EBooks - Fiction and NonFiction

A tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years.

It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. "You should've been born a boy," Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world. As she grows, Adele learns there are certain rules Lebanese girls must follow in order to be good daughters.

The balance of power in a marriage shifts, with shocking consequences. An elderly woman recounts a chilling childhood memory on the family farm. A taxi driver with a missing wife reveals unexpected skills. An inherited painting brings an eerily troubling legacy. Subtle, compelling and unsettling, Amanda O'Callaghan's stories work at the edges of the sayable, through secrets, erasures and glimpsed moments of disclosure. They shimmer with unspoken histories and characters who have a taste for silence.

Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby's grandparent's immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny's life in 1920s Chicago--the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition--and Ruby's subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto. Headstrong and talented, Ruby struggled with the conventions of the times, was trapped in a marriage that forced her to give up her singing career, and in love with another man who shares her passion for music. Now, on the train headed back to a city she cannot remember, to a daughter she hardly knows, Ruby tries to look honestly at herself and the choices she has made, choices that affected not only her children, but her grandchildren.

Another team beat free-spirited archaeologist Olivia Perez to the dig of a lifetime, and now she’s left with the choice to wait for scraps or brave a dangerous, dusty tomb in hopes of finding other priceless artifacts. Her reward? A mysterious key she has no idea is cursed.

In Maggie Barlow's world, reality is overrated. So what if her singing career has hit a sour note or she's no longer the ingenue that she used to be? So what if she drinks and smokes a bit too much or likes to chat with a fairy godperson who apperas to her from time to time?

The comic novel, The Adventures of Ma Suzhen, was written during a highpoint in the popularity of xia "knight-errant" fiction. It is an action-packed tale of a young woman who takes revenge for her brother, Ma Yongzhen, a gangster and performing strongman, who has been murdered by a rival gang in China's most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. After publication of the book in 1923, the character of Ma Suzhen appeared on stage, and subsequently in a film made by the Mingxing Film Company. The book version translated here, displays a delightful combination of the xia and popular "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies" genres, with additional elements of Gong'an "court case" fiction. The translation is followed by an essay that explores the background to the legend of Ma Suzhen--a fictional figure, whose exhilarating escapades reflect some of the new possibilities and freedoms available to women following the founding of the Chinese Republic.

Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year’s Eve hangover. Though it’s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade’’ who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after.
But Rafael Morin’s exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.

Set during the gold-rush era in Australia, this beautifully written historical novel about Chinese diggers in North Queensland is full of unforgettable characters, and explores timeless questions of exile, belonging and identity. Tragic family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in North Queensland. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue finds a job as a carrier on expeditions, taking him far away from his sister. Ying remains in the township, where she works in a local store and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with a troubled past.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families, the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters, the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle, she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another's lives.

15-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

Set in modern-day Morocco, the story of four vastly different Moroccans who illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain chronicles the circumstances that drive them to risk their lives and the rewards that may or may not prove to be worth the danger.

Collects over thirty of the best entries in the Akashic noir series, including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and T. Jefferson Parker.

Zelmont Raines has slid a long way since first gaining his ability to jook—to out maneuver his opponents on the field—which made him a Super Bowl–winning wide receiver and earned him lucrative endorsement deals, not to mention more than his share of female attention. Because he hasn't always been good at saying no, however, a series of missteps involving drugs, a paternity suit or two, legal entanglements, shaky investments, and chronic injuries have virtually sidelined his career. Now that Los Angeles has a new pro franchise, the Barons, Zelmont has one last chance at the big time he dearly misses. Just as it seems he might be getting back in the flow, he's enraptured by Wilma Wells, the leggy and brainy lawyer for the team who has a ruthless game plan all her own—and this time it's Zelmont who might get jooked.

Tennessee. When evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men after a catastrophic flood, he's met with resistance by his wife and congregation. Losing custody of his son Justin, he decides to kidnap the boy and flee to Key West, where he believes his estranged gay brother is living. It is there that Asher and Justin discover a new way of thinking about the world, and a new way of understanding love.

