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As 01-01-00 approaches, Susan Garnett, senior analyst at the FBI's high-tech crime unit and Cameron Slater, an anthropologist, must pool their knowledge of ancient glyphs and modern algorithms in order to crack the code hidden in a formidable computer virus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
On 11th December 1999, computers around the globe freeze for 20 seconds. Susan Garnett, chief of the FBI's high-tech crimes unit, scours Washington's systems for a virus. Someone with the world's technology at their fingertips is counting down to the millennium. But why?
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Stefan was on his way to me. If he's dead..". I swallowed, tried again. "I hunt terrorists. That's my job. If they've killed Stefan..". I took a deep breath, made my voice hard. "I have to stay. I have to find out who did this". One crisp and cold winter night, a major commercial airliner explodes mid-flight with no survivors and no one to claim responsibility. At first Casey Collins, a U.S. State Department counter-intelligence spy, believes that her lover and fellow secret agent was on the flight, but when she embarks on a mission to discover who is behind the bombing, she finds that Stefan is in fact alive. Now the two are embroiled in a relentless game of cat and mouse where they must hunt down the terrorists before they execute their master plan of destroying 12 commercial airliners on the 12th night of Christmas.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"The Dönme sect--a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots--lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land. But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil. When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law--with dangerous implications for his body and his soul"-- Provided by publisher

The story--both romantic and terrifying--of how a handful of men, armed with nothing more than handguns and guts, forced the greatest nation in the world from their shores. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O'Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years. The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins's secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed "The Twelve Apostles." On November 21, 1920, the squad--with its thirteenth member, young Eoin--assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland. An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French and Leon Uris's Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"This short novel explores Willa Cather's friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, with a focus on the aesthetic argument that shaped much of their relationship: art versus politics and tradition versus innovation"-- Provided by publisher

Fetishists, dreamers, voyeurs, internet porn addicts, granola-heads, drug dealers, dorks, liars, layabouts, workaholics, sex maniacs, TV junkies, compulsives, neurotics, intellectuals, idealists: graduate students, all. In this book about the complicated experience of pursuing a Ph.D., Matthew Roberson details the curious world of a group stuck between childhood and adulthood, idealism and surrealism, representation and reality. 1998.6 focuses on three main characters - in three variations of the same story - writing dissertations on postmodern novelist and cult hero Ronald Sukenick. Each confronts the perverse challenge of studying a writer whose illogical surrealism undercuts the clear discussion necessary in a Ph.D. dissertation - and each fails, sometimes badly, and sometimes in oddly brilliant ways. What he wants he thinks is to screw things up. If you screw things up they fall apart. If things fall apart then you're under the skin of the world. And when you reemerge when things come together again they come together differently. Different than before. So what does this mean it means he wants to fail. Believe it or not. He aspires to failure. It's possible however he realizes to fail at failing. Or to make of it a howling success. In this, his first novel, Roberson rewrites Ronald Sukenick's 98.6, simultaneously parodying earlier experimental life and art, while exposing present day vacuousness and alienation. It's a hilarious send-up of American narcissism, wherein Roberson brilliantly reveals video culture and the web-cam as nineties embodiments of metafictional self-fascination.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Global warming, environmental degradation, the rapid pace of technological innovation, and the economic stresses of globalisation give rise to much speculation about the future. How will these dynamic factors affect society in the coming decades? In this dystopian novel, environmental expert Peter Seidel has created a stark and haunting vision of a world on the near horizon. Carl is a small-town mid western businessman who is accidentally put into a coma when he receives an inadequately tested vaccine. When he finally regains consciousness, he discovers that it is the year 2045 and his unusual medical story and recovery have turned him into an international celebrity. As he visits family and friends, he finds out that almost everything has gone wrong and the family business he ran thirty-five years ago has disappeared. Carl's fame lands him a job on a seemingly idyllic tropical island with one of the eight giant international corporations that own almost everything. His job is to help promote a soft drink. He is overwhelmed by the unbounded luxury he finds on the island. But he learns that the ethical standards in this strange place are only a front. During a business trip, he discovers something that horrifies him and turns him in a new direction, one beset with life-threatening dangers. Seidel skilfully projects a wide range of current trends into a believable and disturbing near-term future scenario.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"This vivid, terrifying, and galvanizing novel reveals our future world after previous generations failed to halt climate change-perfect for fans of The Drowned World and World War Z. 2084: Global warming has proven worse than even the direst predictions scientists had made at the turn of the century. No country-and no one-has remained unscathed. Through interviews with scientists, political leaders, and citizens around the globe, this riveting oral history describes in graphic detail the irreversible effects the Great Warming has had on humankind and the planet. In short chapters about topics like sea level rise, drought, migration, war, and more, The 2084 Report brings global warming to life, revealing a new reality in which Rotterdam doesn't exist, Phoenix has no electricity, and Canada is part of the United States. From wars over limited resources to the en masse migrations of entire countries and the rising suicide rate, the characters describe other issues they are confronting in the world they share with the next two generations. Simultaneously fascinating and frightening, The 2084 Report will inspire you to start conversations and take action"-- Provided by publisher

