In what is certain to be one of the most talked-about fiction debuts of the year, Yasmin Crowther paints a magnificent portrait of betrayal and retribution set against a backdrop of Iran’s tumultuous history, dramatic landscapes, and cultural beauty. The story begins on a blustery day in London, when Maryam Mazar’s dark secrets and troubled past surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara. Burdened by guilt, Maryam leaves her comfortable English home for the remote village in Iran where she was raised and disowned by her father. When Sara decides to follow her, she learns the price that her mother had to pay for her freedom and of the love she left behind.
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Three wounds in a perfectly straight line was the bloody signature that marked victims from every corner of France who had been murdered at regular intervals over the course of thirty years. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, is deeply and personally familiar with the case, and though others were always framed and convicted for these crimes, including his own brother, the Commissaire knows the true identity of the killer—and knows that the murderer died in 1987. All the more disturbing, then, is Adamsberg’s discovery one morning of a fresh murder with exactly the same profile. Stunned into action—and himself a suspect—Adamsberg must confront the mysterious return of an old,
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Showcasing the intensity and perception of a truly gifted writer, this collection of stories by the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter transports us to exotic locations as it follows the lives of those on the fringes of society—a fire-eater, an American and his Korean war bride, a juggler and a trapeze artist, a cleaning woman whose life is interwoven with Marie Curie’s. Each must confront, in dramatically different ways, the barriers of time, place and circumstance in that most universal of human experiences: the quest to discover, and understand,
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Hick is the story of Luli McMullen—feisty, precocious, and out on her own at 13. Luli is running away from Nebraska to Las Vegas, where she plans to escape her disturbing present and even less hopeful future by finding herself a sugar daddy. That Luli finds trouble on the road almost immediately is no surprise. What is a surprise is that regardless of circumstances, Luli refuses to be a victim, even at her tender age. On her perilous journey west, she learns the truth of American rootlessness and discovers both the power and the peril of her own sexual curiosity.
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Young Tessa is diminutive, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Kansas community. When a mysterious, entrancing librarian comes to town, full of fabulous stories, earthy wisdom and potions for the lovelorn, she takes Tessa under her wing, teaching her to read, which opens up for Tessa a whole new world of possibility and hope. But even as she blooms, Tessa’s father begins sexually abusing her. And she learns that her mentor, Mary, carries a dark secret. Tessa runs off, following Mary’s footsteps, to join the circus as a trapeze artist,
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