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A story of terror and revenge, death, love, responsibility, the nature of reality--and an individual man. Luke Carr, whose wife and children have been killed in a plane crash, runs from his life, and work assignment, to the woods of New England where he's also running from a series of anonymous letters being sent his way.

Killing Time is a psychological novel about crime. The hero, Joseph Detweiler, is the world's most courteous, sensitive, sincere, and likable killer. He is even innocent of the fact that a crime has been committed.This tough and bizarre story breaks all the rules. It is not a whodunit, because the killer is already known. It is not a detective story or a sociological treatise on crime, because it is told from the point of view of the criminal.PRAISE“Detweiler is one of the most complex characters in modern fiction... the eeriest thing about him is that he is wholly believable, which is to say, of course, that Thomas Berger is a magnificent novelist.” —National Review

Naples is an urban hive that has suffered many an earthquake over the centuries. The next such shakeup provides Domini with his premise. An American family, Jay and Barbara Lulucita and their five children, are something like innocents abroad. In the naive belief that they can help, they come to this crime-riddled and quake-broken city, which in recent years has also suffered another upheaval, namely, the impact of the illegal immigrants pouring in from Africa. There's a child faith-healer, rather a New Age version of the classic Catholic figure. There's an unnerving NATO officer, forever in the same outfit yet forever in disguise.Earthquake I.D. renders an Italy complex and exact.

“Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat.” —Blake ButlerPRAISE“This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock's own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us.” —Matt Bell“Grim Tales is populated end to end with the magical and the bizarre: shape-shifting, witchery, underwater cities, indoor rain, beds that contain oceans, murderous objects, all manner of disappearance. Men lose their faces to mirrors, women are smothered by their hair, clouds settle over cities and suck them up... and in the midst of all this looming, Lock has an incredible ability to render compelling imagery and demeanor in minute, super-compressed bursts. Single lines resound in the mind. In the same way that it's hard to stop staring at the Internet's seemingly endless array of weird memes and video databases, Lock's words are both engrossing and slightly haunted. One could spend forever worming through these magicked words, their worlds.” —Blake Butler

The Funnies is a great insider look at the world of the comic-strip industry blended with the mysteries of family dynamics.PRAISE“Irrepressible, energetic, and good-humored.”—Esquire

The Light of Falling Stars is about the crash of an airplane and its aftermath—how do we find those that we love, both before and after death?PRAISE“Welcome back to storytelling.” —Time Out New York

On the Night Plain explores the complications of love and work; loyalty to family, the land, and one's own desires; and the nature of solitude. This story about a man who reluctantly accepts his birthright in a hard-luck sheep-ranching family redefines the notion of a life worth living.Hoping to make a new life for himself after WWII, Grant Person abandons his family's ranch on the Great Plains for a fishing boat. But the death of his mother draws him back to the ranch left with a couple of hired hands, a sickly flock of sheep, and a pile of debt. Sofia, estranged from her father, struggles to find solace on the ranch, and instead finds herself drawn to Grant.The ensuing contest of wills threatens to tear what is left of the Person family apart, and to revive ghosts that Grant had hoped were gone.PRAISE“It's clear from the first page of his quietly stunning third novel that Lennon doesn't intend to write the same book twice. This is a major departure from both the well-received The Light of Falling Stars, about the after-effects of a plane crash, and The Funnies, a wry look at a dysfunctional family. After World War II ends, Grant Person leaves his family's ranch on the Great Plains and heads for the East Coast. Behind him is the wreckage of a once-thriving family. Out of six brothers, only Grant and Max, his much younger brother, are left. Their mother's death three years later propels Grant home, and he finds the ranch fallen on hard times: his father is gone, and Max is on his way out the door to pursue his art. When Max returns the following year, he brings his girlfriend, whose presence sets up a disastrous conflict between the two men. Brotherly love gone bad, solitude turning to a rancid loneliness, the workings of fate, and a guilty conscience: this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, and Lennon does a masterly job of showing us a man who realizes that he is destined to ‘live a few scant miles from the heart of life, on its chill periphery.'Highly recommended.”—Nancy Pearl, Library Journal

