New Literary Fiction

The best-selling master of historical fiction weaves a grand, sweeping drama of New York from the city's founding to the present day. Rutherfurd celebrates America's greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga that showcases his extraordinary ability to combine impeccable historical research and storytelling flair. As in his earlier, best-selling novels, he illuminates cultural, social, and political upheavals through the lives of a remarkably diverse set of families. Rutherfurd brings to life the momentous events that shaped New York and America.

It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

Children of the New World introduces listeners to 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.

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature.

Holmes faces a moral dilemma, when it turns out that his newest client is a former pirate captain. Years ago, he got cheated out of his share by his comrades, now he is asking Holmes for help with recovering his lost booty.

There is a mole hiding in the British Embassy in Brussels. Important secret papers regarding the colonial politics have been stolen. In order to keep a diplomatic and international crisis from happening Holmes and Watson travel, of course incognito, to Belgium. There they want to put a stop to the traitor's game.

Holmes faces a moral dilemma, when it turns out that his newest client is a former pirate captain. Years ago, he got cheated out of his share by his comrades, now he is asking Holmes for help with recovering his lost booty.

A malicious murder of a highly unusual victim leads Sherlock Holmes to London Zoo. While Scotland Yard attaches little importance to the matter and closes the investigation, Holmes' logical prowess and astute observation skills lead him and Watson down a politically motivated and quite interesting road.

Shortly before the opening of a new ancient Egyptian exhibition at the British Museum, the main attraction disappears: The Pharaoh's Mummy was stolen from its Sarcophagus. The Curator desperately turns to Holmes and Watson and they happily take the case.

When the Crown Prince of Portugal visits London, a precious diamond, the Iguana's Tear, is stolen from him. Faced with the possibility of a devastating financial and political backlash for the Iberian Royal Family, Holmes and Dr. Watson are brought in to investigate matters before they escalate.

When Dr. Watson returns to London from a weekend seminar, he finds hat Sherlock Holmes has been arrested. Inspector Lestrade refers Watson to a questionable psychiatric hospital where Holmes is jailed for mental incapacity.

After receiving an anonymous death threatening note, the aged owner of a Scottish whiskey distillery reaches out to Holmes and Watson. Both of them travel to the Highlands to get to the bottom of the matter and stop the perpetrator.

A colleague of Dr. Watson asks Sherlock Holmes for help: His patient Joseph Merrick, known in public as the "elephant man", because of his strong physical deformations, was the victim of a brutal assault. Holmes and Watson take over the case, which takes them to the circus milieu.

When Dr. Watson returns to London from a weekend seminar, he finds hat Sherlock Holmes has been arrested. Inspector Lestrade refers Watson to a questionable psychiatric hospital where Holmes is jailed for mental incapacity.

Inspector Lestrade asks Sherlock Holmes for help when the Chinese owner of an opium cave is murdered in London. Holmes, however, is not in full possession of his detecting skills, and Dr. Watson has to take over at first. At the scene he finds a big mystery.

THE SIGN OF THE TOOTH: A BEAUTIFUL, YOUNG WOMAN ENTERS 221B BAKER STREET. HER FATHER, HIS CLOSEST FRIEND, AND A YOUNG MEDICAL STUDENT HAVE ALL DIED IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS Each body was found soon after death but with rigor mortis already set in. She believes they were murdered and seeks the help of Sherlock Holmes. The mystery that led to their deaths began fifteen hundred years ago when the sacred tooth of the Buddha was brought to Ceylon. Since then it has never left the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy where it has been guarded and worshiped.

It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear.

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Whittled down with a singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the listener on a careening joyride around the inside track.

After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with 12 new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina, and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities.

Eleanor Morse's Margreete’s Harbor begins with a fire: A fiercely-independent, thrice-widowed woman living on her own in a rambling house near the Maine coast forgets a hot pan on the stovetop, and nearly burns her place down. When Margreete Bright calls her daughter Liddie to confess, Liddie realizes that her mother can no longer live alone. She, her husband Harry, and their children Eva and Bernie move from a settled life in Michigan across the country to Margreete’s isolated home, and begin a new life.