After attending the funeral of her estranged friend Skip in Knoxville, Tennessee, Vrai (short for Vraiment), a forty-something art history librarian with sons of her own, rescues ten-year-old Jonathan, who has been abandoned with no shoes in the funeral home parking lot. The Blizzard of 1993 strands this unlikely duo at the Smoky View Motel, where, motivated in part by the unsolved murders of Jonathan’s parents, they begin to uncover the truth about Skip’s death. With elements of mystery and intrigue, True Stories at the Smoky View is a literary novel about family, friendship, tyranny, and the elusiveness of justice.
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At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd–whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself–Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief,
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In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away, her son even farther, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in empty houses, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. But maybe that could change? As Addie and Louis come to know each other better—their pleasures and their difficulties—a beautiful story of second chances unfolds,
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For three girls in the tiny town of London, Vermont, the summer of 1989 will change their lives forever. Piper and her little sister, Margot, are best friends with Amy, whose family owns the once-spectacular Tower Motel. Now a dilapidated relic, it’s still a paradise for the girls, packed with mysterious treasures from the motel’s heyday that make their imaginations run wild. But one day they make a horrific discovery about Amy’s aunt, who disappeared in the 1960s just after her eighteenth birthday. Everyone said she had run off to Hollywood to live out her dream of becoming Alfred Hitchcock’s next star,
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Kabul—Ten Years After 9/11: After a car explodes in the city, a Japanese-American journalist discovers that its passengers were acquaintances—three fellow expats who had formed an unlikely love triangle—and becomes convinced that a deeper story lies behind the moment of violence. The investigation that follows takes the journalist from Kabul to Louisiana, Maine, Québec, and Dubai, from love to jealousy to hate—and acutely reveals how the lives of individuals overseas have become inseparable from the larger story of America’s imperial misadventures.
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This is a novel about the superstorm that threatens to destroy a marriage, a town and the entire Eastern seaboard. But the destruction begins early, when fear infects people’s lives and spreads like the plague.
Ash and Pia move from hipster Brooklyn to rustic Vermont in search of a more authentic life. But just months after settling in, the forecast of a superstorm disrupts their dream. Fear of an impending disaster splits their tight-knit community and exposes the cracks in their marriage. Where Isole was once a place of old farm families, rednecks and transplants, it now divides into paranoid preppers,
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