Changing the Past plays on the horror of having your wishes come true. It is a black comedy of the finest kind.PRAISE“Berger begins his latest novel by stating, “Not even God can change the past.” But Berger the novelist can and does as he takes Walter Hunsicker, a mild-mannered copy editor, through several possible pasts for the newly invented Jack Kellog. Hunsicker/Kellog explores life as a real estate tycoon, a stand-up comedian, a popular author, and even a radio psychologist whose wife is elected president of the United States. These alternative lives, however, prove unsatisfactory. After desperately seeking to escape life, Hunsicker finally decides that it is best to accept his lot, even though it means watching his son die of AIDS. Berger has a real gift for using absurdity to reveal the core of our humanity. Those willing to spend a few hours in his Twilight Zone will come away the richer. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

A wild, fragmented portrait of the late 70s and the punk scene with a rich and diverse cast of characters including an idealistic editor of a political rag, a pony-riding Boston Brahmin intent on finding herself and shedding her husband, an up-and-coming punkster who fancies evenings at the Knights of Columbus Ladies Auxiliary, an editorial assistant named Topsy Otaka, and more.

Goyen's fifth novel is a fable of sexuality, Texas country life in the first half of the twentieth century, religious revivalism, and the money madness and ecological destruction caused by the oil boom. The narrative is composed of the brief linked episodes and tales that are Goyen's trademark, and is written with an ear for the rhythms of regional speech that was his particular gift.

Pastor Kate Gussey, with her husband Ned, provides a home for the homeless, helps build houses for the needy, and turns a willing hand and sturdy good humor wherever there is a need. But when her ex-husband moves into her small town, then into her home, the townspeople begin to question the kind of person she really is.

In Who Is Teddy Villanova?, Mr. Berger turns for the first time to the private-eye thriller, as practiced by the masters Hammett and Chandler. The seedy office... the down-at-heel detective... and more.In Who Is Teddy Villanova?, the cast of characters would seem taken from the roster of known sex offenders maintained by the police of every major American city—the giant sadist Gus Bakewell; Donald Washburn II, perhaps the scion of a wealthy family, certainly an exhibitionist; quaint slumlord Sam Polidor; sleek, blonde Natalie Novotny, surely more than the airline stewardess she pretends to be; pneumatic Peggy Tumulty, who hails from Queens; Russel Wren, reluctant hero and garrulous narrator of the tale (in a rococo style reminiscent by turns of Thomas DeQuincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Sir Thomas Malory, but nothing like that of Thomas Berger's previous work); a covey of depraved school girls; and a styful of undercover cops, to name only some of the principals. But over them all falls the evil shadow of the elusive Teddy Villanova, master criminal, underwear fetishist, archenemy of social meliorism, and, though presumably a foreigner, a habitué of a diseased Manhattan that Mr. Berger (who felt thoroughly at home there) drew from the living model before rusticating himself on an island in Maine.

Part fable and part rhapsodic exploration of desire and loss, Half a Look of Cain bears Goyen's unmistakable artistic signature on every page. Told as a series of nested episodes, the novel is narrated alternately by a male nurse, his patient, and a lighthouse keeper. As boundaries blur and connections between the men emerge, Half a Look of Cain becomes a meditation on communion and alienation, and an exploration of emotional and physical longing. The novel is both a rediscovered cry against the conformity and suppressed emotions of the 1950s and a celebration of passion. Reginald Gibbons has edited the novel from the author's multiple manuscripts and has contributed a wonderful afterword.