"From the critically acclaimed author of Jennifer Government and Lexicon comes mind-bending speculative psychological suspense about a serial killer pursuing his victim across time and space, and the woman who is determined to stop him, even if it upends her own reality"-- Provided by publisher

• - About the Festival and List of all playwrights from the past 11 Season - Foreword "The Privilege of Identity and Why I Founded The Fire This Time Festival Play Sections 1.Section 1: Vanna White, Brook Shields, and Beyonce: Beauty Standards and Self Acceptance in Black America Featuring Katori Hall's Beyonce Effect, Derek Lee McPhatter's Citizen Jane, Antoinette Nwandu's Vanna White Has Got To Die, and Roger Q. Mason's Hard Palate 2. Section 2: The Cost of Education: Confronting the Effects of Racial Disparity in America's Education System Featuring Dominique Morisseau's Third Grade-- Fransica Da Silviera's scholarship babies-- and Tracey Conyer Lee's Poor Posturing 3. Section 3: The Shots Heard Round The World: Policing Black Bodies in White America Featuring C.A. Johnson's The Fucking World and Everything in It-- William Watkins' BLACK WHITE & BLUE-- Jordan E. Cooper's Ain't No Mo-- and Natyna Bean's Assumed Positions 4. Section 4: Birth: Contemplating the next generation in a complicated system Featuring Dennis A. Allen II's Untainted Wombs, and Deneen Reynolds-Knott's Antepartum 5. Section 5: Maintaining Roots: Addressing Gentrification in Historically Black Neighborhoods Featuring Bernard Tarver's Just Another Saturday in the Park and Cyrus Aaron's Panopticon
• 6. Section 6: The Black Family: How We Thrive in the Face of Oppression Featuring Camille Darby's Exodus-- Marcus Gardley's The Sporting Life of Icarus Jones-- Charly Evon Simpson's The House-- Kendra Augustin's Sisterhood in the Time of the Apocalypse-- and Samantha Godfrey's C.O.G.s. 7. Section 7: Black Love: Why We Hope Featuring Jonathan Payne's The Weatherin'-- Tyler English-Beckwith's Maya and Rivers-- Fredrica Bailey's Love and Happiness-- Angelica Cheri's Slow Gin Fits-- and Josh Wilder's Gravity,
• The Fire This Time Creative Team.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

While the past decade proved to be some of the most tumultuous times in modern US history, the Black community has been resilient, opening up dialogues and sustaining advocacy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival in New York City. Since being founded in 2009, this theater festival has become the destination for emerging and early career playwrights from the African diaspora. Inequality in education and healthcare, skewed and negative images of Black people in mainstream media, racism in policing, widespread gentrification and its effects on multi-generational Black neighbourhoods, and the growth of Black love; these conversations have been happening in the US, and The Fire This Time Festival has borne witness. 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival: A Decade of Recognition, Resistance, Resilience, Rebirth, and Black Theater reflects this fantastic legacy, containing 25 ten-minute plays originally produced by the eponymous festival. Together, these pieces bookend the Black experience in the US from 2009 to the present day: from the hope for further progress and equity under the Obama administration, to the existential threat faced by Black people under the Trump presidency. Edited and curated by Kelley Nicole Girod, the anthology divides the plays into seven thematic sections concerning multi-faceted aspects of the Black experience, featuring work by seminal writers such as Katori Hall, Antoinette Nwandu, Dominique Morisseau, C.A. Johnson, and Marcus Gardley. Both timely and timeless, 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival presents an exciting, eclectic mix of 21st century theater that is perfect for study, performance, and reflection.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"When Francine Ephesians Didwell loses the love of her life, she is forced to reconnect with her estranged family. She's led two lives up until now, one with her evangelical charismatic family, and another of emancipated rebellion with her lover."-- Provided by publisher

