This compelling novel chronicles the cllapse of a family.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Two men conspire to make a one-take film, when an "otherworldy" woman appears and dramatically changes the story.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

This novel is for those who loved Thursday Next and want an adventure that is equally wild, only darker.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Set during WWII in England, this quiet story is about a woman who makes a new life for herself after her husband leaves her.

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In this new collection of novellas, Harrison dives deep into the lives of varied characters.

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In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.