With the humor, irony, and veteran storytelling that have made him one of America's most respected novelists, Thomas Berger has written a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.PRAISE“Mr. Berger possesses the defining gift of a major novelist: he creates a unique fictional world while being flavorsomely idiosyncratic in style, tone, and point of view.” —The New Republic

Carlo Reinhart returns home from service in occupied Germany and finds the postwar US a different world: housing developments, gadget technology, a physical and spiritual malaise that boom times evoke.Good-hearted and intelligent, sympathetic but cynical, Reinhart is a participant who nevertheless remains a spectator. This gives the story its piquancy. Imagine going full throttle for success, simultaneously riding the brakes in apprehension.

Once again, Thomas Berger brings a satiric and irreverent perspective to the human experience, evoking a world that most dare not even imagine and effectively dismantling all existing definitions of sex and gender.

Walter Brimm is a financial advisor in his mid-thirties, husband to Gee, a university professor, and father to a seven-year-old daughter, Rea. His life appears nearly perfect, but this proves an illusion as slowly his world unravels; his actions and reactions to specific events cost him his job, his family, and his health. In search of redemption, Walter's personal journey provides a gripping story of intimate longing and a fallen man's brave attempt to reconcile all that has caused him to sabotage his happiness while answering questions seeded deep in his past.PRAISE“An exceptionally well-written novel... Walter Falls is highly recommended as a powerful and moving saga of the human condition.” —Midwest Book Review

Memory. Regret. Revenge. Forgiveness.Steven Gillis's second novel, The Weight of Nothing, explores these issues through the eyes of Bailey Finne, a gifted pianist who has nonetheless forsaken his talent to become a perpetual graduate student in art history. Niles Kelly, his somnambulistic friend with Albert Camus for a muse, is the heir to a fortune he has rejected, and he carries the burden of the unresolved deaths of both his father and lover at the hands of a mysterious bomber. Together, Bailey and Niles journey to Algiers to confront that which has haunted each of them for years. Following a tragic end to his time in North Africa, Bailey returns to his hometown in an effort to reconcile his familial losses, lack of ambition, and love for his girlfriend, Elizabeth.Gillis skillfully weaves this compelling tale of mystery, love, music, and art into a dramatic story that unfolds as a spiritual odyssey in search of truth and redemption in the midst of unspeakable violence.

A 20,000 copy Quebec bestseller, with rights already sold into seven languages.

A character in a popular cop show, Dan Symmonds, is written out of the series and finds himself lingering in Cop Show Heaven. Here he must try to discover some depth to his personality in order to inspire a writer to re-invent him. But of course, that's just propaganda because nobody really wants depth, they just want what sells, or if not that, they just want that which sells what they want to sell! Here we are in a world aware of its own fictional nature, questioning the reasons for its own existence. In this parody of parodies, any resemblance that Cop Show Heaven bears to Hong Kong and its film-making community is purely coincidental and whoever the readership assumes any of the characters to resemble is much mistaken. All is fiction. All is fantasy. Nothing is predicted. No thesis is proffered. No solution is offered. And it all ends as Hollywood would have it end, with a beginning. Shakespeare might hold up a mirror to the times, but Gray holds up a mirror to the mirror.

The story of a young Brahmin growth into a guru--traveling with him from the time of his youth, through life in a monastery and up to becoming a mentor to another young boy.

A group of survivors arrive in Virginia from the demolished Manhattan, planning to establish an outpost, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Plans go awry however in both violent and humorous manners. At the heart of the story is Pocahontas, who speaks Valley Girl, Ebonics, Old English, and Algonquin—sometimes all in the same sentence. And she pursues a heated romance with settler Johnny Rolfe via text messaging, instant messaging, and, ultimately, telepathy.Deadly serious and seriously funny, Matthew Sharpe's fictional retelling of one of America's original myths is a history of violence, a cross-cultural love story, and a tragicomic commentary on America's past and present.

