Race the Clock with Some Super Fiction

The Pillars of the Earth

By Ken Follett

"Original hardcover edition published by William Morrow and Company Inc.; previously published in a Plume edition"--T.p. verso.

"The Enchantress of Florence" is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. Vivid, gripping, and profoundly moving, this dazzling book is by one of the world's most important living writers.

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The Story of a Marriage

By Andrew Sean Greer

Pearlie is already coping with her husband's fragile health and her son's polio when a stranger appears offering enough money that she starts to doubt her relationship with her husband.

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The Shadow Year

By Jeffrey Ford

In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness—until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police—while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family—all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable—The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.

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Things I Want My Daughters to Know

By Elizabeth Noble

The bestselling author of "The Reading Group" returns with her most engaging novel yet, about four sisters who find hope and laughter in the wisdom their mother left behind.

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The Senator's Wife

By Sue Miller

Two unconventional women -- Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator -- confront the costs and challenges of love.

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The Cure for Modern Life

By Lisa Tucker

Bestselling author Lisa Tucker's new novel tells the story of three old friends who are forced to confront what they truly believe in when a 10 year-old homeless boy disrupts their carefully organized lives.

Love the One You're With

By Emily Giffin

Believing her marriage to Andy to be perfect in every way, Ellen runs into former flame Leo and wonders why she has been unable to forget him even though they brought out the worst in each other.

World Without End

By Ken Follett

#1 New York Times Bestseller In 1989, Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. World Without End is its equally irresistible sequel—set two hundred years after The Pillars of the Earth and three hundred years after the Kingsbridge prequel, The Evening and the Morning. World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroads of new ideas—about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race—the Black Death. Three years in the writing and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End is a "well-researched, beautifully detailed portrait of the late Middle Ages" (The Washington Post) that once again shows that Ken Follett is a masterful author writing at the top of his craft.

Peace

By Richard Bausch

During the winter of 1944, three soldiers are sent on a reconnaissance mission up a mountain in Italy, near Mount Cassino, led by seventy-year-old Angelo, an Italian of indeterminate loyalty, and are confronted by the terror, confusion, and hardship of their mission, which is enhanced by a life-altering encounter with a sniper, in a story of the human cost of war. 35,000 first printing.

Tangerine Dream

By Ken Douglas

Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.

River of Heaven

By Lee Martin

Boasting the largest collection of treasures in Europe, Dresden's Green Vault is also among the continent's oldest museums, founded in the early eighteenth century. Since its extensive restoration and reopening in 2006, it has attracted more than three million visitors who have come from around the world to admire the splendid architecture and opulent riches on display there. Packed with beautiful full-color illustrations, this magnificent volume highlights a selection of masterpieces from this important collection of Baroque and classical art, including the Golden Coffee Service, the Ivory Frigate, the Dresden Green Diamond, the Royal Household of the Grand Mogul, and many other fascinating objects made of gold, silver, gemstones, and other precious materials. For those with an interest in the Baroque or classical periods--or those who simply enjoy exceptional works of art--this book will be a great pleasure.

The Soul Thief

By Charles Baxter

A graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with the people around him--alluring but elusive Theresa, fickle Jamie, and Jerome Coolberg, an enigmatic figure who seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past.

The Philosopher's Apprentice

By James Morrow

A philosopher-tutor is given the opportunity to impress ethical ideas on a first-class mind that is, in matters of morality, a blank slate.

Off Season

By Anne Rivers Siddons

"Anne Rivers Siddons tells the beautiful, tragic, and redemptive story of a woman who searches for meaning after her husband dies"--Provided by publisher.

The Outlander

By Gil Adamson

In 1903 a mysterious young woman flees alone across the West, one heart-pounding step ahead of the law. At nineteen, Mary Boulton has just become a widow—and her husband's killer. As bloodhounds track her frantic race toward the mountains, she is tormented by mad visions and by the knowledge that her two ruthless brothers-in-law are in pursuit, determined to avenge their younger brother's death. Responding to little more than the primitive fight for life, the widow retreats ever deeper into the wilderness—and into the wilds of her own mind—encountering an unforgettable cast of eccentrics along the way. With the stunning prose and captivating mood of great works like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or early Cormac McCarthy, Gil Adamson's intoxicating debut novel weds a brilliant literary style to the gripping tale of one woman's desperate escape.

His Illegal Self

By Peter Carey

Brought up in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, Che, a precocious seven-year-old boy, yearns for his parents, radical activists wanted by the FBI, until a woman claiming to be his mother arrives to help him escape.

Chez Moi

By Agnes Desarthe

At forty-three, Myriam has been a wife, mother, and lover—but never a restauranteur. When she opens Chez Moi in a quiet neighborhood in Paris, she has no idea how to run a business, but armed only with her love of cooking, she is determined to try. Barely able to pay the rent, Myriam secretly sleeps in the dining room and bathes in the kitchen sink, while struggling to come to terms with the painful memories of her past. But soon enough her delectable cuisine brings her many neighbors to Chez Moi, and Myriam finds that she may get a second chance at life and love. Redolent with the sights, smells, and tastes of Paris, Chez Moi is a charming story that will appeal to the many readers who fell in love with Joanne Harris’s Chocolat and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.