A twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from their Boston home, to southern Vermont, to Toronto.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

An unforgettable story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

War photographer--and war weary--Andres Faulques has laid his camera aside and picked up his paintbrush.  Faulques has retired to a tower on the Spanish coast where he is painting a mural of all the battles he has seen both through his camera lens and on the canvases of the great masters.  He lives a quiet life, painting by day, remembering by night.  Some of the works are quite disturbing, showing the bloody thighs of a raped woman and an massive volcano erupting.

His only visitor is a man who he made infamous with one of his photographs years ago.  Now the stranger, the Croatian, Marovic, has shown up at Falques' door with a simple message: "I'm here to kill you."

Faulquest seems disturbed at first, then the two men engage in conversations about love, art, war, and revenge.  They also discuss the woman Faulques photographed on the side of a road after her death, Olvido Ferrara.  After Faulques and Olvido met in a Mexican museum, they became lovers and traveled the world.  He photographed the war while she photographed things.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Five brilliant interconnected stories in which music is an essential character.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Doctorow gives us a masterpiece about the infamous New York hermits, the Collyer brothers.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Dai Sijie, born and educated in China, has lived and worked in France since he was thirty.  He brings his unique experience to bear on this novel, which features a French student caught up in a complicated quest to learn and understand Tumchooq, a lost Chinese language found only in a torn piece of a silk scroll.  The scrap was thrown from an airplane by the crazed last emperor, Pu Yi, enroute to a puppet reign in Manchuria.  Years later, the student meets a vegetable seller named Tumchooq, whose estranged father had been the French scholar who found and interpreted the Tumchooq language.  The solid base of written language is shown to be arbitrary and whimsical:  love, life, and meaning all shift and change with every new perspective.  Only the search seems to finally matter; you can never be entirely sure about what it is that you've found.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

When a wealthy man from a small Wisconsin town advertises for a "reliable wife," the woman he selects is not what he expects.  The twists and turns of this complex relationship create surprises throughout this tale set in 1907 Wisconsin and St. Louis.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Meloy gives us eleven new short stories that are poignant, sly, and emotionally powerful.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Raul Vinas and his family are squatters who live on the unfinished floor of a seven-story luxury condo building under construction.  Teh ghosts are seen by everyone on the construction site, from the workers to the smallest child of Raul and his wife.  No one seems bothered by the naked men coated in a fine layer of dust who seem to sit and watch what is going on.  In fact, Raul uses them to refrigerate his wine:  "It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally ballanced.  When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold."

The entire story takes place on New Year's Eve.   In Buenos Airies, it's a scorching hot summer day.  The heat is almost unbearable on the building's rooftop, but the family learns to make the best of it.  They are grateful that the work is behind schedule so they don't have to find a new place to live.

As the afternoon progresses, the plot's focus shifts from the family in general to the eldest daughter, Patri.  She begins to interact with the ghosts and wants to join them at their party.  Unfortunately, she would have to be dead to do so.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A graduate student is drawn deeper into the mysteries of her family's house, when she discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A young novelist is promised a fortune to write a book for which people will live and die.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

In the streets of Manhattan, ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunning portrait of a city and its people.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Stories of the author's native Pennsylvania, New England suburbia, and foreign travel.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Already a best selling title in France and an award-winning screenplay currently under option, Kaleidoscope has finally been released in the U.S.

Jack Romaine has a problem.  He loves the speakeasies and cards.  He loves them so much that he has overextended his line of credit and now owes more than six big ones to a viariety of unsavory characters, including Al Capone.  Jack lives with mother-in-law and son in a shanty part of Cincinnati.  His large debts lead him to the door of Oliver Bladehorn, a Cincinnati gangster who was cheated out of a small fortune by his not-so-faithful wife.  Unfortunately, the late Mrs. Bladehorn died at sea dn too the secret of the stash's hiding place with her.

Bladehorn sends Jack south to Kaleidoscope, Florida, the winter home of many carnival freak shows.  Conspicuous to Kaleidoscope's oddities, Jack must locate the missing money for Bladehorn or the gangster will have his minions take care of Jack's family.

Kaleidoscope is a fascinating look at carnival folk, especially those who make up the freak show.  It has all the elements to make an outstanding crime noir novel, with writing of a literary value.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Maistros has been a long time resident of New Orleans.  With this book, he proves that not everyone in the Crescent City is down and out. 

The story opens in 1891.  Nine-year-old Typhus Morningstar has a gift; an understanding, his father calls it.  He returns aborted fetuses to the river, and, with tender strokes, turns the bloody corpses into small catfish.  So sets the stage for this literary fiction/magic realism tale that reads as quickly as the re-birthed catfish swims away.  Typhus' father, Noonday Morningstar, is a Baptist voodoo African-American preacher who has named five children after diseases.  To him, "the names were a tribute to God's glory, plain and simple."

This book is the story of Noonday and his children.  Noonday is called to the home of a Sicilian immigrant to perform an exorcism on the man's child.  The demon is defeated but Noonday is killed and Typhus is left irrevocably changed.  The children squeak by after their father's death, getting help from the apparition whom they believe is the boogeyman from their childhood.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Wray's captivating third novel drifts between psychological realities while exploring the narrative poetics of schizophrenia.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.