From the award-winning author of Hotel World and The Accidental, a dazzling, funny, and wonderfully exhilarating new novel. At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles’s story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another? Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, and full of Smith’s trademark wit and puns, There but for the is a deft exploration of the human need for separation—from our pasts and from one another—and the redemptive possibilities for connection. It is a tour de force by one of our finest writers.

Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D. C. law firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers. No time for a conscience. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was this man? Michael did some digging, and learned that he was a mentally ill veteran who'd been in and out of shelters for many years. Then Michael dug a little deeper, and found a dirty secret, and the secret involved Drake & Sweeney. The fast track derailed; the ladder collapsed. Michael bolted the firm and took a top-secret file with him. He landed in the streets, an advocate for the homeless, a street lawyer. And a thief.

Trip’s life motto is simple: get in, get off, get out. His lifestyle works for him, that is until he finds himself in an unexpected situation with the one girl he can't seem to get out of his mind. Teeny has been strong for too long. One amazing crazy night, with her best friend's cocky colleague, leaves her with more than just unwanted feelings and cravings she just can’t seem to quench. She's knocked up. He's freaked out. Life is about to get crazy for two people who can't stand to be close, yet can't seem to pull apart. Tension and confusion turn into mood swings and midnight snacks. How can things ever go back to simple times when every direction leads to chaos?

Two people meet, fall in love, move in together, and then the story begins. A grand New York romance told through dictionary entries, it opens an intimate window into the couple's space, giving a name to their everyday struggles, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time.

In WAR Sebastian Junger gives breathtaking insight into the truths of war -- the fear, the honor, and the trust among men. His on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Through the experiences of these young men at war, he shows what it means to fight, to serve, and to face down mortal danger on a regular basis.

It should have been a simple job. But for Garrett, a human detective in a world of gnomes, tracking down the woman to whom his dead pal Danny left a fortune in silver is no slight task. Even with the aid of Morley, the toughest half-elf around, Garrett isn't sure he'll make it out alive from a land where magic can be murder, the dead still talk, and vampires are always hungry for human blood.

Adams girlfriend is pregnant, and the only thing she now wants from him is marriage, but Adam declines the offer, claiming he hates the devotion, crying and smell of diapers. She chases him out of her life and house. Now Adam has to make up his mind before he losses everything. ..Daniel Rengaw “(POV)” is a published Historical Novelist drawn into a historical mystery. First, by a letter quilled by Thomas Jefferson. The letter holds the signature of Jefferson and is dated more than one hundred and eighty years after his death ‘The Document’, as it becomes known, is curiously found on the writing desk in Jefferson’s Study at Monticello. A place where it shouldn’t be. A place that few have access to.The Colorado Bureau of Investigation pushes the story further toward the murky as it determines that The Document could have indeed been penned by Jefferson. However, there are below the surface motives that may have skewed their analysis. These motives are both personal and internal. The internal: Fame driven greed of a Department Head. The personal: The same Department Head’s warm-for-the-form of Pamila Rengaw; Danny’s wife of thirty years. Both the Internal and Personal are over the shoulder glances that are looked at throughout the story.Doctor Rengaw is intrigued by a 63 page hand written political dossier sent him. The dossier’s implied meaning for our country, and the fact that it contains the same unknown acronym as The Document, furthers to tickle his curiosity. There is also confusion about an article in a Virginia newspaper. The Managing Editor can’t explain its origin or how it got into the edition. Rojer Ousten, Curator at Monticello and long time High School buddy of Danny’s, begs him to come to Monticello. For these reasons and others, Daniel agrees to go to Jefferson’s home. His going is a balancing act; solving the origin of The Document, and helping his friend with a Press Conference designed by the Monticello Foundation as a fund raiser. Daniel’s visit to Monticello is brief at only 48 hours. Yet it is never without happenings. A tumultuous Pacific wave rolling continual across the ocean.Monticello Foundation Chairman Peter Henderson, Rojer, and Daniel, attend a briefing with the FBI at Quantico. Assistant Director and Mr. Henderson’s friend, leads the analysis of the events that place The Document in the Study. This analysis determines a two second glitch in the digital security video from Jefferson’s Study. This glitch, this unexplained anomaly, is termed by the FBI as a Plasmic Event.That same evening while asleep at Monticello, Danny has a sleep walking experience. Danny has been a sleep-walker since childhood. That morning recalling his sleeping travel with Rojer, he tells of a dream conversation with Thomas Jefferson in the study. Together they view the digital surveillance of the Study. There is a similar glitch. A very similar two second glitch. Perhaps a Plasmic Event.This sends them in search of answers. Along the way they visit with the writer of the Dossier. They visit again only to find that he does not exist. They bump into other people that help them to find their answers. People that help; people that create questions.Daniel’s rink skating mind glides a continual circle of confusion. Nothing is clear. Then some focuses. In the end of this Part One, he thinks he understands what he is supposed to; what they need him to. But it is this why they want him to know, and the what they want him to do with it; this is his new wrestle. With this, in this, he leaves Monticello. Intent to answer the what.The two friends pull the reader within themselves as they share that which comes truest from the heart. Danny’s visit is laced with emotion, humor, anger, and searching for the truth. This travel passes close to some that once were here, again here, and again gone. Figures, that only in the end, are seen as who they are. Or who they were. Historical Icons.This smallest part of the body as I have just time-lined, is only the skeleton. The heart of the body is the true being of the story. There are the lives of the characters. Lives that are cloaked with struggles, abuse, victories, and walks that still need to come to end.

