BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from John Irving's *In One Person.* In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” What further distinguishes** Last Night in Twisted River** is the author’s unmistakable voice—the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

In the Forest of the Dead, where the empire’s worst criminals are exiled, twin sisters Moria and Ashyn are charged with a dangerous task. For they are the Keeper and the Seeker, and each year they must quiet the enraged souls of the damned. Only this year, the souls will not be quieted. Ambushed and separated by an ancient evil, the sisters’ journey to find each other sends them far from the only home they’ve ever known. Accompanied by a stubborn imperial guard and a dashing condemned thief, the girls cross a once-empty wasteland, now filled with reawakened monsters of legend, as they travel to warn the emperor. But a terrible secret awaits them at court—one that will alter the balance of their world forever.

Antic Hay is one of Aldous Huxley's earlier novels, and like them is primarily a novel of ideas involving conversations that disclose viewpoints rather than establish characters; its polemical theme unfolds against the backdrop of London's post-war nihilistic Bohemia. This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best, a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere, a novel that's always charged with excitement.

A SWEEPING EPIC OF ANCIENT ROME FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THORN BIRDSWith her renowned storytelling gifts in full force, Colleen McCullough delivers a breathtaking novel that is both grand in scope and vivid in detail -- and proves once again why she is the top historical novelist of our time. In the last days of the Roman Republic, Gaius Julius Caesar is both adored and despised -- but his rule is unshakable. Forced by civil war to leave his beguiling mistress Cleopatra, Caesar turns his eye to the future: who is to inherit the throne of Roman power? But in the shadows of the empire, the talk is of murder. Who among his associates has the cunning and skill to fell the fierce leader -- and brave the dangerous consequences of that cataclysmic act?

From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a mélange of beautifully rendered relationships. In ”After the Season,” a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she’s rich. In “Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,” a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn’t his father who was the distant one. A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in “The Night in Baden-Baden,” but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. And in “Stranger in the Night,” an obliging professor becomes an accomplice—not entirely unwittingly—to the temporary escape of a charismatic fugitive on a delayed flight from New York to Frankfurt. The truth, as once character puts it, is “passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free.” Tantalizingly, so is the act of telling a lie—to others and to ourselves.

'I'm still rather fond of this first book of mine, in spite of all the time that has elapsed, and in spite of the way my style has evolved.' Joanne Harris Caution - May contain vampires. It's never easy to face the fact that a man you once loved passionately has found the girl of his dreams, as Alice discovers when Joe introduces her to his new girlfriend. Then Alice finds an old diary and reads about two men and the mysterious woman who bewitched them both, buried in Grantchester churchyard half a century ago. As the stories seem to intertwine, Alice comes to realize that her instinctive hatred of Joe's new girlfriend may not just be due to jealousy, as she is plunged into a nightmare world of obsession, revenge, seduction - and blood.

He'll do anything to protect her.... Former Marine and newest Red Stone Security employee Alexander Blue is still adjusting to the civilian world after a decade spent at war, but when he sees someone in danger, nothing can take away that intrinsic need to protect. After stopping a would-be mugger, Blue finds himself being bandaged up by a sensual local artist in her Key West condo. He never expected to stay the night, even if it is on her couch. The mysterious Mina gets under his skin in a way he never thought possible. When it becomes clear that her mugging wasn’t random and she’s being targeted by deadly men, Blue has no problem stepping into the role of protector. But she doesn't want to be saved Tired of being coddled and treated like a child, Mina has tried to distance herself from her family. When danger finds her, she’s forced to turn to the sexy stranger who she feels a strong, unexpected connection with. In him she sees glimmers of herself; a little broken, withdrawn and wary of the world. Soon she learns that the biggest threat might not be from the men trying to kidnap her, but from the quiet warrior who poses an immediate risk to her heart. Sinful Seduction appears in Sinful Seduction anthology*