In San Francisco's seamy Tenderloin district, a teenage street hustler has been murdered in a shelter for boys. And the dedicated priest who runs the struggling home stands accused. But despite evidence that he's a killer, and worse, Father Thomas Martin stands by his innocence. And attorney Peter Donley stands with him. But a ruthless DA seeking headlines and a brutal homicide cop bent on vengeance have their own agendas.

"Telus, a one year old, cries day and night, and when wrinkled Granny appears and tells Mother what to do about it, she follows instructions. She cuts up the sleeve of an old shirt and makes nine cry-baby dolls; she takes them to the market square. She throws her troubles into other people's lives. It works as Granny had said it would -- but Mrs. Bartoch is punished for it."--Kirkus

Through twenty-two linked stories, Tristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson explore the creative potential of people's native estrangement from themselves and each other... Their conclusion/suspicion: imagination is stronger, and subtler, than God, and offers more than mere consolation for the difficulties of living

"A hard-boiled crime story with a bi-sexual love triangle peppered with double-crosses. A music professor, an unhappily married woman, and a Mexican bartender band together to steal a buried fortune"-- Provided by publisher

- - is a blank city. There's a sick glow to the clouds, and it always seems to be raining here even when it isn't. Only sad and wounded people live here anymore. They are homeless in their apartments. They are unemployed at their jobs. They are widows in their marriage beds and celibates in amours and loners with many friends because - - is a sad city, full of sad and lonely people. I can't say very much about myself now, only that we have known each other before and for a very short, very slight while. We had a class together and I grew up down the block and our mothers say hello still from time to time in the aisles of a grocery store somewhere north of Tampa. Somewhere deep in Maryland. Somewhere down in Solano County. Somewhere out where the winds never seem to change and the days tick by like cars on a beltway. Things have not worked out for me in life as they may have for you. I have seen your visions of this world flickering on the outsides of my eyelids for a very long time and now and for many other reasons, I cannot stand to see them anymore.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

For generations, the solar system -- Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt -- was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artifact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has appeared in Uranus's orbit, where it has built a massive gate that leads to a starless dark. Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artifact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to find whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face. Assigned to write a profile of Val Face during his much-hyped New England tour, thirty-year-old impoverished journalist Seger Jovi pens a brutal hatchet job. But Seger, at once curious and incredulous, is soon sucked into the mystic's vortex of fame, becoming a devotee himself as he contends with the machinations and absurdities of Face's many protectors, from beefcake bodyguards to helicoptering handlers to Face's unwavering spouse, Nimble. At first unwilling to sacrifice his principles to fulfill his own ambition and rise from privation, then touched by Face's unexpected humanity, Seger oscillates between acting as Face's cynical foil and becoming his unlikely ally. Just as the exalted guru appears to be reaching the apex of his powers, danger threatens from the periphery in the form of an obsessive stalker who wants Face dead. To curb this stalker before he can do harm, Face's security team enlists the aid of Jackie Jaworski, an ex-Marine and resourceful Boston detective who moonlights as a novelist of thrillers. And so About Face, building to a denouement that will astonish readers, takes us into the convergence of violence and fame that has come to define so much of American popular culture over the last half-century. With its indelible array of characters, hypnotic pacing, and shocking conclusion-and "a mesmerizing prose style that is downright pyrotechnic in its brilliance" (Andre Dubus III)-About Face is a novel in the grand tradition that dances along the tenuous line between the sacred and the profane.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Trampoline games
• The moth orchid

