Divine Trade Paperback Fiction
Discover the Divine Trade Paperback Fiction collection—a curated list of captivating novels from acclaimed authors like Steve Martin, Henning Mankell, and Anita Shreve. Explore compelling stories in *The Pleasure of My Company*, *The Dogs of Babel*, and *The White Russian*. Perfect for lovers of literary and mystery fiction, these trade paperbacks offer rich storytelling and unforgettable characters—your next great read awaits.
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Dragon Bones
by Lisa See
In a magnificent land where myth mixes treacherously with truth, one woman is in charge of telling them apart. Liu Hulan is the Inspector in China’s Ministry of Public Security whose tough style rousts wrongdoers and rubs her superiors the wrong way. Now her latest case finds her trapped between her country’s distant past and her own recent history. The case starts at a rally for a controversial cult that ends suddenly in bloodshed, and leads to the apparent murder of an American archaeologist, which officials want to keep quiet. And haunting Hulan’s investigation is the possible theft of ancient dragon bones that might alter the history of civilization itself. Getting to the bottom of ever-spiraling events, Hulan unearths more scandals, confronts more murderers, and revives tragic memories that shake her tormented marriage to its core. In the end, she solves a mystery as big, unruly, and complex as China itself. Praise for Dragon Bones “Stays with you long after the conventional thriller is forgotten.”—The Washington Post Book World “Lisa See is one of the classier practitioners of . . . the international thriller. . . . She draws her characters . . . with convincing depth, and offers up documentary social detail that reeks of freshly raked muck. See’s China is as vivid as Upton Sinclair’s Chicago.”—The New York Times Book Review
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Flash House
by Aimee Liu
FLASH HOUSE was published in Warner hardcover in 2/03, and became a "Los Angeles Times bestseller. With its phenomenal characterizations and exotic setting, FLASH HOUSE won raves in publications, including the "Los Angeles Times, Booklist, and a starred review in "Publishers Weekly, among others.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
New York Times Bestseller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
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Three Junes
by Julia Glass
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An astonishing novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.... Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.... Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.
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The Killing of the Tinkers
by Ken Bruen
A man who's given up on life finds life in helping a kindred spirit.
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Ashes
by Kenzō Kitakata
A deciding event in a yakuza mobster's career leaves this gangster reflecting upon his life and the events leading up to this moment.
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Firewall
by Henning Mankell
The latest installment in the bestselling Kurt Wallander series has the taciturn detective confronting the public's increasingly vulnerability in the digitized world.
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Sidetracked
by Henning Mankell
The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander • From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the fifth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. In the award-winning Sidetracked, Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden’s former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles—a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman’s widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
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The Pleasure of My Company
by Steve Martin
Steve Martin's "gifts for subtlety and slyness compare to those of the finest comic novelists" (People) and his latest New York Times bestseller -- a witty and tender tour de force -- is now in paperback! Shopgirl revealed the novelist in Steve Martin -- witty, tender, intelligent, and passionate about his craft. And with the successful publication of The Pleasure of My Company, his reputation as one of our most gifted writers has been confirmed. Here, the reader is introduced to Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose life is full and rich -- but only within the confines of his Santa Monica apartment. Daniel's pathological obsession with street curbs and gas station attendants wearing blue hats may prevent him from venturing into the world outside of his window, but not from pursuing romance in his own peculiar way. Meticulously constructed, laugh-out-loud funny, and brilliantly inventive, Steve Martin's chronicle of a modern-day neurotic yearning to break free has touched more than 200,000 readers. Now in paperback, thousands more can have the pleasure of discovering his most delightful novel to date.
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The Photograph
by Penelope Lively
"One of Britain's most talented and experienced writers. The closer you look the more mystery you see." --The Times (London) A seductive and hugely suspenseful novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively, about what can happen when you look too closely into the past Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many years earlier, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn's work as a historian should have prepared him for unexpected findings and reversals, but he is ill-prepared for this radical shift in perception. His mind fills with questions. Who was the man? Who took the photograph? Where was it taken? When? Had Kath planned for him to find out all along? As Glyn begins to search for answers, he, and those around him, find the certainties of the past and present slip away, and the picture of the beautiful woman they all thought they knew distort. Propelled by the author’s signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best.