These are the first three stories of the Tollins. Yes, they do have wings, but no, they aren't fairies. Tollins are a lot less fragile than fairies. In fact, the word fragile can't really be used to describe them at all. They are about as fragile as a house brick. In "How to Blow Up Tollins" a fireworks factory comes to the village of Chorleywood and the Tollins find themselves being used as industrial supplies. Being blasted into the night sky or spun round on a Catherine wheel is nowhere near a much fun as it sounds. It's up to one young Tollin to save his people from becoming an ingredient. In "Sparkler and the Purple Death" our hero looks execution in the face. Luckily, the executioner's mask in backwards. Finally, in "Windbags and Dark Tollins" Tollin society faces a threat from the Dorset countryside, which, again, is much more frightening and nail-bitingly dramatic than it actually sounds.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK Angela Carter was one of the most important and influential writers of our time: a novelist of extraordinary power and a searching critic and essayist.This selection of her writing, which she made herself, covers more than a decade of her thought and ranges over a diversity of subjects giving a true measure of the wide focus of her interests: the brothers Grimm; William Burroughs; food writing, Elizbaeth David; British writing: American writing; sexuality, from Josephine Baker to the history of the corset; and appreciations of the work of Joyce and Christina Stead.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUDREY NIFFENEGGER Love is Angela Carter's fifth novel and was first published in 1971. With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and lost connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter's haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.

After a painful loss, Cady Moreland is coming to Magdalene to start the next chapter of her life. A chapter that began eighteen years ago but had a heartbreaking ending. The time in between was full of family and friendship, but Cady could never get the man she fell in love with all those years ago out of her heart. Coert Yeager has learned to live without the girl who entered his life right when she shouldn’t and exited delivering a crippling blow he never would have suspected. The time in between was full of failing to find what he was missing…and life-altering betrayal. But when that girl shows up in Magdalene and buys the town’s beloved lighthouse, even if Coert wants to avoid her, he can’t. A fire in town sparks a different kind of flame that won’t be ignored. As Cady and Coert question the actions of the two young adults they once were thrown into earth-shattering circumstances, can they learn from what came in between and find each other again?

Miguel Guzman isn't exactly looking forward to the summer now that his mother has agreed to let the Sword family—a father, his three daughters, and their dog—live with them while they decide whether or not to move to Vermont. Little does Miguel know his aunt has something up her sleeve that just may make this the best summer ever. With her usual flair for creativity and fun, Tía Lola decides to start a summer camp for Miguel, his little sister, and the three Sword girls, complete with magical swords, nighttime treasure hunts, campfires, barbecues, and an end-of-summer surprise! The warm and funny third book in the Tía Lola Stories is sure to delight young readers and leave them looking forward to their own summer fun! From the Hardcover edition.

Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade. From the Trade Paperback edition.

“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a sixty-year friendship between the brilliant and bookish Elena and the fiery, rebellious Lila with unmatched honesty and brilliance. The four books in this novel cycle constitute a long, remarkable story, one that Vogue described as “gutsy and compulsively readable,” which readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.  

Indelible When medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver take a trip away from the small town of Heartsdale - an escape from all the pressures which complicate their relationship - it should be a straightforward weekend at the beach. But they decide to take a detour via Jeffrey's hometown and things go violently wrong when Jeffrey's best friend Robert shoots dead an intruder who breaks into his house. Jeffrey and Sara are first on the scene and Jeffrey's keen to clear his friend's name, but for Sara things aren't so simple. The sear marks around the bullet-hole don't tally with Robert's story. Robert's wife, Jessie, is incoherent and confused. And when Jeffrey appears to change the crime scene, Sara no longer knows who to trust. Twelve years later, Sara and Jeffrey are caught up in a shockingly brutal attack which threatens to destroy both their lives. But they're not random victims. They've been targeted. And it seems the past is catching up with both of them ... Faithless There are many ways to die. But some are more terrifying than others ... A walk in the woods takes a sinister turn for police chief Jeffrey Tolliver and medical examiner Sara Linton when they stumble across the body of a young girl. Incarcerated in the ground, all the initial evidence indicates that she has, quite literally, been scared to death. But as Sara embarks on the autopsy, something even more horrifying comes to light. Something which shocks even Sara. Detective Lena Adams, talented but increasingly troubled, is called in from vacation to help with the investigation - and the trail soon leads to the neighbouring county, an isolated community, and a terrible secret ... Skin Privilege Lena Adams has spent her life struggling to escape her past. She has only unhappy memories of Reece, the small town which nearly destroyed her. She's made a new life for herself as a police detective in Heartsdale, a hundred miles away - but nothing could prepare her for the violence which explodes when she is forced to return. A vicious murder leaves a young woman incinerated beyond recognition. And Lena is the only suspect. When Heartsdale police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, Lena's boss, receives word that his detective has been arrested, he has no choice but to go to Lena's aid - taking with him his wife, medical examiner Sara Linton. But soon after their arrival, a second victim is found. The town closes ranks. And both Jeffrey and Sara find themselves entangled in a horrifying underground world of bigotry and rage - a violent world which shocks even them. A world which puts their own lives in jeopardy. Only Jeffrey and Sara can free Lena from the web of lies, betrayal and brutality that has trapped her. But can they discover the truth before the killer strikes again?

