The Proposition 3: The Ferro Family

      H. M. Ward
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**By New York Times bestselling author H.M. Ward Blackmail. Sex. Ferro.** An engagement is the farthest thing from my mind, but as Neil holds up the ring I glance around and notice someone is missing. Maggie. The man had the audacity to invite everyone else except my best friend. Where is she? When I go to find out, I don't like what I discover. Once, I'd thought I was different from the Ferros and the Campagones, but when it comes down to it--I'm exactly the same. Genre: New Adult Romance This story unfolds over 5 volumes approx. 125 pages each.*

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    The Reverberator: A Novel

      Henry James
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Henry James, one of the great literary stylists, an incomparable analyst of human relations, and---who knew?---a startlingly prescient media critic. This little-known novel from one of his most fertile creative periods could have been written for today's news-hungry, celebrity-obsessed times. Pretty American Francie Dosson travels to France with her father and less pretty sister. En route they meet scandal sheet journalist George Flack, who promptly falls for Francie. On their arrival in Paris he tours the Dosson sisters through its high society and bohemian circles, unwittingly introducing her to his rival Gaston Probert. Flack---a forerunner of a phone-hacker if ever there was one---is dismayed by this competition for the guileless Francie, but soon finds a way to turn the situation to his advantage, as well as that of his readers. The Reverberator is James at his most incisive, not to mention most caustic, and perhaps funniest, and one of very few of his novels to win the praise of his harshest critic: his brother William James. It's also a remarkably timely take on privacy, press freedoms, and our own inquisitive natures. ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-157-7 From the Trade Paperback edition.

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    The Seekers

      John Jakes
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Against the backdrop of the harsh and unforgiving American frontier, Abraham Kent seeks to build a life and identity of his own Continuing the saga of the Kent family, John Jakes turns his masterful eye to the settlement of the untamed American West. Abraham Kent, the son of Philip Kent and Anne Ware, fought valiantly on the frontier, only to return home to Boston and a life he doesn’t want. Determined not to live in his father’s shadow, Abraham and his young bride join the wave of pioneers carving out farms in the turbulent, dangerous West. But life on the nation’s frontier soon becomes more than their fledgling family can endure. Furthering his reign as the living master of American historical fiction, Jakes unfurls the epic of The Seekers. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

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    Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

      Simone de Beauvoir
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A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

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    A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

      Siri Hustvedt
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A compelling and radical collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prize-winning novelist Siri Hustvedt, the acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved. Siri Husvedt has always been fascinated by biology and how human perception works. She is a lover of art, the humanities, and the sciences. She is a novelist and a feminist. Her lively, lucid essays in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women begin to make some sense of those plural perspectives. Divided into three parts, the first section, “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women,” investigates the perceptual and gender biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. Among the legendary figures considered are Picasso, De Kooning, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The second part, “The Delusions of Certainty,” is about the age-old mind/body problem that has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks. Hustvedt explains the relationship between the mental and the physical realms, showing what lies beyond the argument—desire, belief, and the imagination. The final section, “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition,” discusses neurological disorders and the mysteries of hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology, and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound and powerful consideration of suicide. There has been much talk about building a beautiful bridge across the chasm that separates the sciences and the humanities. At the moment, we have only a wobbly walkway, but Hustvedt is encouraged by the travelers making their way across it in both directions. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an insightful account of the journeys back and forth.

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    Trap Line

      Carl Hiaasen
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With its dozens of outlying islands and the native Conchs’ historically low regard for the law, Key West is a smuggler’s paradise. All that’s needed are the captains to run the contraband. Breeze Albury is one of the best fishing captains on the Rock, and he’s in no mood to become the Machine’s delivery boy. So the Machine sets out to persuade him. It starts out by taking away Albury’s livelihood. Then it robs him of his freedom. But when the Machine threatens Albury’s son, the washed-out wharf rat turns into a raging, sea-going vigilante. In Trap Line, Hiaasen and Montalbano pit a handful of scruffy Conchs against an armada of drug lords, crooked cops, and homicidal marine lowlife. The result is a crime novel of dizzying velocity, filled with wrenching plot twists, grimily authentic characters, and enough local color for a hundred tropical shirts. It’s the Key West the tourist brochures won’t tell you about: a place as crooked as Al Capone’s Chicago and as irredeemably violent as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.

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    Lionel Asbo: State of England

      Martin Amis
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A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers.  Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine.  He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality.  Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love (and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him).  But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle—once again in a London prison—wins £140 million in the lottery and upon his release hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and “poet.”  Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.

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  • 291

    Bad Romance

      Heather Demetrios
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Grace wants out. Out of her house, where her stepfather wields fear like a weapon and her mother makes her scrub imaginary dirt off the floors. Out of her California town, too small to contain her big city dreams. Out of her life, and into the role of Parisian artist, New York director—anything but scared and alone.Enter Gavin: charming, talented, adored. Controlling. Dangerous. When Grace and Gavin fall in love, Grace is sure it's too good to be true. She has no idea their relationship will become a prison she's unable to escape. Deeply affecting and unflinchingly honest, this is a story about spiraling into darkness—and emerging into the light again.