Divorced and disillusioned about relationships, Theresa Osborne is jogging when she finds a bottle on the beach. Inside is a letter of love and longing to "Catherine," signed simply "Garrett." Challenged by the mystery and pulled by emotions she doesn't fully understand, Theresa begins a search for this man that will change her life. What happens to her is unexpected, perhaps miraculous-an encounter that embraces all our hopes for finding someone special, for having a love that is timeless and everlasting.... Nicholas Sparks exquisitely chronicles the human heart. In his first bestselling novel, The Notebook, he created a testament to romantic love that touched readers around the world. Now in this New York Times bestseller, he renews our faith in destiny, in the ability of lovers to find each other no matter where, no matter when...

The erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy now continues with a fourth novel by master storyteller and best-selling author of Prince Lestat, Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure. Mega-best-selling author Annie Rice returns to where she left off in Beauty's Release with the disappearance of Queen Eleanor in Bellavalten. Now, 20 years after they were forced to leave the kingdom to return to their homeland, Beauty and her husband, Laurent, agree to travel back as its king and queen, to uphold the ways of complete sensual surrender with a twist: They now insist on voluntary servitude in Bellavalten. Countless eager princes, princesses, lords, ladies, and common folk journey to Beauty's new kingdom, where she and her husband awaken their domain, ushering in a new era of desire, longing, and sexual ecstasy. Provocative and stirring, Rice's imaginative retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth will be hailed by her longtime fans and new listeners of erotica just discovering the novels. This audiobook is intended for mature audiences. **

Both Nick and the Accelerati have learned that the strange objects Nikola Tesla left in Nick’s attic are pieces of a Far Range Energy Emitter, capable of transmitting “free energy” to the globe. Some components of the contraption are still missing, but the objects themselves seem to be leading Nick to their current owners. Each piece is with the person who needs it the most. But there are plenty of obstacles: Nick finds his judgment impaired by Caitlin’s intoxicating closeness, not to mention her ex-boyfriend Theo’s jealous sabotage; Mitch has to choose between pleasing Petula or helping Nick; and Vince, who gets his hands on some light-absorbing drapes, is so taken by the darkness, he can’t let them go. The Accelerati, meanwhile, are still around every corner, and they manage to beat Nick to a few more objects. They use the few pieces of Tesla’s technology they've recovered to create a storm and convince local officials that the Tesla F.R.E.E. is hazardous.The objects are confiscated by the Accelerati as the town brings in a wrecking ball to demolish Nick’s house. The Accelerati transport the objects back to their lab, hidden under the Edison Museum in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Nick knows that is where he’ll find his destiny.