"Dominic Snow wanted me. I never doubted that fact, but I was doing what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do. I was falling for him, and I couldn't help thinking I'd made a terrible mistake.” Aleena Davison's life is quickly spinning out of control. Her rich, gorgeous boss is taking her to heights of sexual pleasure that she'd never imagined, but it's quickly becoming apparent to her that, no matter what he says, sex is all she is to Dominic. She, however, wants more. When things come to a head, will Dominic be willing to give up some of his control or will Aleena walk away?

Lightning-struck sleuth Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver must face their family’s troubled past in this gripping mystery from #1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris.Taking a break from looking for the dead, Harper and Tolliver decide to visit the two little girls they both think of as sisters. But as they travel to Texas, memories of their horrible childhood resurface...   To make matters worse, Tolliver learns his father is out of jail and trying to reestablish contact with other family members. Tolliver wants no part of the man—but he may not have a choice in the matter. Soon, family secrets ensnare them both, as Harper finally discovers what happened to her missing sister, Cameron, so many years before. And what she finds out will change her world forever.

I've seen so many freaky things since I started attending Mythos Academy last fall. I know I'm supposed to be a fearless warrior, but most of the time, I feel like I'm just waiting for the next Bad, Bad Thing to happen. Like someone trying to kill me--again. Everyone at Mythos Academy knows me as Gwen Frost, the Gypsy girl who uses her psychometry magic to find lost objects--and who just may be dating Logan Quinn, the hottest guy in school. But I'm also the girl the Reapers of Chaos want dead in the worst way. The Reapers are the baddest of the bad, the people who murdered my mom. So why do they have it in for me? It turns out my mom hid a powerful artifact called the Helheim Dagger before she died. Now, the Reapers will do anything to get it back. They think I know where the dagger is hidden, but this is one thing I can't use my magic to find. All I do know is that the Reapers are coming for me--and I'm in for the fight of my life.

In the darkness, demons come out to play . . . and someone must bring their sins to light. Part vampire, part werewolf, Riley Jenson knows what can happen when vamps don't play well with others. But she's never seen anything like this: a series of brutal murders surrounding the latest hot spot for vampire-human hookups—and the victims aren't just killed, they're beheaded. Now Riley is launching into action, toying with a seductive—and highly suspicious—club owner, and finding herself in the middle of another mystery: women being killed one by one without a trace of violence. For Riley, solving multiple cases—in a world going mad with human and vampire passions—would have been tough enough. Instead, she has two jealous lovers on her hands: Kye Murphy, the amber-eyed werewolf who makes Riley's wolf blood howl—and Quinn, the cool, elegant vamp who has over a thousand years' experience at fulfilling women's desires. While she's busy juggling these two sexy beasts, Riley's detective work takes a stunningly violent turn. Finding a murderer is now a matter of life and death. Especially since the killer has long since found her. . .

Still half asleep, Michael looked up at his parents sitting on the buckboard of their covered wagon and saw an arrow penetrate his father's chest. Then he saw his mother being dragged from the wagon by two Indians. His mother fell from the wagon and disappeared from his sight and from his life forever. Now he was all alone.Still half asleep, Michael looked up at his parents sitting on the buckboard of their covered wagon and saw an arrow penetrate his father's chest. Then he saw his mother being dragged from the wagon by two Indians. She was fighting them with all her might. He watched as one of the Indians hit her with his stone ax. His mother fell from the wagon and disappeared from his sight and from his life forever. Now he was alone. "Sagebrush" tells of how Michael survived the Indian attack and then endures alone in the vast and hostile land.

Karen finds a shiny new penny that gives her all sorts of good luck, then learns the hard way how to manage her good fortune.