After the death of her husband, Akbar Ahmad, Mona finds herself settling ambivalently into a new life. But the calm rhythm of her days—gardening, cooking, spending time with her neighbors and family in Karachi—is upset by the appearance of Salamat Ali, the new tenant in her friend Mrs. Baig's house. Vivacious, friendly, and, at times, impertinent, Salamat Ali is both a breath of fresh air and a disconcerting new presence in Mona's life. When Salamat Ali, encouraged by Mrs. Baig, presents Mona with a marriage proposal, she is forced to reconsider her past with Akbar Ahmad, and envision the future she wishes to make with her new suitor. As Mona negotiates the complex web of tradition-bound in-laws and gossiping, interfering relatives, she finds Salamat Ali waking her to the pleasures of life that thirty years with her dour first husband all but smothered. But if Salamat Ali helps her discover something so new and essential, he also exposes her to the danger of transgressing old traditions.The Story of a Widow is a beautifully observant novel that pays careful attention to the delicate movements of the heart in romantic and family life. But it is equally concerned with the mores of a society whose conventions constrain men and, particularly, women. Gently humorous, profoundly perceptive, and exceedingly clever in its cultural critique, The Story of a Widow is Musharraf Ali Farooqi's modern answer to the Victorian novel.

“In the steppe near Tashkent they came upon a never-ending ladder with wooden rungs and iron rails and that stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon... Whistling and thundering, a snake-like wonder hurtled past them, packed both on the inside and on top with infidels shouting and waving their hands. ‘The End of the World!'thought both Mahmud-Hodja the Sunni and Djebral the Shiite.”Set mainly in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, The Railway introduces to us the inhabitants of the small town of Gilas on the ancient Silk Route. Among those whose stories we hear are Mefody-Jurisprudence, the town's alcoholic intellectual; Father Ioann, a Russian priest; Kara-Musayev the Younger, the chief of police; and Umarali-Moneybags, the old moneylender. Their colorful lives offer a unique and comic picture of a little-known land populated by outgoing Mullahs, incoming Bolsheviks, and a plethora of Uzbeks, Russians, Persians, Jews, Koreans, Tatars, and Gypsies.At the heart of both the town and the novel stands the railway station—a source of income and influence, and a connection to the greater world beyond the town. Rich and picaresque, The Railway is full of color. Sophisticated yet with a naive delight in storytelling, it chronicles the dramatic changes felt throughout Central Asia in the early twentieth century.

In pursuit of the lives wrecked by disease and wracked by cough, How the Days of Love & Diphtheria follows one son who accidentally replaces another, until the family can no longer tell the dead from the living, and the mounds of bodies continue to swell.

God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara's life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason. After surviving the grand tragedy of the Busan Fire that leaves 28,000 people homeless, Nara leaves the squalid tent city that had become her home and is thrown headlong into a new life in Vancouver, Canada, where she elucidates the poetry of home. Amidst violence and abject injustice, Nara finds a way to rise up from the ashes again and again to rejoice in small triumphs in the homes she has lived, in the homes she has lost.

In 1771, Mr Earnshaw returns to Yorkshire from Liverpool with a bundle in his arms. ‘As dark almost as if it came from the devil', this strange apparition is taken into the bosom of his family and becomes the starting point of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.Almost two-hundred years later, Monica Johnson, a young woman growing up in a conservative family in the north of England, leaves her place at Oxford to marry a man from the Caribbean against her parents'wishes and then struggles to bring up their children as a single mother in Leeds.While Ben is popular, does well at school and embraces the popular culture of the day, Tommy is bullied and remains an outcast, as stigmatised by the origins of his parentage as Healthcliff was. Vulnerable and alone, Tommy disappears one day, demolishing the precarious family bond with an intensity matched only by Heathcliff's arrival into the Earnshaw clan.In the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J M Coetzee's Foe, The Lost Child boldly re-imagines the origins of Heathcliff, and the manner in which he emerged from Emily Brontë's imagination, to deftly spin tales of disparate lives bound by the past and struggling to liberate themselves from it into a haunting novel about migration, social exclusion and the difficulties of family.

