EBooks - Fiction and NonFiction

Mary Sanders Shartle paints a strong portrait of New York’s rugged Adirondack region in her debut novel, The Truth and Legend of Lily Martindale. It’s an atmospheric tale about a great tragedy that devastates two little girls. One refashions her life, finding love, faith, and a rewarding career, while the other struggles for many years to forge herself anew … Shartle’s memorable novel will find a ready audience with readers who are already fond of the Adirondacks, but it is so studded with rich detail and scenery that others will want to transport themselves to this wild, dangerous, yet achingly lovely place

A bold reinvention of Shakespeare's Hamlet and a hair-bristling story of betrayal, revenge, and the possibilities of forgiveness On a cold November afternoon in northern Minnesota, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson finds his hunting partner-his father-sprawled on the forest floor, dead of a rifle wound. Authorities rule it a suicide, but Jesse is not convinced. Haunted by the ghost of his dad, and compelled by recently unearthed secrets, he is forced to wrestle with questions of justice and retribution even as he tries to hold his family, and himself, together.

Clearing Out follows two parallel narratives: the first is that of Helene the narrator who learns that her father (of whom she knows little about) was the grandson of a coastal Sami from northern Norway-something no one in the family ever talked about. Helene's experience in understanding her father's family is told alongside that of Ellinor, the protagonist in the novel she is writing.

When Katherine Pettit and May Stone arrived in the rural Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky to engage in social settlement work in the late 1800s, they were unmarried outsiders, living in pitched tents on the side of a hill, and perceived as odd, peculiar -- and "quare" (the local pronunciation of "queer"). Yet these strong, capable educators wanted to "learn all we can and teach all we can," and in doing so would persevere to establish the Hindman Settlement School in 1902. When Lucy Furman arrived at the school five years later, she was already an accomplished writer, but used her two decades of living and working at the school as fruitful and prolific inspiration for her beloved novels. Printed for the first time since 1941, this lightly fictionalized account of Pettit's and Stone's entrances into the Hindman community offers the contemporary reader a unique look at this country's early rural/urban divide.

A Good Day to Die centers on an unlikely trio: a poet with a tendency to lapse into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; a Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers, and violence; and a girl who loved only one of them-at first. With plans conceived during the madness of one long drunken night, the three of them leave Florida, driving west to buy a case of dynamite, determined to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believe is about to be built. A Good Day to Die is an unrelenting tour de force, and a dark exploration of what it means to live beyond the pale in contemporary America.

Swedish novelist Ola Larsmo's historical novel Swede Hollow follows a group of Swedish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and their experiences trying to forge a life for their families in Swede Hollow, a collection of shacks in a wooded ravine on the edge of the emerging industrial city of St. Paul.

The multigenerational tale of the Trà̂n family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trà̂n Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that will tear not just her beloved country but her family apart.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.

Recently orphaned, Angel Martin moves into a boarding house populated by an assortment of eccentric and colourful characters. She’s befriended by the gregarious Winifred Varnham – a vision in exotic fabrics – and the numerically gifted Barnaby Grange. But not everyone is kind and her scrimping landlady, Missus Potts, is only the beginning of Angel’s troubles.

Angel refuses to accept her fate and focusses her affections on her two maiden aunts. Despite their resistance, she is determined to forge a sense of belonging.

In these two novellas, Kimura Yusuke explores human and animal life in northern Japan after the natural and nuclear disasters of March 11, 2011. Kimura inscribes the 'Triple Disaster' into a rich regional tradition of storytelling, incorporating far-flung voices and experiences to testify to life and the desire to represent it in the aftermath of calamity. In Sacred Cesium Ground, a woman from Tokyo travels to volunteer at a cattle farm known as the 'Fortress of Hope, ' tending irradiated animals abandoned after the reactor meltdown. The farm closely resembles an actual ranch that has been widely covered in Japan, and the story's portrayal of those who stubbornly care for animals in spite of the danger speaks to the sense of futility and meaningfulness in the wake of traumatic events. Isa's Deluge depicts a family of fishermen whose crotchety patriarch draws on old tales of the floods that have plagued the region to fashion himself as the father of the tsunami. Together, the novellas present often-unheard voices of one of Japan's peripheral regions and their anger toward the government and Tokyo for mishandling and forgetting their part of the country.

Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai's busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai. Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People's Republic of China.

Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II-and it's a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one wonderfully vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it.

Swedish novelist Ola Larsmo's historical novel Swede Hollow follows a group of Swedish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and their experiences trying to forge a life for their families in Swede Hollow, a collection of shacks in a wooded ravine on the edge of the emerging industrial city of St. Paul.

Hannah lives in Zimbabwe during the reign of Robert Mugabe; it’s a country of petrol queues and power cuts, food shortages and government corruption. Yet Hannah is lucky. She can afford to go to school, has never had to skip a meal, and lives in a big house with her mum and their Shona housekeeper. Hannah is wealthy, she is healthy, and she is white. But money can’t always keep you safe. As the political situation becomes increasingly unstable and tensions within Hannah’s family escalate, her sheltered life is threatened. She is forced to question all that she’s taken for granted, including where she belongs.

Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end.

wo lost sisters find family, and themselves, among the voices of an Ojibwe reservation. When Loretta surrenders her young girls to the county and then disappears, she becomes one more missing Native woman in Indian Country's long devastating history of loss. But she is also a daughter of the Mozhay Point Reservation in northern Minnesota and the mother of Azure and Rain, ages 3 and 4, and her absence haunts all the lives she has touched--and all the stories they tell in this novel. In the Night of Memory returns to the fictional reservation of Linda LeGarde Grover's previous award-winning books, introducing readers to a new generation of the Gallette family as Azure and Rain make their way home. After a string of foster placements, from cold to kind to cruel, the girls find their way back to their extended Mozhay family, and a new set of challenges, and stories, unfolds. Deftly, Grover conjures a chorus of women's voices (sensible, sensitive Azure's first among them) to fill in the sorrows and joys, the loves and the losses that have brought the girls and their people to this moment.

If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe’s most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home.

Award winning author António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. Drawing on his own bitter experience as a soldier stationed for twenty†‘seven months in Angola, Lobo Antunes tells the story of a young African boy who is brought to Portugal by one of the soldiers who destroyed the child’s village, and of the boy’s subsequent brutal murder of this adoptive father figure at a ritual pig killing.

Deftly framing the events through an assembly of interwoven narratives and perspectives, this is one of Lobo Antunes’s most captivating and experimental books. It is also a timely consideration of the lingering wounds that remain from the conflict between European expansionism and its colonized victims who were forced to accept the norms of a supposedly superior culture.

Set over the course of a weekend spent fishing on an Adirondack lake, two middle-aged friends -- Jim McManus and Walter Kidman -- sip Jim Beam on the rocks and share tales of memory and camaraderie as the past and present meld to reveal that what happens in the past rarely stays there. Lyrical and poetic, playful and entertaining, Fishing the Jumps is more than just fishing tales. It is a seamless and haunting novel that is ultimately a story of the deep and necessary relationship between two men and the binding and nourishing effect of family -- not only of an extended family, but of a whole community, and in fact, a whole region.

A riveting English translation the Irish classic tale of heartache, death, and loneliness by the beloved author of The Dirty Dust The final published work by the renowned Máirtín Ó Cadhain, this novella follows a widower as he attempts to plan his wife's funeral arrangements without money, direction, or whiskey. Thrown into a desert of unknowing, he knows not where to turn or what to do. In a poignant meditation on regret, possibilities, maybes, and avoidances, the author portrays a man hopelessly watching as the people in the world go about their lives around him. With black humor sprinkled throughout, the book, a profound look at psychic loss and puzzlement by a writer at the height of his powers, illustrates Ó Cadhain's conviction that tragedy and comedy are inextricably connected. Bringing this work to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this volume includes an illuminating introduction by Alan Titley, whose skillful translation captures the spirit and tone of the original.

This book is a fantasy romance told on different levels, transcending time, place, gender, and even species. In this enchanted space, the boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, and here and there are all blurred. The eponymous tea garden is one whose customers are mostly deceased, mostly in love, and mostly fade away with the dawn. This work investigates the concepts of love, passion, and loyalty..

The Sadness of Antonioni follows Hank Morelli, a young assistant professor of film obsessed with Antonioni's L'Avventura. As he embarks on an unlikely romance with a Wendy's cashier, he is also drawn into the mystery of his grandfather's underworld connections and tempted by his department chair and his department chair's mysterious girlfriend to take part in a monstrous film project they are planning. Haunted throughout by the terror of time's raw present without exit.

Shame the Devil tells the remarkable and true story of Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis), one of the most successful, influential, and popular writers of the nineteenth century. A novelist, journalist, and feminist, Fern (1811–1872) outsold Harriet Beecher Stowe, won the respect of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and served as literary mentor to Walt Whitman. Scrabbling in the depths of poverty before her meteoric rise to fame and fortune, she was widowed, escaped an abusive second marriage, penned one of the country's first prenuptial agreements, married a man eleven years her junior, and served as a nineteenth-century Oprah to her hundreds of thousands of fans. Her weekly editorials in the pages of the New York Ledger over a period of about twenty years chronicled the myriad controversies of her era and demonstrated her firm belief in the motto, "Speak the truth, and shame the devil."

or the summer people from Manhattan, the small community of Grand Isle typifies the perfect lazy summertime mixture of sun-soaked beach days drifting into long barbecue parties that last late into the warm, firefly-lit nights. But this year, summer's idyll is shattered by a tragedy in early June, setting in motion upheaval, mistrust, and deception among the people of this small community off the North Fork of Long Island. The summer residents are forced to reexamine their friendships, their marriages, and their lives, and tensions between the summering teens and their year-round counterparts spike with the pressure of a terrible secret that could mean the ruin of one of them.

High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.