The Mysterious Benedict Society is back with a new mission, significantly closer to home. After reuniting for a celebratory scavenger hunt, Reynie, Kate, Sticky, and Constance are forced to go on an unexpected search--a search to find Mr. Benedict. It seems that while he was preparing the kids' adventure, he stepped right into a trap orchestrated by his evil twin Mr. Curtain. With only one week to find a captured Mr. Benedict, the gifted foursome faces their greatest challenge of all--a challenge that will reinforce the reasons they were brought together in the first place and will require them to fight for the very namesake that united them.

Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s drifting toward bankruptcy and is in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes. Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a child who looks very much like Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin’s high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin—a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives—begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who have been on the run all these years from a drug dealer from whom Anna stole $121,000. In her most ambitious novel yet, Emily Mandel combines her most fully realized characters with perhaps her most fully developed story that examines the difficulty of being the person you'd like to be, loss, the way a small and innocent action (e.g., taking a picture of a girl in a foreclosed house) can have disastrous consequences. The Lola Quartet is a work that pays homage to literary noir, is concerned with jazz, Django Reinhardt, economic collapse, love, Florida’s exotic wildlife problem, crushing tropical heat, the leavening of the contemporary world, compulsive gambling, and the unreliability of memory. This is literary fiction with a strong detective story element.

Werewolves meet the Wild West in this thrilling final installment of the Wolf Brides trilogy. Lucianna Whitlock has her entire life planned out for her by men determined to use her as a pawn in high society marriage games. But when she balks against the cruel man who has won her hand, he rips her life apart. A strapping cowboy, half-feral and fully terrifying, saves her life from her ex-fiancé’s vengeance. When her only hope is to escape to America beside the stranger with the inhuman eyes and that thick, southern drawl, she’ll have to decide whether escaping her old life is worth leaving everything she knows behind. Gable Dawson has been running as a wolf for over a year, but saving Lucianna is breathing new life into the human form he left behind. To keep her safe, he’ll brave the rough waters of the Atlantic on a merchant ship, and travel back to the home in Colorado Springs he’s been avoiding for years. He’ll need the help of his pack to keep his woman safe. If anyone is worth facing his sordid past for, it’s Lucianna. And if he can claim his mate and protect her from the reach of the brutal man who’s hunting her, he just might save himself along the way. Content Warning: explicit love scenes, language, badass Wild West werewolves, and sexy shifter secrets. Adult only shifter romance.

From #1 bestseller Michael Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the gripping, true stories that inspired and informed his novels. Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet. Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.

Fan-favorite author Bree Despain continues her modern-day romance trilogy inspired by the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades with this second book in her Into the Dark series.  Haden Lord, the disgraced Prince of the Underrealm, has chosen love over honor and will do everything in his power to protect Daphne Raines, the human girl he was supposed to bring to the Underrealm. Haden’s choice is put to the test as the Skylords and a figure from his past arrive in Olympus Hills with a plan that could destroy all of the realms. Embracing her destiny as the Cypher, Daphne begins to understand the immense power of her musical ability to control the elements, but she must come to terms with her feelings for Haden and what she must sacrifice in order to protect him and her friends. Believing the Key of Hades is the only thing that can stop the Underrealm Court from releasing the monstrous Keres on the mortal world, Haden, Daphne, and their friends set out to find the Key before Persephone’s Gate opens again on the spring equinox.

Three weeks after Eleret’s mother is killed, the messenger arrives with the tragic news. She died far from home, succumbing to wounds sustained in battle, and Eleret must travel to reclaim her belongings. The overland journey to the city of Ciaron is treacherous, but Eleret has no fear. She straps a dagger to her leg and sets off to recover one of her mother’s prized possessions: a ring etched with a raven. Though she makes it to Ciaron safely, getting home is another story. Eleret doesn’t know what’s special about her mother’s ring, but someone wanted it badly enough to kill for it. To make it home in one piece, she must unlock the mysteries of the ring her mother died to protect.