Impetuous is not a word you'd use to describe Claire Bramany. She's steady and reliable--until an accident, in Brooklyn, in 1995, takes the life of her lover, Jessie Friedman. Claire's world implodes. Things get even worse when--while cleaning out Jessie's desk--Claire finds journals that tell long-buried secrets of Jessie's western girlhood. Jessie's account of Tulsa in 1944 appears innocent and playful. Jessie's days are peopled with quirky characters--especially Uncle Jimmy, an honest-to-goodness teenage hero back from war-torn Europe. He's Jessie's favorite--until he makes his move on his nine-year-old niece. No secrets. Secrets kill. This was the promise Claire and Jessie had made to each other long ago. But Claire has never heard of any Uncle Jimmy, much less any sexual violation. Shattered, yearning to reconnect with the Jessie she thought she knew, Claire heads out to Oklahoma. Are the journals true? If so, has Claire any other course than to avenge Jimmy's hideous crimes…?

Set in Williams'fictional city of Leah, New Hampshire, Whipple's Castle is a mansion within the town where the Whipple family resides--husband, wife, three sons and a daughter, each with their own worries and dilemmas. Williams takes a close look at the darker side of small-town life through this family and their lives in this novel set in the 40's.

John Cotter returns reluctantly to the smug New England town from where he had escaped via the G.I. Bill and foreign study fellowships. His older and much hated brother Bruce is dying of a brain tumor, and his possessive mother and stunned father requested John's presence. Upon his return he discovers what sort of person he could be through the love of a girl who made an unfortunate marriage. He also is affected by finding and reading his brother's secret diary, through his parents'reactions to Bruce's dying state, through his friendship for the town bum and through the events leading up to and culminating in the violence and fury of a forest fire.

'A fan is like the thighs of a woman: it opens and closes.'And so begins this lush, historical novel--a mixture of imagination and conceit, passion and suspense. In a tense courtroom during the French Revolution, a young fan-maker, renowned all over Paris for her sensual and graphic objets d'art, is on trial because of her collaboration with the Marquis de Sade. Heads will roll unless the independent fan-maker, erotically cast in the shadow of Sade, can justify her art and friendships to a court known for its rigid and prudish proprieties.

Tells tales of India during the Mughal era, viewed from the contrasting mindsets of European aides to the two leading princes, Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. Niccalao Manucci and Francois Bernier offer insights into the minds of their respective princes into the same event, give the reader a wide perspective on how history is actually shaped by every day events of its times.

Head in Flames is a collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, & quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font & aesthetic/political/existential space.The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother's great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo's murderer, outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation & abuse of women.The aggregate: an exploration of art's purpose, religion's increasingly dominant role as engine of politics & passion, the complexities of foreignness & assimilation, & the limits of tolerance.

You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor—this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam.

