Susan Clegg and Mrs. Lathrop were next-door neighbors and bosom friends. Their personalities were extremely congenial, and the theoretical relation which the younger woman bore to the elder was a further bond between them. Owing to the death of her mother some twenty years before, Susan had fallen into the position of a helpless and timid young girl whose only key to the problems of life in general had been the advice of her older and wiser neighbor. As a matter of fact Mrs. Lathrop was barely twelve years the senior, but she had married and as a consequence felt and was felt to be immeasurably the more ancient of the two.

A car tumbles through darkness down a snowy ravine...A woman without a name walks out of a dust storm in sub-Saharan Africa...And in the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the Internet, looking for victims...Lives intersect. Worlds collide. And it all begins with a single email: “Dear Sir, I am the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help…”Will Ferguson takes readers deep into the labyrinth of lies that is 419, the world’s most insidious Internet scam.When Laura Curtis, a lonely editor in a cold northern city, discovers that her father has died because of one such swindle, she sets out to track down—and corner—her father’s killer. It is a dangerous game she’s playing, however, and the stakes are higher than she can ever imagine.Woven into Laura’s journey is a mysterious woman from the African Sahel with scars etched into her skin and a young man who finds himself caught up in a web of violence and deceit.And running through it, a dying father’s final words: “You, I love.”From Publishers WeeklyFerguson's African epic, which won Canada's Scotiabank Giller prize in 2012, details the linked lives of four individuals, three African and one Canadian, drawn together by Nigeria's bloody, exploited history. Laura seeks justice for her murdered father; amoral Winston chases wealth at any cost; Nnamdi and Amina seek only honest employment and a chance to raise Amina's child. Greed contends with generosity and vengeance with forgiveness in a world where the bad prosper and acts of charity are harshly punished. Despite the terrible events of the book, the author leaves room for hope of a better tomorrow. White North Americans grappling with the €˜matter of Africa' is an often fraught affair, bright white teeth contrasted with chocolate skin, where tides of causeless violence wash across the hopeless continent and exoticized, sexualized natives exist solely to provide a supporting cast for white protagonists. Ferguson avoids many of the pitfalls of this genre; every terrible action has a motivation, Nigeria's present calamities have a historical and international context. Most importantly, Winston, Nnamdi and Amina do not exist merely to cast an edifying light on Laura, but, as she belatedly comes to appreciate, have inner lives, goals and ambitions of their own. Ferguson provides a template for novels about Africa other Western authors would do well to contemplate. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Sept.)From BooklistStarred Review According to Ferguson, Nigeria’s Igbo people believe that we each have a pair of souls, and that when we die, one soul leaves and the second attaches to someone else as protector. In 419 (named for the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code forbidding fraud), this belief in linked souls is wrapped with manipulation and revenge in a package nothing short of epic. In Canada, Laura Curtis’ father plunges his car from an embankment, and investigators discover he’s fallen prey to a Nigerian e-mail scam. Laura resolves to get both revenge and remuneration. In Lagos, the enterprising scammer who snared Laura’s father is snatched up by a local crime boss and forced to work for his violent crime syndicate. Amina has fled her northern desert village, seeking safety for her unborn child. Nnamde, a storyteller’s son from Nigeria’s oil-soaked Delta region, has been both oil worker and saboteur, using his sharp wits to avoid being killed by either side. Ferguson draws these characters closer with each page, finally hurling them together in a multilevel game of cunning and manipulation. His Nigeria is alternately mystical and grounded in harsh realities, tragic and hopeful, hard-boiled and soft-spoken. Absolutely worthy of its 2012 Giller Prize, 419 is a gift for both crime- and general-fiction readers, especially fans of Khaled Hosseini, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and John le Carré. --Christine Tran

As one of Britain's foremost poets, Ben Okri brings both poetry and story together, paring writing and image down to their essentials. This significant title story 'The Comic Destiny' forms the centrepiece of this collection, complemented by thirteen magical stokus. In his new introduction Ben Okri describes it as a talisman, an alchemic instigator for much of his later work. The stoku is a blend of story and haiku. And thirteen, according to the author, is the number of liberation. All these stories are about freedom. They flow easily, but burn slowly. And they offer the possibility of freedom beyond the confines of our usual perception. 'Moments of genuine insight and poetry' Guardian. 'Okri's writing has a light-as-air elegance, yet its seriousness keeps the stories gravity bound' New Statesman.

Night Train to Lisbon follows Raimund Gregorius, a 57-year-old Classics scholar, on a journey that takes him across Europe. Abandoning his job and his life and travelling with a dusty old book as his talisman, he heads for Lisbon in search of clues to the life of the book's Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado. As he gets swept up in his quest, he finds that the journey is also one of self-discovery, as he reencounters all the decisions he has made - and not made - in his life, and faces the roads not travelled.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence , featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica - and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind - happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where "The Sixteen Pleasures" - now called "The Italian Lover," - is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other...

