With the same dynamic force and careful, clever craft that led to the overwhelming success of his award-winning 2001 novel Atonement, Ian McEwan presents a thrilling and unexpected spy novel that is much more than it seems.
It is 1972, and the Cold War still lingers. Despite her indefatigable love of literature, Serena Frome—the young, beautiful, and independent-minded daughter of an Anglican bishop—has somehow ended up a math student at Cambridge University. She is failing at her studies and bored with her life, until a brief and tragic affair with a university professor leads to her recruitment by the British secret service.
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As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.
When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue,
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In a sweeping tale that moves forward and backward in time across sixty years in Georgia and Philadelphia, Ayana Mathis’s extraordinary first novel tells the story of an unforgettable family—and an indomitable woman—caught in singular moment in American history.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, hoping for a chance at a better life, flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia with her twin babies. Instead, she watches helplessly as they succumb to an illness that a few pennies might have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave,
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Chicky Ryan loves the small Irish seaside town of Stoneybridge where she grew up. She’s happy living at home, working at the local factory, and walking along the wild Atlantic coast. Then one day Walter Starr, an attractive American tourist, sweeps her off her feet. Surprising herself, and in spite of her family’s dire warnings, she returns to New York with him. To placate her family, she writes of her wonderful life with Walter, even making up a story about their quiet wedding ceremony. But her fantasy is cut short when Walter announces he is moving on. Left on her own,
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In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape–from her husband’s demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different.
Then a new family moves in across the street. Ted and Eva Wilson have three children and a fourth on the way, and their arrival reignites long-buried feelings in Billie. The affair that follows offers a solace Billie has never known,
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A powerful story about an unforgettable friendship between two teenage boys and their hopes for escape from a dead-end town.
The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet, is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive,
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