Some Bloody Good Stories

Shantaram

By Gregory David Roberts

The story of a man who escapes from a maximum security facility in Australia and arrives in Bombay, crossroads of the underworld, where he works in an aid station and smuggles drugs and guns.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

By Lisa See

A language kept a secret for a thousand years forms the backdrop for an unforgettable novel of two Chinese women whose friendship and love sustains them through their lives.

In 'A Salty Piece of Land', Jimmy Buffett weaves a mesmerising tale that combines humour and emotional reflection. After all, one man's cathedral is another man's fishing hole. And in Jimmy Buffett's world, paradise is just a state of mind.

None

By None

None

By None

None

By None

None

By None

None

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.

Snow

By Orhan Pamuk

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize winner. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else.

Runaway

By Alice Munro

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 This acclaimed, bestselling collection also contains the celebrated stories that inspired the Pedro Almodóvar film Julieta. Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

The Divide

By Nicholas Evans

A devastating journey of discovery that extends from the streets of New York to the daunting grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. A family fractured by betrayal and struggling in search of lost happiness.

The English Teacher

By Lily King

A single mother has sheltered her son for many years at the private school where she works as an English teacher, but she is beginning to unravel as secrets from her past catch up with her.

Vita

By Melania G. Mazzucco

After arriving at Ellis Island, two poor children from Southern Italy, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, struggle to survive in New York City amid the poverty, opportunity, and crime of Little Italy.

The Undomestic Goddess

By Sophie Kinsella

Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting goes into utter meltdown and walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, Samantha soon finds herself hired as a housekeeper.

Ordinary Wolves

By Seth Kantner

Cutuk Hawcly, a white boy living among the natives of the Alaskan Tundra is torn between the culture of the modern cities where his father comes from and the Alaskan wilderness where he was born and raised.