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The Bean Trees
Taylor Greer grew up poor in Kentucky in the '60s and '70s, managed to avoid pregnancy through high school, and earned enough money to buy a Volkswagen that would take her west. Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places. Available for the first time in mass-market, this edition of Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling novel, "The Bean Trees," will be in stores everywhere in September. With two different but equally handsome covers, this book is a fine addition to your Kingsolver library.
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Winters* Tales: Stories And Observations For The U
The most original and influential comic mind of our generation gives us a rollicking tour of his expansive imagination. Alongside the hilarity are intimate, revealing, and poignant recollections of childhood's pains and lost love, as well as remarkable illustrations from Winters' accomplished, surreal pen. Line drawings.
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House of Sand and Fog
In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to resotre his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice. Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.
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Olympiad: An Historical Novel
This historical novel takes as its basis the fact that 2776 years ago a group of men ran between two piles of stones, and invented history. If, that is, history can be believed. All we know now is the name of the man who won the race in the first ever Olympic Games in 776 BC.
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Ice Road
Leningrad. 1933. Loyalties, beliefs, love and family ties: all are about to be tested to the limit in a fight to see who will survive one of the most crushing moments the world will ever know. Boris Ivanov, the father who understands politics and pragmatism; his daughter Natasha, a carefree, delightful girl who will be almost crushed because of political compromises; Anton, Boris's oldest friend, who in an uncharacteristic moment saves a skinny little orphan he finds on the Moscow train; Anna, that tough intriguing child. And watching it all is the marvellous Irina. Wry, wise, ironic, Irina understands that simple loyalty to an individual may well be more powerful than blind loyalty to an idea.
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Evening
With two novels and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim ("Monkeys takes your breath away," said Anne Tyler; "heartbreaking, exhilarating," raved the New York Times Book Review), Susan Minot has emerged as one of the most gifted writers in America, praised for her ability to strike at powerful emotional truths in language that is sensual and commanding, mesmerizing in its vitality and intelligence. Now, with Evening, she gives us her most ambitious novel, a work of surpassing beauty. During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was twenty-five. Forty years later--after three marriages and five children--Ann Lord finds herself in the dim claustrophobia of illness, careening between lucidity and delirium and only vaguely conscious of the friends and family parading by her bedside, when the memory of that weekend returns to her with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream. Evening unfolds in the rushlight of that memory, as Ann relives those three vivid days on the New England coast, with motorboats buzzing and bands playing in the night, and the devastating tragedy that followed a spectacular wedding. Here, in the surge of hope and possibility that coursed through her at twenty-five--in a singular time of complete surrender--Ann discovers the highest point of her life. Superbly written and miraculously uplifting, Evening is a stirring exploration of time and memory, of love's transcendence and of its failure to transcend--a rich testament to the depths of grief and passion, and a stunning achievement.
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A Map Of The World
en /Hemingway Award-winning novelist Jane Hamilton follows up her first success, The Book Of Ruth, with this spectacularly haunting drama about a rural American family and a disastrous event that forever changes their lives.
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Ombria In Shadow
The Prince of Ombria is dying, and already his sinister great-aunt is plotting to seize power. The city folk know her reign would be a terrible one. Ombria, it seems, is doomed and yet beneath the streets, a mysterious sorceress is weaving new spells, watched over by a girl sculpted entirely from wax.
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One Day as a Tiger
Martin Hawkins, a brilliant young historian, turns his back on his academic career and returns home to the family sheep farm. It is here that Missy, a sheep that has been "improved" with the introduction of human genes, begins to make a significant impact on his imagination