These twenty-five new stories mark Graham Swift's return to the short form after seven acclaimed novels and confirm him as a master storyteller. They unite into a richly peopled vision of a country that is both a crucible of history and a maze of contemporary confusions. Meet Dr Shah who has never been to India and Mrs Kaminski, on her way to Poland via A meet Holly and Polly who have come to their own Anglo-Irish understanding and Lily Hobbs, married to a shirt; Charlie and Don who have seen the docks turn into Docklands; Mr Wilkinson the weirdo next door; Daisy Baker who is terrified of Yorkshire; and Johnny Dewhurst, stranded on Exmoor. Graham Swift steers us effortlessly from the Civil War to the present day, from world-shaking events to the secret dramas lived out in rooms, workplaces, homes. With his remarkable sense of place, he charts an intimate human geography. In doing so he moves us profoundly, but with a constant eye for comedy. Binding these stories together is Swift's grasp of the universal in the local and his affectionate but unflinching instinct for the story of us all: an evocation of that mysterious body that is a nation, deepened by the palpable sense of our individual bodies finding or losing their way in the nationless territory of birth, growing up, sex, ageing and death.

In RIVER-HORSE, the preeminent chronicler of American back roads -- who has given us the classics BLUE HIGHWAYS and PRAIRYERTH -- recounts his singular voyage on American waters from sea to sea. Along the route, he offers a lyrical and ceaselessly fascinating shipboard perspective on the country's rivers, lakes, canals, and towns. Brimming with history, drama, humor, and wisdom, RIVER-HORSE belongs in the pantheon of American travel literature. In his most ambitious journey ever, Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat he named Nikawa ("river horse" in Osage) from the Atlantic at New York Harbor in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon. He and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some five thousand watery miles -- more than any other cross-country river traveler has ever managed -- often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark. En route, the voyagers confront massive floods, submerged rocks, dangerous weather, and their own doubts about whether they can complete the trip. But the hard days yield up incomparable pleasures: strangers generous with help and eccentric tales, landscapes unchanged since Sacagawea saw them, riverscapes flowing with a lively past, and the growing belief that efforts to protect our lands and waters are beginning to pay off. And, throughout its course, the expedition enjoys coincidences so breathtaking as to suggest the intervention of a divine and witty Providence. Teeming with humanity and high adventure, Heat-Moon's account is an unsentimental and original arteriogram of our nation at the edge of the millennium. Masterly in its own right, RIVER-HORSE, when taken with BLUE HIGHWAYS and PRAIRYERTH, forms the capstone of a peerless and timeless trilogy.

Liam O’Connor should have died at sea in 1912. Maddy Carter should have died on a plane in 2010. Sal Vikram should have died in a fire in 2026. But all three have been given a second chance—to work for an agency that no one knows exists. Its purpose: to prevent time travel destroying history... Project Exodus—a mission to transport 300 Americans from 2070 to 54AD to overthrow the Roman Empire—has gone catastrophically wrong. Half have arrived seventeen years earlier, during the reign of Caligula. Liam goes to investigate, but when Maddy and Sal attempt to flee a kill-squad sent to hunt down their field office, all of the TimeRiders become trapped in the Roman past. Armed with knowledge of the future, Caligula is now more powerful than ever. But with the office unmanned—and under threat—how will the TimeRiders make it back to 2001 and put history right?

Francine Green doesn’t speak up much, and who can blame her? Her parents aren’t interested in her opinions, the nuns at school punish girls who ask too many questions, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities is blacklisting people who express unpopular ideas. There’s safety in silence. Francine would rather lose herself in a book, or in daydreams about her favorite Hollywood stars, than risk attracting attention or getting in trouble. But when outspoken, passionate Sophie Bowman transfers into Francine’s class at All Saints School for Girls, Francine finds herself thinking about things that never concerned her before—free speech, the atom bomb, the existence of God, the way people treat each other. Eventually, Francine discovers that she not only has something to say, she is absolutely determined to say it. Once again, Karen Cushman follows a young woman’s progress toward her true self, this time exploring the nature of friendship and the experience of growing up Catholic in an era that is both fascinating and relevant to today’s young people. Author’s note.

In Cromwell, award-winning biographer Antonia Fraser tells of one of England's most celebrated and controversial figures, often misunderstood and demonized as a puritanical zealot. Oliver Cromwell rose from humble beginnings to spearhead the rebellion against King Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649, and led his soldiers into the last battle against the Royalists and King Charles II at Worcester, ending the civil war in 1651. Fraser shows how England's prestige and prosperity grew under Cromwell, reversing the decline it had suffered since Queen Elizabeth I's death.