The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood
The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale.
Adam One, the kindly leader of God’s Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion - has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have been spared: Ren, a young trapeze-dancer, locked inside a high-end sex club; and one of God’s Gardeners, Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived?
By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and witty, The Year of the Flood unfolds Toby’s and Ren’s stories during the years prior to their meeting again. The novel not only brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.
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Galore
Michael Crummey
Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us. This is Michael Crummey’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.
An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the people of Paradise Deep persist in a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish.
Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Sellers and Devine families through generations, Galore is alive with singular characters, and an uncommon insight into the complexities of human nature. |
Her Fearful Symmetry
Audrey Niffenegger
Another brilliant, original and moving novel from 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 ...
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Under the Dome
Stephen King
On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when - or if - it will go away.
Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens - town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing - even murder - to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out. |
Border Songs
Jim Lynch
Brandon Vanderkool’s severe dyslexia and six-foot-eight height give him an unusual perspective on his new job with the American Border Patrol, along the Washington/BC border - just a long, grassy ditch, really, barely dividing neighbours who used to be as congenial as those in any small community. Though his curious mind proves surprisingly adept at intercepting Canadian pot smugglers and potentially dangerous illegals, years of security hysteria and cross-border resentment - and a fascinating young Canadian who has turned her green thumb to a more lucrative crop - complicate Brandon’ s world in ways even he might not be able to see past.
Border Songs is that rare delight: a gently satirical portrait, an extraordinary love story and a celebration of the coincidental and the miraculous. |
Small Wars
Sadie Jones
Sadie Jones, the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of The Outcast, returns with an ambitious, richly imagined novel that confirms her place in the literary firmament.
A passionate and beautifully written tale of personal loss in the midst of war in late 1950s Cyprus, Small Wars raises important questions that are just as relevant today.
What happens when everything a man believes in - the army, his country, his marriage - begins to crumble? Hal Treherne is a young British soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Transferred to Cyprus to defend the colony, Hal takes his wife, Clara, and their daughters with him. But Hal is pulled into atrocities that take him further from Clara, a betrayal that is only one part of a shocking personal crisis to come. Small Wars is a searing, unforgettable novel from a writer at the height of her powers. |
Order in Chaos: Templar Novel #3
Jack Whyte
In the final novel in the Templar Trilogy, William St. Clair faces the end of the Order of the Temple of Solomon. Philip IV has arrested every Templar in France and seized the Order's assets, unleashed the Inquisition, and burned the last Grand Master at the stake. St. Clair escapes into exile in Scotland with the Temple's legendary treasure, and on the island of Arran the surviving Templars train with him in secrecy for a return to France. But St. Clair is growing disillusioned with the old Templar ways, and after taking his men into battle one last time as Temple Knights, he leads the survivors away in search of another legend, the fabled land that lies beyond the Western Ocean. |
The Vintage Caper
Peter Mayle
From Hollywood to Marseille with delicious stops in between, Peter Mayle’s latest novel is filled with the culinary delights and entertaining characters that make him our treasured chronicler of French food and life.
The story begins high above Los Angeles at the impressive wine cellar of lawyer Danny Roth. Unfortunately, after inviting the Los Angeles Times to write an extensive profile extolling the liquid treasures of his collection, Roth finds himself the victim of a world-class wine heist. Enter Sam Levitt, former lawyer and wine connoisseur, who follows leads to Bordeaux and Provence. The unraveling of the ingenious crime is threaded through with Mayle’s seductive rendering of France’s sensory delights - even the most sophisticated of oenophiles will learn a thing or two from this vintage work by a beloved author. |
 My Life as an Experiment
A.J. Jacobs
One man. Ten extraordinary quests.
Bestselling author and human guinea pig A. J. Jacobs puts his life to the test and reports on the surprising and entertaining results. He goes undercover as a woman, lives by George Washington’s moral code, and impersonates a movie star. He practices "radical honesty," brushes his teeth with the world’s most rational toothpaste, and outsources every part of his life to India - including reading bedtime stories to his kids.
Filled with humor and wisdom, My Life as an Experiment will immerse you in eye-opening situations and change the way you think about the big issues of our time - from love and work to national politics and breakfast cereal. |
 Defector
Daniel Silva
Six months after the dramatic conclusion of Moscow Rules, Gabriel has returned to the tan hills of Umbria to resume his honeymoon with his new wife, Chiara, and restore a seventeenth-century altarpiece for the Vatican. But his idyllic world is once again thrown into turmoil with shocking news from London. The defector and former Russian intelligence officer Grigori Bulganov, who saved Gabriel's life in Moscow, has vanished without a trace. British intelligence is sure he was a double agent all along, but Gabriel knows better. He also knows he made a promise.
In the days to come, Gabriel and his team of operatives will find themselves in a deadly duel of nerve and wits with one of the world's most ruthless men. |
The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker
The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder - a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought.
What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel. |
Journey to the Edge of the World
Billy Connolly
Comedian Billy Connolly tells us the gripping story of his adventures in some of the most remote parts of the world. In 2008, he set sail on a 10-week journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by way of the North West Passage – a fabled route deep within the Arctic Circle that has thwarted explorers and fortune hunters for centuries. For Cook, Drake, and countless other adventurers, the North West Passage has been an alluring but impossible journey, a trial of unparalleled physical and mental strength, a haunting and fascinating wilderness. Now the Arctic is melting at a rate of 36,000 square miles a year and the journey is finally possible. For the first time, if you’re quick, you can sail freely, if precariously, from Newfoundland right round to Vancouver. By plane, rail, road and boat, along coastlines and across sweeping landscapes that represent the final Northern frontier of the inhabited world for both man and beast, Billy’s adventure will embrace a memorable mix of bizarre encounters. |
A Better Quality of Murder
Ann Granger
Victorian London springs to life in this gripping crime novel. As Inspector Ben Ross of Scotland Yard walks homeward one Saturday night in late October 1867, the fog that swirls around him is like a living beast. By the time it has lifted next morning a women lies murdered in Green Park. Allegra Benedict was the beautiful Italian wife of an art dealer in Piccadilly. But what had she been doing in London that afternoon and why had she been selling her brooch in the Burlington Arcade just hours before her death? As Ben begins his investigation, his wife Lizzie - with the help of their maid Bessie - looks into Allegra’s private life and uncovers more than one reason why someone might want her dead. |
Dead Tomorrow
Peter James
The body of a teenager dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are found. Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive an urgent liver transplant. When the health system threatens to let her down, Lynn, her mother, turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ – but at a price. As Superintendent Roy Grace investigates the recovered bodies, he unearths the trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe. Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter’s life. |
Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, and all Pynchon, "Inherent Vice" spotlights private eye Doc Sportello who occasionally comes out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era, as the free love of the 1960s slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. |
The Gladiator
Simon Scarrow
While centurions Macro and Cato are returning to Rome from a harrowing campaign against the Parthians, their transport ship is almost capsized by a tidal wave. They barely make it to the port of Matala in Crete where they are stunned to find a devastated town. An earthquake has struck the island, destroying its cities and killing thousands. In the chaotic aftermath, large bands of the island’s slaves begin to revolt, and local bandits, taking advantage of the slave rebellion, urge the Cretans to overthrow the Roman administration. With many of the island’s troops either killed or wounded during the earthquake, the governor of the province calls on Macro and Cato for help. Can they move swiftly enough to counter the rebellion before it sweeps the Romans from the island? |
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