Review“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, *The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail*“The Street Sweeper is an impressive literary achievement, complex in its organization, meticulous in its plotting and deeply satisfying in its emotional payoffs.” —The Wall Street Journal “Humane, compelling and convincing . . . artfully structured and well written.” —The Sunday Times“Street Sweeper . . . demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.” —The Telegraph (UK)“Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.” —The Guardian (UK)“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America—and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement.... A moving and literate page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.” —Booklist (starred review)“In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside — subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned — and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next…. [The Street Sweeper is] a towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.” —Entertainment Weekly “A sprawling work, generous in its spirit and in breadth of imagination, unabashed in its liberal humanism.” —The Age“A rich, engaging story of New York. [Perlman is] an author of rare erudition and compassion. The Street Sweeper is his boldest work yet and, quite probably, the one that will win him a greater following.” —The Washington Post“[An] ambitious yet thoughtful novel.” —The Independent (UK) Product DescriptionFrom the civil rights struggle in the United States to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are momentous stories everywhere. But only some survive to become history.Lamont Williams is a black man from the Bronx trying to return to a normal life after serving a six-year prison term for a crime for which he was wrongly convicted. Historian Adam Zignelik is an untenured Columbia professor whose career and long-term relationship are falling apart. When Lamont Williams strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient at the hospital where he works as a janitor, he learns about the Sonderkommando--prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi extermination camps. Meanwhile, Adam pursues a promising research topic suggested by a World War II veteran, a topic that might just save him professionally and even personally. When the lives of these two men intersect, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen.The Street Sweeper is an astonishing feat of storytelling that addresses the personal and the political as it sweeps across the globe, through the seminal events of the twentieth century to the present. Honest, hypnotic and redemptive, this is a novel that explores the responsibility of the historian, the weight of history on all of us, and the crucial role that bearing witness plays in breaking the cycle of human cataclysm.From the Hardcover edition.

National bestselling author Kiki Swinson burns up the page with calculating characters,ingenious plot twists, and a ruthless depiction of Southern conniving, rising—and taking the final hard fall. Now she brings you back to the start of wild-card lawyer Yoshi Lomax's career, where her first elite white-shoe-law job puts an inescapable target on her back . . .No one suspects . . . Never one to play by any rules, Yoshi Lomax is determined to make good at an internship with one of Manhattan's most prestigious law firms. She's being mentored by twin brilliant legal lights—Aron and Noah Jupe—who are her parents' friends. And with her unexpected knack for helping the city's wealthy, powerful clients finagle their way out of major trouble, even she is surprised at how bright her future shines . . . No one will tell . . . Until Yoshi discovers the firm uses any means necessary to get their clients...

“There! That is Umzilikazi’s grave,” said Christian Sybrandt, pointing out a towering pile of rocks some little way off, across the valley. “Is it? Let’s go and have a look at it then,” was the prompt reply. But immediately upon having made it, the second speaker knew that he had spoken like a fool, for the first gave a short laugh.

The Truth About Death," the title novella of this virtuosic collection, is a masterpiece of sardonic humor that confronts Death head on and emerges bloody but unbowed. Simon, an undertaker, embalms his own father and faces his own death. Louisa, Simon's mother, makes peace with her husband over his dead body in a cooler in the basement of the funeral home. Simon contemplates the mystery of death over a plate of spaghetti cacio e pepe in Rome with an Italian undertaker. The dog, Maya—who works as a greeter at the funeral home where she comforts those who are grieving hardest—eventually makes the truth about death known to Elizabeth, Simon's wife. New Yorker cartoons keep the family laughing during the most difficult months, Elizabeth decides to show her own cartoons (included here), to the New Yorker cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, at his office in New York. The serious issues cleverly addressed in The Truth About Death are touched...

Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) is a moving, delicately observed coming-of-age novel––one that brilliantly exemplifies the cultural, social, and creative ferment of the Harlem Renaissance. Its heroine, the young, talented, light-skinned Angela Murray, hopes for more from life than her black Philadelphia neighborhood and her middle-class upbringing seem to offer. Seeking romantic and creative fulfilment, and refusing to accept racist and sexist obstacles to her ambition, she makes a radical choice: to pass as white, and study art in New York City. Against the vivid, cosmopolitan backdrop of Harlem and Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, her subsequent journey through seduction, betrayal, protest, and solidarity is ultimately a journey toward self-understanding. Along the way, Fauset includes fictionalized portraits of leading Harlem Renaissance figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois (for whom she edited The Crisis) and the sculptor Augusta Savage,...