appearances can be misleading. It takes just one crime - a disturbing allegation of sexual assault - to blast through the veneer of mutual trust, to expose a hotbed of suspicion and paranoia. Suddenly politicians, businessmen, mothers, students and gossips all seem to care less about the truth, than they do about the illusion of personal and public security. Security is a tense, penetrating and brilliantly observed novel about actual and imagined safety - about public and private life today.
The beautiful younger woman who appeared so unexpectedly, so gloriously, in Michael Coolidge’s life one night—a seemingly chance pick-up at a quiet neighborhood bar—vanished just as suddenly a few days later, into thin air it seemed, leaving him dazed and bewildered. Months later he chances upon Justine on a village street, locked in a violent quarrel with a scary looking brute—a day later, that man is found dead in a seedy motel and Justine has disappeared again, leaving behind only a hasty plea for help. Michael’s efforts to locate her, or to find out something more about her elusive past, yield only further mystery, a confusing web of lies, manipulations and false leads. Who is the real Justine? Downtown art world sophisticate, or small town innocent? Victim or predator? Someone he can trust, or someone he should actually fear?Stephen Amidon’s spellbinding psychological thriller, The Real Justine, confounds the reader at every turn, constantly causing us to revise our assumptions. It’s a fascinating study in character and a relentless, ingeniously head-spinning story—all deliciously unresolved until the very last page.
'One of the most original and audacious autobiographies ever written by a writer.' Le Monde Hand to Mouth tells the story of the young Paul Auster's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Auster's memoir is essentially a book about money - and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art and, in the process, treats us to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable encounters. Hand to Mouth is essential reading for anyone interested in Paul Auster, in the figure of the struggling artist, in the nature of poverty, or in baseball.
In North Carolina, a woman escapes from hospital after a car accident, arriving in the office of the real estate agent who caused it, asking his help without explaining why. He is so intrigued he offers her one of the agency's houses and begins an affair behind his wife's back, unaware of what he is getting into.
Daniel North, a struggling actor, searches for his estranged father in the Arizona desert.
Acclaimed as one of the funniest and most assured Irish novels of recent years, An Evening of Long Goodbyes is the story of Dubliner Charles Hythloday and the heroic squandering of the family inheritance. Featuring drinking, greyhound racing, vanishing furniture, more drinking, old movies, assorted Dublin lowlife, eviction and the perils of community theatre, Paul Murray's debut novel is a tour de force of comedic writing wrapped in an honest-to-goodness tale of a man- and a family - living in denial . . .
To the Hermitage tells two stories. The first is of the narrator, a novelist, on a trip to Stockholm and Russia for an academic seminar called the Diderot Project. The second takes place two hundred years earlier and recreates the journey the French philosopher Denis Diderot made to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a woman whose influence could change the path of history . . . Malcolm Bradbury’s last novel is rich with his satirical wit, but it is also deeply personal and weaves a wonderfully wry self-portrait.