NNELS Upgrade

With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the hands of a blackjack dealer, Carol Shields introduces us to two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There's Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man. And right across the street there's Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who has focused a little too intently, having married and divorced three times.

Esi decides to divorce after enduring yet another morning's marital rape. Though her friends and family remain baffled by her decision (after all, he doesn't beat her!), Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man-wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage-the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems. Witty and compelling, Aidoo's novel, inaugurates a new realist style in African literature.

On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

When the harassing phone calls and bizarre "gifts" targeting Alison take a violent turn, her detective brother and his sidekick Mitch come to her aid. And as her relentless stalker turns up the heat, she and Mitch find themselves drawn to each other.

June, 1945. Ingrid Bergman has been sent to entertain the troops and when she bumps into the photographer Robert Capa, he is enchanted. He slips a mischievious invitation to dinner under her door and the two find themselves hopelessly attracted. Ingrid, tired of her passionless marriage and her controlling film studio, longs for freedom and excitement. With everything at stake, both Capa and Ingrid are presented with terrible choices.

Seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera knew by accepting the love of John Hayden, she'd be forced to live forever in the Underworld. But now her happiness and safety are threatened because the Furies have discovered that John has broken one of their strictest rules, and the only way to fix the balance is for someone to die.

After finding God and falling in love, life is good for Dr. Jennifer O'Malley. But can her faith--and her family--survive the challenges ahead?