National Network for Equitable Library Service

Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

Tommy Wilhelm is separated from his family, at odds with his father, failed in his career, and in a financial mess. One climactic day, while he reviews his past mistakes, a mysterious con man grants him a moment of truth and understanding and offers him one last hope.

On a single, fateful day in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, 1938, a former British consul wrestles with his demons as his wife tries to rescue their marriage from his drinking problem.

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine.

From her hospital bed in Dublin, the elderly Dilly awaits the visit of her daughter, Eleanora, from London. The epochs of her life pass before her; she also retraces Eleanora's precipitate marriage to a foreigner, which alienated mother and daughter, and Dilly's heart rending letters sent over the years in a determination to reclaim her daughter. But Eleanora's visit does not prove to be the glad reunion Dilly prayed for. And in her hasty departure, Eleanora leaves behind a secret journal of their stormy relationship.

Six-year-old Emma vanished into the thick San Francisco fog. Or into the heaving Pacific. Or somewhere just beyond: to a parking lot, a stranger's van, or a road with traffic flashing by. Devastated by guilt and haunted by her fears about becoming a stepmother, Abby refuses to believe that Emma is dead. And so she searches for clues about what happened that morning and cannot stop the flood of memories reaching from her own childhood to illuminate that irreversible moment on the beach.

She's a fashion model who has everything--until a sudden freeway "accident." Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her the real meaning of reinventing yourself.

A lushly imagined novel that asks, “When do we ever really know ourselves?”

When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows.

Who hasn't, at one time or another, considered killing a billionaire? Rich and Poor is a novel of a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. It is literature as political theory and theory as pure literary pleasure'a spiralling, fast-paced parable of joyous, overly self-aware, mischievous class warfare.

A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O’Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing “flashbacks” to his unresolved and turbulent past.

It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier.