The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Bessy Buckley, the novel’s heroine, is a cynical, wide-eyed, and tender fifteen-year-old Irish girl who takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh, where all is not as it seems. Asked by her employer, the beautiful Arabella, to keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts, Bessy soon makes a troubling discovery and realizes that she has fled her difficult past only to arrive in an even more disturbing present.
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Thinking largely of escaping a complicated love-life and having fun on the beach, eighteen-year old Cori signs up for a ten-week trip to help build a church on a remote island in Indonesia.
Six weeks into the trip, a conflict that has been simmering for years flames to deadly life on the nearby island of Ambon. Before they can leave, Cori and her teammates find themselves caught up in the destructive wave of violence washing over the Christian and Muslim villages in the area. Within days they are forced to flee into the hazardous refuge of the mountains with only the pastor’s son to guide them.
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In the best-selling tradition of The Color of Water comes a beautifully written, evocative memoir of a relationship between a mother and son—and the Chinese-American experience.
In The Eighth Promise, author William Poy Lee gives us a rare view of the Asian-American experience from a mother-son perspective. His moving and complex story of growing up in the housing projects of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s and ’70s unfolds in two voices—the author’s own and that of his mother—to provide a sense of tradition and culture. It is a stunning tale of murder,
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The feature film “The Fragile Mistress” is based upon Edges. With the release of the film the book has been reissued as The Fragile Mistress, by Hamilton Stone Editions containing about 75 more pages of text and narrative.
Edges is set in a pre-1967 Israel, during the Cold War. Liana Bialik is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father forces her family to return to her mother’s native Jerusalem. A chance meeting with a runaway American diplomat’s son in the forest draws Liana into an odyssey of borders,
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In this suspenseful and elegantly constructed novel, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed reveals the surprising connections among three people—the Bedouin, the orphan, and the eunuch—to tell a provocative tale of modern Saudi society. Combining an arresting immediacy in its realist mode with an aching poetry in its allegorical mode, and confounding stereotypical images of life in Saudi Arabia, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a luminous and haunting novel of pain remembered and hope restored.
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My name is not Omar Nasiri—or at least that is not the name my parents gave me. It is the name I am using to write this book, but it is only one of a long line of names I have used over the course of my life. Or perhaps I should say my lives—as a son, a brother, a student, a gun-runner, a mujahid, a secret agent, a civilian, a husband, and now an author…
Between 1994 and 2000, Omar Nasiri worked as a secret agent for Europe’s top foreign intelligence services. From the netherworld of Islamist cells in Belgium to the training camps of Afghanistan to the radical mosques of London,
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