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    Among the Echoes

      Aly Martinez
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My name was Dr. Erica Hill. I was a victim, then a witness, and then I ceased to exist altogether. I may still be breathing, but stripped of my identity, I have long since stopped living. I am invisible, and my life depends on my ability to stay in the shadows. But he sees me. Slate Andrews is the embodiment of everything I have been taught to avoid. He’s rich and famous, and one image of him with a woman would earn millions for any paparazzi lucky enough to snap it. He has vowed to protect me with his life, yet he exposes me with his every breath. I should be stronger and walk away. I should disappear. But I’m terrified he would come after me. I’m on the run, determined not to take him down with me but absolutely unable to let him go. My name is Riley Peterson…at least for today.

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  • 291

    Elegy for Kosovo

      Ismail Kadare
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A timely and profound reflection in fiction on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples by "one of the most compelling novelists writing in any language" (Bruce Bawer, The Wall Street Journal). June 28, 1389: Six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, there took place, on the Field of the Blackbirds, a battle shrouded in legend. A coalition of Serbs, Albanian Catholics, Bosnians, and Romanians confronted and were defeated by the invading Ottoman army of the Sultan Murad. This battle established the Muslim foothold in Europe and became the centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars that the world witnessed with horror at the end of the past century. In this eloquent and timely reflection on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples, Ismail Kadare explores in fiction the legend and the consequences of that defeat. Elegy for Kosovois...

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  • 291

    How To Be Invisible

      Tim Lott
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Strato Nyman couldn't be more of an odd-one-out. He's the only black kid in Hedgecombe-upon-Dray, he knows more about particle physics than his teacher, and he's constantly picked on by school bully Lloyd Archibald Turnbull. It's only at home that he blends in to the background – his parents are too busy arguing to notice he exists. But one day, Strato picks up a dusty old book in a mysterious bookshop and learns how to become invisible. He soon discovers that people aren't always what they seem ... and realizes standing out isn't so bad after all.

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  • 291

    Hearts on Air (Hearts #6)

      L.H. Cosway
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3 weeks. 5 cities. 15 impossible stunts. One reality show. Trevor Cross came into Reya Cabrera’s world with a bang and faded out with a whimper. They vowed to make it work, but life had other plans. After chasing his TV dreams for years, Trev finally became the UK’s next big reality star, but he alienated his family and friends in the process. Now he finally has everything he ever wanted. Women. Money. Fame. But none of it means anything when he doesn’t have the one thing that matters most: love. Money leaves a gaping hole. Fame surrounds him with loneliness. And no woman makes him feel like Reya used to before the whirlwind of success pulled them apart. He has a plan to get her back for good. However, with a hectic filming schedule looming, the only way to do that is to convince her to come on the road with him. Reya has been stuck in a rut for a while, and the opportunity to travel across Europe and play her music for new audiences seems like heaven. The only catch? She has to do it with the one boy who ever got close enough to break her heart. But he’s not a boy anymore, and as she gets to know him again she can’t deny her respect for the man he’s become. Every time she’s around him her heart feels full of air, like a balloon about to pop. Little does she know, Trev’s feelings are just tumultuous as hers. One thing’s for sure, these three weeks on the road together will either make them whole again or break them irrevocably. *Hearts on Air is a contemporary romance and book #6 in the Hearts series, however it can also be read as a complete standalone.* **

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  • 291

    Breathless

      Beverly Jenkins
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A strong-willed beauty finds herself in the arms of the handsome drifter from her past, in this second book in the sizzling series set in the Old West, from USA Today Bestselling Author Beverly JenkinsAs manager of one of the finest hotels in Arizona Territory, Portia Carmichael has respect and stability—qualities sorely missing from her harsh childhood. She refuses to jeopardize that by hitching herself to the wrong man. Suitors are plentiful, but none of them has ever looked quite as tempting as the family friend who just rode into town...and none has looked at her with such intensity and heat.Duchess. That's the nickname Kent Randolph gave Portia when she was a young girl. Now she's a stunning, intelligent woman—and Kent has learned his share of hard lessons. After drifting through the West, he's learned the value of a place to settle down, and in Portia's arms he's found that and more. But convincing her to trust him with her heart, not just her...

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  • 291

    Legacy of Silence

      Belva Plain
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Legacy of shame...Caroline Hartzinger fled wartime Europe with a shattered life and a devastating secret. Pregnant and unwed, she arrived in America in 1939. Joel Hirsch offered marriage and respectability, hoping one day to earn her love, if not the passion she felt for a man whose memory still haunted them both. With Joel, Caroline built a new life, determined to bury the past--until her daughter Eve brought Caroline's carefully crafted world crashing down again, driven by a rage to learn the truth....Legacy of secrets...It was Eve's turn now, a legacy that tainted her life and risked generations to come. But with it came a gift--a new sister, young enough to be her own daughter, then a truth that would finally break the hold of the past....New York Times bestselling author Belva Plain creates an unforgettable story of a remarkable family--and a deception that reaches across continents, oceans and generations.From the...

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