Her Fearful Symmetry
Audrey Niffenegger
The much-anticipated new novel by the author of The Time Traveler's Wife. Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers - normal, at least, for identical "mirror" twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn't know existed has died and left them her amazing flat in a building by Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin ... but they have no idea that they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the OCD-suffering crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt's mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the mother of the girls - her own twin - and who can't even seem to quite leave her flat...
hardcover on sale for $27.96
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Last Night in Twisted River
John Irving
From the author of A Widow for One Year, A Prayer for Owen Meany and other acclaimed novels, comes a story of a father and a son - fugitives in 20th-century North America.
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the boy and his father become fugitives, pursued by the constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as a world "where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course." From the novel's taut opening sentence to its elegiac final chapter, what distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice, the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.
hardcover on sale for $27.96
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Superfreakonomics
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
New York Times bestselling authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with more iconoclastic insight and observations in this long-awaited follow-up to their blockbuster Freakonomics.
In 2005, Freakonomics exploded in the culture, forever changing our understanding of how the world works, how we really make decisions—even how we name our children. This revolutionary book spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than 3 million hardcover copies, single-handedly spawned a new genre of books, and led to a column in the New York Times Magazine and a blog on the New York Times website. Now, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and award-winning writer Stephen J. Dubner return with this all-new book that is bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again.
hardcover on sale for $29.59
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Queen Elizabeth: The Official Biography of the Queen Mother
William Shawcross
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, was born on August 4, 1900. It might reasonably have been expected that she would lead a life of ease and privilege, but few could have imagined the profound effect she would have on Britain and its people. Her life spanned the whole of the 20th century, and this official biography tells not only her story but, through it, that of the country she loved so devotedly.
Drawing on her private correspondence and other unpublished material from the Royal Archives, William Shawcross vividly reveals the witty girl who endeared herself to soldiers convalescing at Glamis in the First World War; the assured young Duchess of York; the Queen, at last feeling able to look the east end in the face at the height of the Blitz; and, finally, the Queen Mother, representing the nation at home and abroad throughout her widowhood. It is the definitive portrait of a remarkable woman.
hardcover $39.99
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The Greatest Show on Earth
Richard Dawkins
The author of The God Delusion presents a stunning counterattack on advocates of "Intelligent Design," explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationist "argument." Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence: from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics. Combining these elements and many more, he makes the case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection."
hardcover on sale for $31.99
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The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Born in the United States, but raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd grows up in the wild world of his flapper mother and her rich boyfriends. He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.
With her first novel in nine years, Kingsolver shows that she has lost none of her ability to create a rich tale full of dramatic power.
hardcover on sale for 27.99
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