Two strangers meet on a windswept car lot in West Texas. Marcus is fleeing the disastrous fallout of chasing a lifelong dream; Maria is returning to the hometown she fled years ago, to make amends. They begin to argue over the car that they both desperately want--a low-slung sky-blue twenty-year-old Buick Electra. The car, too, has seen its share of mistakes and failures. Every dent and seam has witnessed pivotal moments in the lives of others, from the boy who assembled it at the Cleveland factory to all the owners who were to follow: a God-fearing man who sells it when he sees a sexy girl sprawled across it; a doctor who can't dissociate it from his son's fate; and a rancher's wife who'd much rather live without it for all the history it carries. As this surprising novel follows the rocky paths of the Electra and its owners--both past and present--these two lost souls form an unexpected alliance. All I Have in This World is a tender novel about our desire to reconcile past mistakes, and the ways we must learn to forgive others, and perhaps even ourselves.

A winless high school basketball team is on the rebound after two stars move to town and inspire coach Sam Pickett to get down to business.

Rotoroa Island in the Hauraki Gulf, tiny and isolated, is home to a Salvation Army facility for alcoholic men. It's also where three people at very different points in their lives share a fleeting encounter. There is Katherine, known to history as Elsie K. Morton, famous journalist and author; Jim, an alcoholic with a young family; and Lorna, a teenage mother who has turned to religion, looking for a fresh start. As the stories of their lives are revealed, so too are their hopes and vulnerabilities. Set in the 1950s, as New Zealand society is starting to change under the pressure of new cultural energies, Rotoroa is a compassionate, beautifully unfolding examination of loss and the possibility of renewal.

Blood Clay tells the story of Tracey Gaines, who has moved to rural Saul County, North Carolina, to escape the wreckage of a divorce and becomes a teacher at an alternative school. She devotes herself to renovating an old farmhouse but finds she can't as easily build connections in this new place. When the community splits, she finds an ally in Dave Fordham, a native son who struck out for new opportunities, only to face his own trauma and a forced return home.

Home is a new house with a loving husband in 1970s California that is suddenly transformed into the frightening world of the antebellum South. Dana, a young black writer, can't explain how she is transported across time and space to a plantation in Maryland. But she does quickly understand why: to deal with the troubles of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder - and her progenitor. Her survival, her very existence, depends on it. This searing graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's science fiction classic is a powerfully moving, unflinching look at the violent, disturbing effects of slavery on the people it chained together, both black and white - and made kindred in the deepest sense of the word.

When his sister tricks him into taking her guru on a trip to their childhood home, Otto Ringling, a confirmed skeptic, is not amused. Six days on the road with an enigmatic holy man who answers every question with a riddle is not what he'd planned. But in an effort to westernize his passenger--and amuse himself--he decides to show the monk some "American fun" along the way. From a chocolate factory in Hershey to a bowling alley in South Bend, from a Cubs game at Wrigley field to his family farm near Bismarck, Otto is given the remarkable opportunity to see his world--and more important, his life--through someone else's eyes.

At seventeen, David Lizard Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone. Sylphide, the world's greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband's own disasters have intersected with Lizard'sand Kate'sin the most intimate and surprising ways. Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father's missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard's and Kate's lives much more deeply than either had ever realized.

Hex is a novel set in Western North Carolina that features a character named Alice Small and her deceased friend Ingrid, whom Alice calls "Thingy." Alice is raising Thingy's daughter, Ingrid the Second, and tells her stories that comprise the novel's narrative, which explores themes of love, friendship, fear, greed, and broken or reinvented histories.

When Hannah unexpectedly inherits her uncle's rundown resort, she must head to the northwoods to close up and sell the business. But the only interested buyer is Ingold, an international mining company, and Hannah finds herself reluctantly operating the resort while trapped in the midst of a treacherous dispute between Ingold and Uncle Hal's activist friends.
From safeguarding the wilderness to pursuing elusive new love interests, Hannah has plenty to engage her imagination at Star Lake. A new aspect of her personality emerges, one that is surprisingly courageous and compassionate.