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Murder in Belleville
by Cara Black
The second Aimée Leduc investigation set in Paris When Anaïs de Froissart calls Parisian private investigator Aimée begging for help, Aimée assumes the woman wants to hire her to do surveillance on her philandering politician husband again. Aimée is too busy right now to indulge her. But Anaïs insists Aimée must come, that she is in trouble and scared. Aimée tracks Anaïs down just in time to see a car bomb explode, injuring Anaïs and killing the woman she was with. Anaïs can’t explain what Aimée just witnessed. The dead woman, Anaïs says, is Sylvie Coudray, her cheating husband’s long-time mistress, but she has no idea who wanted her dead, and Anaïs officially hires Aimée to investigate. As she digs into Sylvie Coudray’s murky past, Aimée finds that the dead woman may not be who Anaïs thought she was. Her Belleville neighborhood, full of North African immigrants, may be hiding clues to Sylvie’s identity. As a prominent Algerian rights activist stages a hunger protest against new immigration laws, Aimée begins to wonder whether Sylvie’s death was an act of terrorism, and who else may be at risk.
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Murder in the Sentier
by Cara Black
The third Aimée Leduc Investigation set in Paris When Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc picks up the phone one hot July afternoon, the call turns her life upside-down. The voice on the other end, with its heavy German accent, belongs to a woman named Jutta Hald. Jutta claims to have shared a jail cell with Aimée’s long-lost mother, a suspected terrorist on Interpol’s most wanted list. If Aimée wants to learn the truth about her mother, she is to meet Jutta at a rendezvous point in an ancient tower in the Sentier. But when Aimée arrives, Jutta is dead, shot in the head at close range. Aimée realizes she has stumbled into something bigger than Jutta let on, and that her own life is in danger. She has a lot of unsolved mysteries in front of her: Jutta Hald’s murder, resurfaced materials from Sydney Leduc’s terrorist activities in the 1970s, police suppression of important information. The question is, can Aimée put the pieces together before someone else ends up dead?
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Shooting Elvis
by Robert M. Eversz
In California a woman photographer is conned by her handsome Harley-riding boyfriend to deliver a package to Los Angeles airport. When the package explodes--she was set up--the lady decides to bring the terrorists to justice. A pop noir novel by the author of False Profit.
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Oracle Night
by Paul Auster
Recovering from a near-fatal illness, Sidney Orr, a thirty-four-year-old novelist, purchases a mysterious blue notebook from a Brooklyn stationery shop and is drawn into a bizarre world of eerie premonitions and baffling events.
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The Dogs of Babel
by Carolyn Parkhurst
In Paul's fantastic and even perilous search for the truth about his wife's death, he abandons his everyday life to embark on a series of experiments designed to teach his dog Lorelei to communicate. Could she really give him the answers he is looking for?
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
This official Penguin movie tie-in is the companion book to the major motion picture from Focus Features, releasing in September and starring Reese Witherspoon.
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The Effect of Living Backwards
by Heidi Julavits
Following her acclaimed debut, The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling novel about two sisters, a bizarre event, and the elusive nature of truth—a New York Times Notable Book. Does Alice really hate her sister, or is that love? Was she really enrolled in grad school, or was that an elaborate hoax? Is this really a hijacking, or is it merely the effect of living backwards? “Heidi Julavits—no stranger to edgy, dark topics—takes liberties with conventional notions of hijacking and hostages, weaving humor in a zingy and brainy spectrum...If you can take successive shots of wit with gulps of moral inquisition, then this fine book is for you.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Sea Glass
by Anita Shreve
With all the narrative power and emotional immediacy that have made her novels acclaimed international bestsellers, Anita Shreve unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times-the story of a pair of young newlyweds who, setting out to build a life together in a derelict beach house on the Atlantic coast, soon discover how threatening the world outside their front door can be.
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The Passion of Artemisia
by Susan Vreeland
"Susan Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue.... The Passion of Artemisia is even better.... Vreeland's unsentimental prose turns the factual Artemisia into a fictional heroine you won't soon forget." —People A true-to-life novel of one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era against great struggle. Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist. Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples, inhabited by historical characters such as Galileo and Cosimo de' Medici II, and filled with rich details about life as a seventeenth-century painter, Vreeland creates an inspiring story about one woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile career and family, passion and genius.
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The White Russian
by Tom Bradby
January 1917—With St. Petersburg on the brink of revolution, Sandro Ruzsky, the city’s chief police investigator, returns from exile in Siberia only to be assigned a grisly case: the bodies of a young couple found on the ice of the frozen River Neva, just outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace. Ruzsky’s investigation leads him dangerously close to the royal family and to the woman he loves, and he finds himself confronting both a ruthless killer and the ghosts of his past as he fights desperately to save all that he cares for. With meticulous research and narrative skill Tom Bradby brilliantly re-creates the gilded salons and squalid tenements of St. Petersburg in the last days of the tsars. Evocative and thrilling, The White Russian is a tumultuous story of murder and betrayal in a city at the crossroads of history.
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The Company
by Robert Littell
A novel of Cold War espionage traces the struggles of two generations of CIA operatives fighting Communism and battling one another in the complex world of international intrigue.