Award-Winning Fiction - 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards
Discover the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards' winning fiction titles. Explore acclaimed books that earned top honors in this prestigious literary competition.
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The Gem Merchants
by Ray Ferguson
Mark Branson has achieved what every gem dealer dreams of. He is on the scene at the time and place of a major gem strike. In this case, the place is Zambia just as a major cache of emeralds has been unearthed. Branson, the gem buyer for a small London firm, manages to purchase a king's ransom in rough emerald crystals, but to hold on to them and get them out of the country, Branson must navigate his way through a series of obstacles including greedy politicians, sadistic military men and a grasping Indian gem dealer .
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Illuminations
by Eva Hoffman
The award-winning Hoffman, former senior editor at the New York Times and the author of several highly regarded works of nonfiction (e.g., Exit into History), has now written a compelling novel that charts the inner life of her heroine, Isabel Merton. Isabel is an accomplished pianist, and on one of her many tours abroad, she encounters the mysterious Chechen rebel Anzor. At first, she is drawn to him and feels sympathy for his cause, and soon enough she enters into an affair with him. They meet clandestinely in various European cities, but as she comes to learn more about his mysterious undertakings and witnesses at close range the havoc they can create, she comes to question her own values and her fragmented, unsettled way of life. Interspersed throughout the narrative are flashbacks to Isabel's earlier life, which appear in a journal she is reading, kept by her former music teacher in Berlin. Hoffman reveals here an impressive command both of classical music and of world affairs. Literate readers with a taste for the international will especially enjoy this highly intelligent work.Edward Cone, New York Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Knife Song Korea
by Richard Selzer
A tumultuous year in the life of a young surgeon during the Korean War.
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Matterhorn
by Karl Marlantes
Young Marine lieutenant and platoon commander Waino Mellas and his battalion learn about life, loss, and the horrors of war during their thirteen-month tour in the sweltering mountains of South Vietnam.
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The Book of Fathers
by Miklos Vamos
When in 1705 Kornell Csillag's grandfather returns destitute to his native Hungary from exile, he happens across a gold fob-watch gleaming in the mud. The shipwrecked fortunes of the Csillag family suddenly take a new and marvelous turn. The golden watch brings an unexpected gift to the future generations of firstborn sons: clairvoyance. Passed down from father to son, this gift offers the ability to look into the future or back into history–for some it is considered a blessing, for others a curse. No matter the outcome, each generation records its astonishing, vivid, and revelatory visions into a battered journal that becomes known as The Book of Fathers. For three hundred years the Csillag family line meanders unbroken across Hungary's rivers and vineyards, through a land overrun by wolves and bandits, scarred by plague and massacre, and brutalized by despots. Impetuous, tenderhearted, and shrewd, the Csillags give birth to scholars and gamblers, artists and entrepreneurs. Led astray by unruly passions, they marry frigid French noblewomen and thieving alehouse whores. They change their name and their religion, and change them back. They wander from home but always return, and through it all The Book of Fathers bears witness to holocaust and wedding feast alike.
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Expecting Goodness & Other Stories
by C. Michael Curtis
When renowned fiction editor C. Michael Curtis moved from Boston to a small college town to accept a distinguished chair in the English Department, he assumed he'd be far from a literary center. But Curtis, long-time fiction editor of The Atlantic magazine and self-professed "habitual anthologist," found himself in a pocket of extraordinary writers in Spartanburg, South Carolina, home of the Hub City Writers Project. The venerable literary editor's exploration of his new city has led to the publication of Expecting Goodness, a collection of twenty Southern short stories by both established and up-and-coming authors who remarkably share the same hometown.
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Once the Shore
by Paul Yoon
Ethereal stories set on a South Korean island introduce a haunting new voice in international fiction.
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How the Indians Buried Their Dead
by Hilary Masters
The fourteen stories in Masters’s third collection are set in New England, upstate New York, and various European locales. They range from a late-blooming romance between two shoeshine booth operators to uninvited mourners crashing the funerals of people they don’t know, from a felon-turned-chef watching his son sample his savory meatloaf to a dual tale involving two unlikely murderers.
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Stonewiser
by Dora Machado
Banished and on the run, Sariah must find a way to carry out the stone's mystifying legacy. As the war excalates and the rot destroys the land, she must act before the executioners ruin her kin, her enemies slaughter her lover, and the mysterious bracelet she has been forced to wear kills her.
