Before she met Il-sun in an orphanage, Gi was a hollow husk of a girl, broken from growing up in one of North Korea’s forced-labor camps. A mathematical genius, she has learned to cope with pain by retreating into a realm of numbers and calculations, an escape from both the past and present. Gi becomes enamored of the brash and radiant Il-sun, a friend she describes as “all woman and springtime.” But Il-sun’s pursuit of a better life imperils both girls when her suitor spirits them across the Demilitarized Zone and sells them as sex workers, first in South Korea and then in the United States.
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In this “witty, heartfelt story of hope, forgiveness, and redemption,” (Booklist) celebrated musician, actor, and activist Steve Earle shows that his talents are truly far-ranging and adds a “richly imagined” (Kirkus Review) novel to his list of achievements.
Rumored to have given Hank Williams the final morphine dose that killed him, Doc Ebersole lives with the famed singer’s ghost—and not just in the figurative sense. In 1963, ten years after Hank’s death, Doc has fallen to performing abortions and patching up the odd knife wound to feed his own addiction.
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A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.
His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany,
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Reality TV—Jane Austen Style
Meet the Harcourts of Chevy Chase, Maryland. A respectable middle-class, middle-age, mixed-race couple, Harold and Forsythia have four eminently marriageable daughters—or so their mother believes. Forsythia named her girls after Windsor royals in the hopes that one day each would find her true prince. But princes are far from the mind of their second-born daughter, Elizabeth (AKA Bliss), who, in the aftermath of a messy divorce, has moved back home and thrown herself into earning her PhD. All that changes when a Bachelorette-style reality television show called
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When Maxon met Sunny he was seven years, four months and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in one another: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son.
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What the best cure for post-partum depression? After years of barely moving, Kate springs back to life when the mothers-youlove- to-hate in her daughter’s preschool begin to turn up dead. Murder as a cure for sadness? Sounds evil, but it’s not. In Perfect Is Overrated, stand-up comedian and author of Following Polly Karen Bergreen presents a lovable heroine who is so at sea she’s still not sure whether what she suffers has to do with the birth of her little girl or with the fact that her handsome hunk of a detective husband doesn’t live with her anymore.
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