Investigating an apparent paranormal incident, reporter Andrew Westley visits Lady Katherine Angier in England’s Peak District, only to learn that she has summoned him there on a pretext. Kate wishes to confirm that Andrew—born Nicholas Julius Borden, before his adoption—is the great-grandson of magician Alfred Borden, whose stage name was “Le Professeur de la Magie.” Tantalizingly, she reveals knowledge of a forgotten childhood meeting, and of the personal and professional feud between Borden and her great-grandfather Rupert Angier, “The Great Danton.”
The rivalry began in 1878, when Borden disrupted a fraudulent séance conducted by Angier and his wife,
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After a classified ad for an abandoned vacation cottage sparks Kate Whouley’s imagination, she becomes determined to attach the tiny building to her three-room house. Town politics and construction mishaps test her resolve, but Kate and her bossy gray cat exercise willful persistence in their single-minded pursuit of a place called home. Sometimes hilarious, often moving, this story of her year-long adventure is a also a meditation on friendship, family, commitment, creativity, and the possibility of making our dreams come true. <264783>
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Lucky Strike is the story of a young widow who is prospecting uranium with her children in Utah in 1954. Zafris’ characters, all mildly desperate, are searching less for ore than for themselves—for redemption, connection, even hope. Jean has sped west with her young children to give her seriously ill son one last adventure and to escape from the weight of too many failed relationships; camp neighbor, Jo, is struggling to endure marriage to a hateful man; and Harry, a salesman, is alienated from his Mormon heritage.
Only Jean’s daughter, Beth, recognizes the epic that is their common search for a thread of ore and riches in the desert Southwest.
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A nonfiction She’s Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and darkly riveting memoir of obsession with food and body image, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer. For anyone who’s ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how they look, for anyone who’s ever knowingly or unconsciously used food to fill a hole in their heart, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss.
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Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of war as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. Finell depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed;
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In Dreaming the Mississippi, Fischer offers a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation by sharing experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope–swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets.
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