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Thank You, Death Robot
by Mark R. Brand
If you run, it will catch you. If you hide, it will find you. If you resist, it will destroy you. A jaded ex-wife prepares a deadly surprise for her husband's new bride, a robotic executioner discovers there's more to lethal injection than just needles, an army of war machines not interested in polite conversation has humanity in its gun-sights, an aging actor treads the line between man and machine, and from beyond come the towering steel shadows of monsters that blot out the starlight. It is estimated that within our generation's lifetime a computer will be built that can exceed the raw computational power of the human mind. Shortly thereafter, a computer will be built that can "think" faster than the human race... From the earliest stories of Golems and clockwork men in the 19th century to Hollywood films full of steel-skinned mechanical killing machines, authors and filmmakers for the last two hundred years have given birth to an emerging archetype: a manifestation of industrial malevolence, a cautionary tale of technological hubris, and a call to reassert the tenuous hold modern man has over the machines that do his bidding. An enduring icon much beloved of science fiction fans everywhere, the Death Robot comes to life in this collection of stories by some of the brightest upcoming stars in speculative fiction.
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The Wheel of Nuldoid
by Russ Woody
When a student in Warren Worst's sixth-grade class is kidnapped by two creatures and taken deep into the earth, Warren and his neighbor Lily follow them. Their quest ends in a spherical city in the center of Earth called Nuldoid. There, they see the giant Wheel and learn its secret.
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The Sword of Medina
by Sherry Jones
Before dying, Muhammad leaves his jeweled sword to A'isha, telling her to use it in the jihad to come. But what if the jihad is against her own people? This climactic sequel to "The Jewel of Medina" returns to 7th-century Arabia to discover whether, after fighting a civil war, a people can ever truly heal.
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The Afflicted Girls
by Suzy Witten
Witten presents a startling new theory of the Salem Village witch-hunts, which is certain to put this 300-year-old unsettled mystery to rest. Part parable, part star-crossed romance, and part supernatural venture, this is an intuitive human--and inhuman--history spun with a modern twist.
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The Factory Voice
by Jeanette Lynes
Wrapped around the stories of these four women, is a mystery. Something''s gone wrong with the Mosquitos being built for the war effort -- they keep crashing in flight tests, for no apparent reason. Is the problem with their design, or are they being sabotaged? By whom? The traitorous Red Finns? The political subversives who have recently escaped from one of the nearby prison camps? Everyone''s on high alert, and "The Factory Voice" keeps abreast of the details. Or at least the rumours.
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Our Promised Land
by Michael Darkow
Two generations of families--one Israeli and one Palestinian--fight for their survival and their own piece of the Promised Land.
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Personal Demons
by Gregory Lamberson
While battling a cocaine addiction, Jake Helman starts a high-pressure position as the director of security at a controversial genetic-engineering company. As Jake delves deeper into this frightening laboratory, he unveils much more than unethical practices performed in the name of human progress. Original.
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The Picture of Contented New Wealth
by Tariq Goddard
In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire Sunset Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound, and complaining of a rare bone disease that no Doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration his secular and agnostic world-view undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills: the Rector, their unlikely saviour. Or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life? The picture of contented new wealth' is a gothic tragedy set in the nineteen eighties, bringing proper characterisation and a literary sensibility to the traditional horror story. Its mix of generic elements and mystical realism deal with the irreducibility of evil and its successful normalisation in to our daily and dominant reality.