On St. Helena island in 1821 a mysterious doctor removes Napoleon Bonaparte's penis from his corpse while in the next room his loyal lieutenants brag about their dead emperor's merciless cruelty. Fifty years later the search for this itinerant appendage leads through Victorian London to ante-bellum New York, Amherst, Massachusetts, and finally Colorado Territory, dragging in its path a promiscuous mix of French counts, love-sick poets, dandies, shady antiquarians, utopian dreamers, con men, and a pieced-together homunculus named Bonnie. The French want to re-member their empire, the English relic-seekers wish to recover a valuable prize, and Bonnie wants to complete his diminutive body. Along the way, John Vernon corrects history's mistake by arranging a meeting between the two great American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. And Whitman's friend, Peter Doyle, the dandified streetcar conductor at the center of it all, saves the lives of a family abducted by Indians with an ingenious use of Napoleon's “dingus,” as he calls it. From the half-completed Brooklyn Bridge to Horace Greeley's Union Colony in Colorado Territory to the Rocky Mountains and the canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers, this sprawling novel creates its own manifest destiny by mixing fact and fiction with shameless joy. Peter Doyle's brand of speculative historical fiction corrects history's minor errors while vividly describing its major ones. Praise“Vernon's great virtue is his style–smart, marvelously specific, insightful both about large issues and small ones. The novel contains a wealth of fine sentences, and a wealth of sharply delineated objects. Reading it is rather like going into the world's best and most fascinating antique store and watching everything, on every shelf, in every drawer, draped over every rack, be made new again. This is not a novel to be devoured, but to be browsed over and savored.” – Jane Smiley, The Boston Globe“Peter Doyle is not just a novel, it's a conjuration–a darkly comic, exciting, can't-put-it-down, joyous chase of a book. Twisting and turning from history to fantasy, from picaresque to romance, from Europe to Colorado, this is a grand old stem-winder told with great zest, invention, and flair.” – Ron Hansen“Vernon is a superb writer, and most of Peter Doyle is a thrill to read. Here is a funhouse-mirror distortion of American dreams, American eccentricities, and American tragedies, offered with sly purpose and cracked wisdom.” – The San Francisco Chronicle“A magical mystery tour of the 1870s and'80s, from a memorably squalid New York to the wide-open spaces of the Colorado Territory.... A furiously bubbling stew of all manner of ingredients, a grab bag stuffed to the bursting point with the real and the invented.” – Angela Carter, The New York Times Book Review

“All this began long before I died,” says the brain in a jar that narrates John Vernon's second novel. The brain once belonged to Charles Cooper, a 55-year-old water engineer in upstate New York, and has been kept alive by a perfusion pump invented by the man who may have been Coop's father–Charles Lindbergh. Then again, maybe not. Coop's suspicion that he is the kidnaped Lindbergh baby who never really died but instead was stolen as a child and raised by gangsters begins when, on a day like any other, while playing basketball with his ne're-do-well stepson, two women approach him, one claiming to be the mother he thought long dead, the other his sister. “As a rule, I'm not a paranoid man,” he says, but these persistent strangers initiate a chain of clues and strange events that open before him like a bottomless pit. His search for an identity locks him inside a labyrinth of memory, historical detective work, deceit and obsession. Is he Lindbergh's son or the victim of an elaborate hoax designed to rob him of his inheritance? And is he deranged or rather is it “reality,” as he says, that “has come down with an illness.”? Lindbergh's Son is a map of a peculiar kind of American megalomania, one whose genealogies are floating, roots shallow, and borders ever shifting. “Franz Kafka, I think, is Mr. Vernon's true master... [His] story, with bits of new and old news falling into contradictory configurations, will excite those who love a mystery. It's a dark dream, told with twin passions for intellectual process and the bizarre required by this particular dark age.” – New York Times Book Review“Striking and original and never dull... Truly novel, truly chancy and subversive.” – St. Petersburg Times“A fascinating book, full of intrigue, verbal luminosity, and mysterious thrills. Vernon's imagination is all over the place with a virtuoso's irreverence for standard procedures. Let the reader beware and be dazzled by this rising and unique voice in American literature.” – John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and The Sterile Cuckoo“We are soon caught up in the autobiography of this brain–the way it shifts and assimilates facts, exchanges imagination and memory, forgets to remember, anything to justify itself, to keep on going.” – Washington Post Book World

Jeff Phillips is a blessed man with a clear vision of what he wants for his family and himself. But he has other visions, as well—visions that fill him with a longing he does not understand. Walks Alone is blessed by the promise of a great destiny. But he has visions, too—visions that speak to the loss of a once-great culture and fill him with the fear that his destiny will not be realized. Neither man can imagine the extent to which their lives, lived centuries apart, are going to become connected. By the Breath of Their People and its intertwined narratives weave a tapestry of adventure, hope, and longing. Will either man find the destiny he believes to be his?

