Literary Life

Both highly suspenseful and deeply moving, The Deep End of the Ocean imagines every mother's worst nightmare - the disappearance of a child - as it explores a family's struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds. Filled with compassion, humor, and brilliant observations about the texture of real life, here is a story of rare power, one that will touch listeners' hearts and make them celebrate the emotions that make us all one.

When the McPheron brothers see Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they’d taken in, move from their ranch to begin college, an emptiness opens before them—and for many other townspeople it also promises to be a long, hard winter. A young boy living alone with his grandfather helps out a neighbor whose husband, off in Alaska, suddenly isn’t coming home, leaving her to raise their two daughters.

Sara Stanley is only 14, but she can weave tales that are impossible to resist. In the charming town of Carlisle, children and grown-ups alike flock from miles around to hear her spellbinding narratives. And when Bev King and his younger brother, Felix, arrive for the summer, they, too, are captivated by the Story Girl.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.

An absorbing chronicle of a much overlooked chapter in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ life - her 19-year editorial career. History remembers Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the consummate first lady, the nation’s tragic widow, the tycoon’s wife, and the quintessential embodiment of elegance. Her biographers, however, skip over an equally important stage in her life: her nearly 20-year-long career as a book editor. Jackie as Editor, written by one of the authors Jackie edited, is the first book to focus exclusively on this remarkable woman’s editorial career.

At the age of 12, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.

After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past - a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.

In the spring of 1981, the young Skinner siblings - fierce Renee, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe, and watchful Fiona - lose their father to a heart attack and their mother to a paralyzing depression, events that thrust them into a period they will later call “the Pause.” Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the siblings navigate the dangers and resentments of the Pause to emerge fiercely loyal and deeply connected.

Claire is a hardworking doctor living a simple, quiet life in London. She is also the daughter of the most notorious murder suspect in the country, though no one knows it. Nearly 30 years ago, while Claire and her infant brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family's townhouse.

New adventures lie ahead as Anne Shirley packs her bags, waves good-bye to childhood, and heads for Redmond College. With old friend Prissy Grant waiting in the bustling city of Kingsport and frivolous new pal Philippa Gordon at her side, Anne tucks her memories of rural Avonlea away and discovers life on her own terms, filled with surprises...including a marriage proposal from the worst fellow imaginable.

For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents - moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and her sister, Tina, must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them.

For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade.

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep - and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town.

In this “jewel of a novel” (The Observer), Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing.

Reclusive literary legend M. M. "Mimi" Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies - with a few stipulations: no Ivy Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids.

Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.

Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears - imperfection, failure, loneliness - she spirals down anorexia and depression till she weighs a mere 88 pounds. Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where pale, fragile women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Women like Emm, the veteran; quiet Valerie; Julia, always hungry. Together, they must fight their diseases and face six meals a day.

Épicène, adj. : Qui a la même forme au masculin et au féminin. Claude et Dominique, dont la rencontre au café a été fortuite, se marient et filent à Paris conquérir une nouvelle vie. De leur union naquit un enfant : Épicène. Un amour mère-fille fusionnel. Une détestation père-fille immédiate. Le dernier roman d'Amélie Nothomb est un jeu de piste familial shakespearien, écrit d'une main de maître.

Arial knows the rules that keep her safe. She's been following them since she was a little girl: Do not tell. Do not show. But in a moment of terror, facing an attacker intent on taking more than just her life, Ari has no choice but to unleash the psychic powers she's been hiding since childhood.