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Geometry of God
by Uzma Aslam Khan
Khan (Trespassing, 2004, etc.) fuses the romantic, the spiritual and the political in her story of two sisters in 1980s and '90s Pakistan. The same day that eight-year-old Amal finds an important fossil on a dig with her grandfather Zahoor, her baby sister Mehwish goes blind, supposedly from looking too long at the sun. Zahoor, a professor whose Darwinism is under attack by Islamists, encourages Amal's curiosity, and she becomes a scientist, as well as Mehwish's protector. Their grandfather also encourages Mehwish, who becomes a poet and narrates her sections of the novel in a playful made-up language combining English and Urdu. Six years after Mehwish loses her sight, the girls are noticed at one of Zahoor's lectures by Noman, a young man whose father, a member of Zia's Party of Creation bent on ridding Pakistan of Western science, has sent him to spy on the professor. An angry but dutiful son, Noman has relinquished his mathematical ambitions to write articles in his father's name extolling strict adherence to Sharia, though he himself enjoys liquor and marijuana with nihilist friends. Meeting the enlightened Zahoor changes Noman's life; he is increasingly torn between family loyalty and his intellectual awakening. When Zahoor is arrested, Noman blames himself and breaks with his father, then takes a job teaching math. Meanwhile, Amal, who also blames Noman, becomes a lab assistant (as a woman she is barred from doing actual fieldwork) and eventually agrees to marry longtime sweetheart Omar only if he will allow her independence. Noman, once drawn to Amal, discovers genuine, spiritual love for Mehwish, who slowly responds. As these private lives are about to reach fulfillment, political realities hone in. The consequences are tragic but not insurmountable. The author's take on fundamentalism can be polemic, but the characters, the poetry and the philosophical questions she raises are rendered with a power and beauty that make this novel linger in the mind and heart. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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The Big Wake-up
by Mark Coggins
The critically acclaimed A Corpse in the Koryo brought readers into the enigmatic workings of North Korean intelligence with the introduction of a new kind of detective---the mysterious Inspector O. In the follow-up, Hidden Moon, O threaded his way through the minefield of North Korean ministries into a larger conspiracy he was never supposed to touch. Now the inspector returns . . . In the winter of 1997, trying to stay alive during a famine that has devastated much of North Korea, Inspector O is ordered to play host to an Israeli agent who appears in Pyongyang. When the wife of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan dies under suspicious circumstances, O is told to investigate, with a curious proviso: Don't look too closely at the details, and stay away from the question of missiles. O knows he can't avoid finding out what he is supposed to ignore on a trail that leads him from the dark, chilly rooms of Pyongyang to an abandoned secret facility deep in the countryside, guarded by a lonely general; and from the streets of New York to a bench beneath a horse chestnut tree on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the Inspector discovers he is up to his ears in missiles---and worse. Stalked by the past and wary of the future, O is convinced there is no one he can trust, and no one he can't suspect. Swiss intelligence wants him out of the country; someone else wants him dead. Once again, James Church's spare, lyrical prose guides readers through an unfamiliar landscape of whispered words and shadows, a world wrapped in a level of mystery and complexity that few outsiders have experienced. With Inspector O, noir has a new home in North Korea, and James Church holds the keys.
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Death of a Bronx Cop
by Tom Walker
A fourth-generation New York cop whose great-grandfather was on the force during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863, and author of Fort Apache: New York's Most Violent Precinct, Tom Walker delivers another eye-opening look at the life of being a cop in the Bronx. In this ambitious novel based on events from his family's history, Hugh Ryan, a proud third-generation New York police officer, runs up against the most difficult challenge of his career: battling the institution that has sustained his family for a century, driving him to the brink...
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Pope Annalisa
by Peter Canova
What forces were at work when the unthinkable became reality and an African nun was elected the first female pope? Amid conflicting prophecies of destruction and renewal she came. She is a healer, a miracle worker, a captivator of men’s souls. But when demonic-looking symbols begin appearing around the Vatican upon her arrival, were her enemies correct about her being the prophesied figure that would destroy the church and lead the world order to ruin? As the world nears nuclear holocaust, four people must race against time to learn her secret. As sinister hidden forces from within her own church and terrorism from without rear their heads, one thing becomes crystal clear—Pope Annalisa is at the very center of all the deadly plots within plots in a world where nothing is as it seems. And though it was a miracle for a woman to become pope, it will be a far greater miracle if she survives.
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Offerings
by Christine Sunderland
Jack's haunted by fears of the past. Madeleine holds a powerful secret. And Rachelle is running away. For the last seventeen years, her husband, Jack, and son, Justin, have been Madeleine Seymour's world. Then, during Justin's wedding reception, Jack collapses. Jack needs surgery, and he insists it be performed by the doctor who perfected the procedure. But the doctor isn't reachable, and time is running out. Dr. Rachelle DuPres, plagued by memories of a deadly failure, flees America to search out her roots in her ancestral village in Provence, France. But as she tries to locate the graves of her Catholic uncles and her Jewish parents, will their roles in the Holocaust bring more angst-or the answers she so desperately seeks? A poignant story about choices made along the way...and the miracles of the heart. Set in the breathtaking beauty of France. The second in a trilogy. Don't miss Pilgrimage, the first title in the trilogy (set in Italy): It was a day when nothing should have gone wrong...but everything did.