Baja Oklahoma, features protagonist Juanita Hutchins, who can cuss and politically commentate with the best of Jenkins' male protagonists. Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station—and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson. That Juanita is way too old to remain a kid with a crazy dream doesn't matter much to her.

A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.

The Odd Women is an 1893 novel by the English novelist George Gissing. Its themes are the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. The novel's title is derived ostensibly from the notion that there was an excess of one million women over men in Victorian England. This meant there were "odd" women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in the book and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.

Jane Austen's classic comedy of manners is one of the most enduring love stories in English literature, located in a remote Hertfordshire village in the early nineteenth century. A razor-sharp satire of English country life and a stirring tribute to the power of romance to overcome the longest of odds, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's masterwork and one of the finest novels ever written.

"What James Thurber might have written had he lived in North Carolina".--The Washington Post.
RANEY is the hilarious story of the first two years, two months, and two days of a modern Southern marriage. The bride, Raney Bell, of North Carolina, and the groom, Charles Sheperd, of Atlanta, Georgia, met through their common interest in music. Can this marriage be saved? Stay tuned, for as one of the Bethel, N.C., matrons says to the bride, "Honey, you're at the start of a long, wonderful journey.

When a successful New Yorker returns to her birthplace in the Adirondack Mountains to escape her publicly tragic life, she begins to find peace for the first time since she was five years old. Hired as a caretaker for an Adirondack Great Camp, she spends over ten years living alone. But Lily Martindale’s days as a recluse are plagued by a secret which aggravates her fragile state of mind. On a winter day in the 1990s, deep in the mountains, she opens fire on a military flyover. Lily, once again, is a person of interest in the press, to the public, and now to the FBI—not an enviable position for a hermit. The Adirondack hamlet of Winslow Station is transformed by the unexpected return of its solitary prodigal child.

It is 1979. The first Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit on African soil is due to take place in Zambia, and graced by Queen Elizabeth herself. Barely a week before this much anticipated event, a white British couple, Henry and Laura Hinckley, are brutally killed on their farm on the outskirts of the capital city, Lusaka. The unknown perpetrators are at large, their motive unclear. Fearing a media backlash, the British government applies pressure on the Zambian authorities to bring the culprits to book, threatening to cancel the Queen's trip altogether - a move that would result in huge embarrassment for the Zambian government. Detective Maxwell Chanda, head of the Special Crimes Investigative Unit, is the man tasked with leading the investigation. He is a wise, steady hand but will he be able to piece together the seemingly disparate evidence in just five days?

It's been decades since Mara's family was last together, decades since the day her sister Allison drowned at Silver Beach. After the family tragedy, Mara's father took her to the opposite end of the country, where she made a tidy life for herself in western Massachusetts, with a good education, stable job, and loving girlfriend. Her half-sister, Shannon, was left behind with their mother in San Diego. Surviving on disability checks and handouts from family, Shannon can't remember a time when Linda wasn't drunk. When a heart attack lands Linda in the hospital, Shannon's first impulse is to skip town--to finally escape her mother's orbit and make her sister step up. While Mara gave up on Linda years ago and couldn't have less in common with her sister, an unemployed stoner, it's time for her to stop running from everything that makes her have feelings. This is a novel about the persistent, mystifying ties of family, the extravagant mess of addiction, and what it means to actually live inside your own life.

Ghosts of New York interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend, entangled in a set of relationships with repercussions, both personal and political, that extend for decades and travel around the world; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory.

Adam Finney, a young man who is mentally disabled, faces sterilization and lobotomy in a state-supported asylum. When he is found dead in the French Broad River of rural North Carolina, his teenaged stepsister, Jess, is sought for questioning by their family and the police. Jess's odyssey of escape across four states leads into dark territories of life-and-death moral choices where compassion and grace offer faint illumination but few answers. Grappling with the powerful bonds of love and family, A Question of Mercy recognizes the countless ways people come to help one another and the poor choices they can make because of love--choices that challenge the boundaries of human decency and social justice but also choices that can defy what is legal in the course of seeking what is right.