Three tribes are at war on the planet Gan, unaware that the sign of Christ’s birth on an unknown world - Earth - is about to appear in the heavens. During a bloody skirmish with Gideonite troops, Jonathan of Daniel spares Pekah, a young enemy soldier. His merciful act results in a chain of events that saves the life of his betrothed, ends the war, and gives birth to a national hero.

Since the death of their parents, Triona Pryor and her brother, Ben, have lived with their aunt and uncle in Camden, Maine. Now in her senior year of high school, Triona loves her family and friends, but she has always felt that she didn’t quite fit in...in Camden, or anywhere else. Enter Caleb Wallace, the devilishly handsome man who has recently moved to Triona’s small town. While their attraction to each other is instantaneous, it also proves to be dangerous...and deadly. When tragedy strikes, Triona flees to London for solace and to start her life anew. It’s there she discovers from an unlikely source that her family has been keeping secrets from her – secrets about not only her birthright, but her ultimate destiny as well. Armed with this knowledge, Triona finds herself thrown into a whole new world and into a battle to save the lives of everyone she loves.

Burke is one of the most cold-blooded yet strangely honorable heroes in the history of crime fiction, an outlaw who makes his living by preying on the most vicious of New York City’s bottom-feeders, those who thrive on the suffering of children.             In Andrew Vachss’s tautly engrossing novel Burke is given a purse full of dirty money to find the infamous Ghost Van that is cutting a lethal swath among the teenage prostitutes in the ‘hood.  He also gets help in the form of a stripper named Belle, whose moves on the runway are outclassed only by what she can do in a getaway car.  But not even.  Burke is prepared for the evil that is behind the Ghost Van or for the sheer menace of its guardian, a cadaverous karate expert who enjoys killing so much that he has named himself after death.

His Last Fire is historical fiction with a contemporary feel, meticulously researched, bursting with a rich and arcane vocabulary, and written in an engaging present. A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gem-like stories that are a riot through the revolutionary alehouses, printshops, and pleasure-houses of late-18th-century London. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolor on the White Tower; the famous comic actor with his self- destructive craving for eel pies; and the laborer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador.

Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of "normal.”**

From the bestselling author of Latitudes of Melt and An Audience of Chairs: utterly engrossing, unsettling and beautifully written, The Birthday Lunch is the story of one pivotal week in the life of a family facing a tragic loss. Hal McNab made love to his wife for the last time the morning of the day she was killed. Joan Clark's riveting new novel opens as Lily McNab wakes up on her 58th birthday, June 30, 1981, in the quiet, picturesque town of Sussex, New Brunswick. Free-spirited Lily has always played the peacemaker between her fierce, doting sister, Laverne, and her loving, garrulous husband, Hal, as they competed for her attention, and the competition has only gotten worse since they all moved into the same big house. Today Laverne feels she's beaten Hal out for Lily's company at a birthday lunch, but it's a bittersweet and short-lived victory. When the sisters stop for celebratory ice cream cones at the town's famous...

Romance. 25219 words long. First published in 2009, 2009

Gay romance is coming into full bloom in the wake of the Defense of Marriage Act's fall, and the literary world is giving this full expression. New series editor Felice Picano is one of the top gay writers in the world with many awards and much critical acclaim to his credit. Picano has written novels, plays, and major nonfiction works and he is at his finest when it comes to the subject of love. In Best Gay Romance 2015, he gathers a sweepingly romantic collection of short fiction that is long on love (and sex).

After an elemental apocalypse, the fate of Earth hangs in the balance. While struggling to survive, Kaitlyn battles a side of her that is as dark as the rest of the planet. In the exciting conclusion to The Akasha Series, our heroine is no longer a part of The Seven or One Less. Now she is on Team Kaitlyn; who will join her?