Now in paperback, Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this ’90s-set horror novel about a women’s book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town, perfect for murderinos and fans of Stephen King.
Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime.
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The agonizingly funny, captivatingly poignant journals of England’s bespotted everyboy.
Adrian Mole’s first love, Pandora, has left him; a neighbor, Mr. Lucas, appears to be seducing his mother (and what does that mean for his father?); the BBC refuses to publish his poetry; and his dog swallowed the tree off the Christmas cake. “Why” indeed.
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Modern existence can be atomizing, isolating. Certainly it is for William G. and Neaera H., the lonely Londoners at the center of Russell Hoban’s prickly yet heartwarming Turtle Diary. William works at a used-book store and lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has stripped him of his home, family, and career. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation “looks the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks … like a man’s woman and hasn’t got a man.” By inexplicable coincidence each is irresistibly drawn to the turtle tank at the London Zoo with a mind “full of turtle thoughts,” wondering how the creatures might be freed.
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There are hundreds of lives sown inside Pretty Little Mistakes, Heather McElhatton’s singularly spectacular, breathtakingly unique novel that has more than 150 possible endings. You may end up in an opulent mansion or homeless down by the river; happily married with your own corporation or alone and pecked to death by ducks in London; a Zen master in Japan or morbidly obese in a trailer park.
Is it destiny or decision that controls our fate? You can’t change your past and start over from scratch in real life—but in Pretty Little Mistakes,
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The Gnome Stories focuses on characters who are loners in the truest sense; who are in the process of recovering from mental, physical, or emotional trauma; and who find solace—or at least a sense of purpose—in peculiar jobs and pursuits.
A man whose wife has left him is robbed, so he decides to start doing his own breaking and entering, into his neighbors’ homes. When another man’s girlfriend is cryogenically frozen by her family after a car accident, he becomes a maintenance worker at the cryogenic facility, eavesdropping on visitors as they whisper secrets to their frozen loved ones.
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Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry,
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