National Network for Equitable Library Service

It's 1983 in Coachella Valley and Yolanda Ramírez, a lowly phlebotomist at the Palm Springs hospital, has a hunch. Gay men, hemophiliacs, and women scarred by cosmetic surgery are dying. Safe blood, like the water keeping this desert green, is a lie. In the nearby trailer, Isabel Ochoa Dreyfus disappears into a new identity: Marina Lomas. Somewhere in Iowa her businessman husband sits in the dark, staring at his drink, promising never to hit her again, if only he can track her down. Despite herself, Marina finds companionship at Mac and Gil's annual Casa Diva fashion show.

À l'est du mur qui sépare Berlin en deux, elles se sont promis de ne jamais se quitter. Hannah et Judith ont six ans quand elles se rencontrent pour la première fois, leur amitié est de celles qui commencent tôt et ne finissent jamais. Elles vivent une enfance heureuse dans un pays qui ne l'est pas. Mais comment préserver ce qu'elles ont de plus cher quand le père de Judith, cadre zélé de la Stasi, préférerait que sa fille s'éloigne de la petite Hannah et de sa mère très critique à l'égard du Parti ?

In the aftermath of World War II, Kuki Kyuzo, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria, struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyuzo finally makes his way to the waters off Japan but finds himself unable to disembark. His nation remains inaccessible to him, and now he questions its very existence. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "absolute master of 'Western' prose," comes McMurtry's electrifying take on the classic tale of Billy the Kid, the teenage outlaw of the American Old West. The first time I saw Billy, he came walking out of a cloud... Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most legendary outlaw. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth.

'She has a talent amounting to genius' John Updike. Don Juan, that notorious libertine, has disappeared. Has he been dragged down to hell by demons, as rumoured - or has he escaped? Doña Ana, the woman he tried to seduce, will stop at nothing to discover the truth. Set in a rural eighteenth-century Spain rife with suspicion and cruelty, and featuring a glorious cast of peasants, aristocrats and vengeful ghosts, this moving, surprising tragicomedy is also Sylvia Townsend Warner's response to the dark days of the Spanish Civil War.

A Treasonable Growth was Ronald Blythe's first book and only novel. Set in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, shortly before the Second World War, Blythe described it as his "Forsterian novel" and even admitted to walking with E. M. Forster while working on it, though he never mentioned it to him. Freda Bellingham, founder of Copdock School, ensnares the unsuspecting Richard Brand to save her failing foundation. At twenty-four, Richard is a perilous mix of gauche, good, and uncommitted, quickly finding himself drawn into the tangled world of Copdock School.

A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.

The Navigator of New York is set against the background of the tumultuous rivalry between Lieutenant Peary and Dr. Cook to get to the North Pole at the beginning of the 20th century. It is also the story of a young man's quest for his origins, from St. John's, Newfoundland, to the bustling streets of New York, and the remotest regions of the Arctic. Wayne Johnston has harnessed the scope, energy and inventiveness of the nineteenth century novel and encapsulated it in the haunting and eloquent voice of his hero.

In The Discovery of Slowness, German novelist Sten Nadolny recounts the life of the nineteenth-century British explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847). The reader follows Franklin's development from awkward schoolboy and ridiculed teenager to expedition leader, governor of Tasmania, and icon of adventure. Everyone with whom he came into contact sensed that he was a rare man, one who was “out of his time” and who moved to a different, grander beat. That beat eventually led Franklin to sail once more—on his final, fateful voyage—into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston's breakthrough novel based on the life of Newfoundland's first premier, Joe Smallwood, was published internationally and earned him nominations for the highest fiction prizes in Canada. One of the most highly praised elements of the novel is the character Sheilagh Fielding, with whom Smallwood shares a lifelong love-hate relationship. The Custodian of Paradise is a riveting narrative with Fielding at its heart.