In this debut book, two novellas focus on loners whose seemingly unremarkable lives simmer with darkness. In Trampoline Games, 12-year-old Jake Lore and his mother move to Sandy, Utah, in the summer of 1986. His father remains in California on business while Jake adjusts to an almost exclusively Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints neighborhood. He's immediately smitten with Debra Hanson, the girl next door who's the same age, but even more drawn to neighbor Finn Levy. The two boys jump on the Hansons' trampoline when the family attends Sunday morning church. But their activities become increasingly riskier and more violent: poltergeisting homes (nightly invasions to move around or take small items) or throwing lawn darts with little warning to others. In the more mysterious The Moth Orchid, Alasa Memnov raises orchids in Fairbanks, Alaska, and periodically visits her mother, Bebe, in a nursing home. That's where research physician Dr. Rene Funes approaches Alasa. Evidently, Bebe had given Funes her daughter's genetic material years ago, and Alasa is susceptible to the same rare form of dementia afflicting her mother. The doctor suggests Alasa return to her hometown of Lotus as a "cognitive exercise." Though the intent is to aid her memory, the trip may instead prove too revealing for Alasa. Masters skillfully puts ordinary characters in troubling and sometimes-dire circumstances. Jake, for example, is a typical tween (he gets gum in his hair) while Finn introduces precarious elements into the boy's life, like ingredients for a bomb. In the same vein, Alasa's hometown excursion is nostalgic but also becomes a struggle to remember her past.

A mesmerizing novel of unfolding dystopia amid the effects of climate change in a world very like our own, for readers of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. In this prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change. A father and his young children fleeing a tsunami after a massive earthquake in the Gulf. A woman and her husband punishing themselves without relent for the loss of both their sons to addiction, while wildfires slowly burn closer to their family home. A brilliant investor, assessing opportunity in the risk to crops, homes, cities, industries, and infrastructure, working in the silent comfort of her office sixty floors up in the scorching air. A doctor and his wife stuck in a refugee camp for immigrants somewhere in a southern desert. Two young men working the rides for a roadside carnival, one escaping a brutal past, the other a racist present. The manager of a chain of nondescript fast-food restaurants in a city ravaged by the relentless wind.. While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken-a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails-until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"On March 29, 1973, Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. At [sixteen] years old ... Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women, storytellers with wings dragging the dirt, survivors perched on radio towers, lovers lit up like fireworks, and heroes disguised as everyday men and women. Prudence sets forth on a quest to discover her ancestors, to grapple with wings that only one other person can see, and ultimately, to find out where she belongs"--Amazon.com.

Abracadabra is a fantastical and inventive addition to the tradition of noir writing, which not only delights and surprises at every turn but also raises important questions about identity, the human condition, the nature of evil, and the state of the union. The novel begins with a mystery, when Mark Goodson, a seemingly well-adjusted married man, disappears during a magic act, precipitating a series of events, encounters, and seemingly inexplicable occurrences, which it falls to a former professional football player, Elko Wells, to weave together into a story that is at once compelling and true. The concussion that ended Wells' playing career left him open to hearing voices and discerning patterns of meaning helpful to his work as the owner of a missing-persons agency. He also owns a celebrity look-alike agency, which complicates matters in humorous ways, and his reliance on a string of cocktail waitresses called the Bloody Marys who are on the lookout for various people adds another level of intrigue. Magicians and misdirection, gambling, down-on-one's-luck, the crazed sense of possibility and impossibility, mistaken identity, impersonators and body doubles, people acting bizarrely with all sorts of chaos, collisions, and overlaps thrown in for good measure. Again and again the reader is swept into treacherous waters, always confident that the writer is in control of his material. Because the many twists and turns the plot takes are all but impossible to anticipate, the experience of reading Abracadabra is deliciously magical.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Newly divorced Rhonda, haunted by her sister Evelyn's ghost, travels to an old palazzo in Rome to confront Marco, the man who stole her sister's heart--only to find out he's vanished in the wake of Evelyn's death. Meanwhile, Rhonda's nineteen-year-old daughter Olivia, adopted by Rhonda at birth, travels to the mysterious and lush waters of northern Vietnam, where she's been summoned by the missing Marco, a man she only knows from her parents' whispers, a man she has never met or seen. Soon, truths are exposed and lives unraveled, and the real journey begins. Four lives in all, spanning three continents, are now bound together in an unfathomable way; and they tell a powerful story about love in all its incarnations, filial and amorous, healing and destructive.

