Eve Brown, college diploma in hand and notions of saving the world in her head, was unsure about what to do with the rest of her life. Something noble…yet glamorous, she hoped. With some ambivalence she looked into joining the Peace Corps. When she fell for her dashing and altruistic Peace Corps recruiter, John, all the ambivalence disappeared. She absolutely had to join the Peace Corps, if for no other reason than to win John’s heart. Off to Ecuador she went—and after a year in the jungle, back to the States she ran, vowing to stay within easy reach of a decaf cappuccino for the rest of her life.
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At age twelve, Mende Nazer lost her childhood. It began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, setting fire to the village huts and murdering the adults. The raiders rounded up thirty-one young children, including Mende, who was eventually sold to a wealthy Arab family in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. So began Mende’s seven dark years of enslavement. Normally, Mende’s story never would have come to light, but when she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in London—she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Published to critical acclaim for the honesty and clarity of its prose,
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From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II.
Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its entirety – teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when “peace” was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the novel is Silvio,
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Nicole Mones transports readers to the fascinating world of elite cuisine in modern China with the story of an American food writer traveling in Beijing. Recently widowed Maggie MacElroy is unexpectedly called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate. Shocked that he may have led a secret life, she immerses herself in work as a palliative. She is sent to profile Sam, a Chinese-American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the Imperial Palace. As he prepares an elaborate banquet as his audition for the Cultural Olympics, Maggie learns to appreciate the beauty and balance,
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Trespass is an ambitious intellectual thriller about a comfortable, cultivated American family forced into sudden proximity with the discomfiting, the lawless, and the wild—particularly the wildness of history.
Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire,
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The author of the Tony Award winner The History Boys, Alan Bennett is one of Britain’s best-loved literary voices. With The Uncommon Reader, he brings us a playful homage to the written word, imagining a world in which literature becomes a subversive bridge between powerbrokers and commoners. By turns cheeky and charming, the novella features the Queen herself as its protagonist. When her yapping corgis lead her to a mobile library, Her Majesty develops a new obsession with reading. She finds herself devouring works by a tantalizing range of authors, from the Brontë sisters to Jean Genet.
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