Hauntingly beautiful and told with remarkable clarity, Over the Water is the story of an Australian outsider who finds teaching work in Bandung, a city in Java. Seduced by the sights, sounds, and magic of Indonesia, Joe finds himself unwittingly drawn into the lives of three women. Firstly he rents a room in fellow teacher Lisa's house, and discovers that she has a small harem of Indonesian boys living with her. Then there is Danu, a Javanese beauty, who says she is trying to escape an arranged marriage. Danu and Joe find common ground in seeking aspects of themselves ‘over the water'– for Danu this means the West, for Joe it means the East. Joe also feels a connection with Babette, a reclusive English woman who lives in a crumbling Dutch villa. She is an old friend of Joe's elder brother, Emile, who once lived in Bandung. Her relationship with Emile has long ceased, but Joe makes a remarkable discovery. As Over the Water unfolds, Joe discovers that his identity is not only fragile, it is disturbingly arbitrary. Based at least in part on the author's experiences of living in Indonesia, this compelling debut is the quintessential novel about East and West, and how our dreams manifest themselves.'A kind of Wake in Fright set in Indonesia, Lane paints an unsentimental portrait of wanderlust and the perils of freedom. But he doesn't stop there. With hallucinatory vision, he draws back the curtains to reveal the inevitable pull and power of a mythic undertow.'Courtney Collins, author of The Burial.

Souls of Fire is a story of four friends: John Graham, Kurt Bowden, Jerry Rawlings and Henry Burke, four artists who grew up in a city where it's expected that you graduate from school, get married, go to work in the factories, be thankful if you could get a life at least as good as your old man had and never think you're worth any more than that. In an unflinching, street-level style, Souls of Fire chronicles the four as they enter their “Summer of Destiny” where they find their lives at the point where they must decide whether to risk it all for their dreams knowing they are promised nothing, or stay in the safety of a life lived by their fathers before them. Souls of Fire is a story written for artists just starting out, those who have tried, those who live everyday lives wondering if it's not too late. In the end its a story about that part of us that still raises its fist and refuses to be bound.

This new work of fiction by one of Australia's most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies – the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well – build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.

A story of brothers

There follows a young American journalist working in the capital city of the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, a land verging on economic boom, but never far from a violent past. A cross-genre work that most closely resembles a novel, the story is at once driven and diverted by the young reporter's struggles to negotiate her own uncertainties in a strange land — observing, participating, and retreating daily from the people and events surrounding her. Assigned reports that the newspaper bosses deem fit for an inexperienced female foreigner, she ultimately turns to writing her own story, relayed with careful attention to the intricacies of language — rhythm, acoustics, and repletion. What she discovers is that her own in-betweenness is only amplified in this foreign place, that the tension between ancient customs and contemporary conflicts somehow provides a familiar backdrop for her own attempts to relate to the people back home who, confused by her choice to travel to a dangerous place, ask, “why go there?”

The coast and dreams of being by the water are never far away in Kinsella's surprising stories of Australian small town life. They summon in us both longing and fear at the recollection of our own childhoods, families, friends and upbringings. Flight is a possibility. A boy builds a rocket from 44-gallon drums and packing cases, a lone farmer travels to London to glimpse the snow his late mother once spoke of, inseparable mates relocate to the inner city. But the elemental mystery of place, of the country, of the sea, invariably draws them back.

The mystery continues, 125 years later. Emily Dickinson is one of our greatest national poets, yet her life remains wrapped in secrecy. Why did she spend the last 25 years of her life as a recluse? What drew forth the passionate and agonized love poetry of her youth? And what brought on the partial blindness that overtook her in her early thirties? This “brilliant little gem of a novel” offers a controversial new theory about the mysteries surrounding Emily Dickinson and creates an intimate portrait of the poet, weaving her actual letters and poems into the fabric of the story and bringing her family, her loves, and her times to life as never before.