On the face of it, Claire and William have a perfect marriage and family. They also have an impeccably restored cottage in the country that looks like it belongs in a magazine. It will be in a magazine, in fact: Idyllic Home plans to feature the house in its Christmas issue. But to meet its deadline, it‘s scheduling the photo shoot in two days—in the middle of a heat wave in July. The publicity would help Claire’s growing vintage textile business—and at first William likes the idea of showing off the results of all his renovations. But soon he’s complaining that the photo shoot is disrupting his plans to build a summer house in the garden.
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In this extraordinary story, Tor Baz, the young boy who becomes the Wandering Falcon, moves between the tribes of Pakistan and Afghanistan and their uncertain worlds full of brutality, humanity, deep love, honor, poverty, and grace. The region he travels—the Federally Administered Tribal Area—has become a political quagmire known for terrorism and inaccessibility. Yet in these pages, debut author Jamil Ahmad lyrically and insightfully reveals the people who populate those lands, their tribes and traditions and their older, timeless ways in the face of sometimes ruthless modernity. This story is an essential glimpse into a hidden world, one that has enormous geopolitical significance today and that remains largely a mystery to us.
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Fans of Per Petterson’s other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It’s Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun’s first day of school, he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he’s not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities.
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Forced into early retirement by a spinal condition, Steven Wolf reluctantly left his family and moved to Arizona for its warm winter climate. A lifelong dog lover, the former hard-driving attorney is drawn to a local group that rescues retired racing greyhounds. When Comet, a once-abused cinnamon-striped racer, chooses to “adopt” Wolf, he has no idea that a life-altering relationship has begun—for both of them.
Racers, cruelly treated and exposed only to the track and cage, have no inkling of the most basic skills—walking on tile floors, climbing stairs, even playing with toys or children—so Wolf must show the mistrustful greyhound how to thrive in the real world.
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When photographer Suzanne Paris lands in Walton, Georgia, she’s pretty sure she’s never seen a town so small—or quite so disquieting. It’s a far cry from the life she left behind—and Joe Warner is nothing like any man she’s known in the past. He’s the mayor, in the first place, and in the second…he has six children. Hardly a picture-perfect boyfriend for a woman who’s on the run and can’t stick around. But something about Joe’s slow Southern warmth lights up Suzanne in places that have been cold for far too long—and tempts her to look at life through a whole new lens…
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A luminous novel—funny and moving in equal measure—that shines with the author’s unique talents
Jacob’s Folly is a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book, brimful of sparkling, unexpected characters, that takes on desire, faith, love, acting—and reincarnation.
In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jew, a peddler of knives, saltcellars, and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, he is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can. More than two hundred years later, Jacob is amazed to find himself reincarnated as a fly in the Long Island suburbs of twenty-first-century America,
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