• Contents Acknowledgments Anchor & Knife We Drag Our Feet near the Stingrays Feed Tendons Sometimes Kids Bleed for No Reason God's Zipper Begin with Serenity All Saints' Eve Waiting for Red Dawn Hindu Kush Waist Deep at Hapuna Acceleration Hours Why I Listen to My Children Breathe Sovereignty What My Dead Wife Should Know Benevolence Ishi Wilderness Not an Emergency Green Lungs, Purple Hearts, Orange Kidneys The Price of Everything About the Author.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

From the author of the critically-acclaimed novel, I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby's Acceleration Hours is a haunting collection of narratives about families, life, and loss during America's twenty-first-century forever wars. Set across the mountain west of the United States, these fierce, original, and compelling stories illuminate the personal search for human connection and intimacy. From a stepfather's grief to an AWOL soldier and her journey of reconciliation to a meditation on children, violence, and hope. Acceleration Hours is an intense yet necessary portrayal of the many voices living in a time of perpetual war.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown, navigating new terrain and new challenges, the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting.

Following the death of their mother from a botched backwoods abortion, the McAlister daughters have to cope with the ripple effect of this tragedy as they come of age in 1950s Mississippi and then grow up to face their own impossible choices--an unforgettable, beautiful novel that is threaded throughout with the stories of mothers and daughters in pre-Roe versus Wade America. Life heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day it jumps the track and crashes." In the fall of 1957, Olivia McAlister is living in Opelika, Mississippi, caring for her two girls, June and Grace, and her husband, Holly. She dreams of living a much larger life--seeing the world and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an "accidental"--a migratory bird blown off course. When Olivia becomes pregnant again, she makes a fateful decision, compelling Grace, June, and Holly to cope in different ways. While their father digs up the backyard to build a bomb shelter, desperate to protect his family, Olivia's spinster sister tries to take them all under her wing. But the impact of Olivia's decision reverberates throughout Grace's and June's lives. Grace, caught up in an unconventional love affair, becomes one of the "girls who went away" to have a baby in secret. June, guilt-ridden for her part in exposing Grace's pregnancy, eventually makes an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile Ed Mae Johnson, an African-American care worker in a New Orleans orphanage, is drastically impacted by Grace's choices. As the years go by, their lives intersect in ways that reflect the unpredictable nature of bird flight that lands in accidental locations--and the consolations of imperfect return. Filled with tragedy, humor, joy, and the indomitable strength of women facing the constricted spaces of the 1950s and 60s, The Accidentals is a poignant, timely novel that reminds us of the hope and consolation that can be found in unexpected landings.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Maddy is a social worker trying to balance her career and three children. Years ago, she fell in love with Ben, a public defender, drawn to his fiery passion, but now he's lashing out at her during his periodic verbal furies. She vacillates between tiptoeing around him and asserting herself for the sake of their kids, until the rainy day when they're together in the car and Ben's volatile temper gets the best of him, leaving Maddy in the hospital fighting for her life.

"Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz-nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max's family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America, where leaders like Argentina's Juan Perón gave them safe harbor and new identities. With his life nearing its end, Max asks his nephew Aaron Wiley-an American CIA desk analyst-to complete the task Max never could: to track down Otto in Argentina, capture him, and bring him back to Germany to stand trial. Unable to deny Max, Aaron travels to Buenos Aires and discovers a city where Nazis thrive in plain sight, mingling with Argentine high society. He ingratiates himself with Otto's alluring but wounded daughter, whom he's convinced is hiding her father. Enlisting the help of a German newspaper reporter, an Israeli agent, and the obliging CIA station chief in Buenos Aires, he hunts for Otto-a complicated monster, unexpectedly human but still capable of murder if cornered. Unable to distinguish allies from enemies, Aaron will ultimately have to discover not only Otto, but the boundaries of his own personal morality, how far he is prepared to go to render justice"-- Provided by publisher.

• Restoration
• Youth
• Probability
• Mobility
• Fortune
• Integration
• Art
• Design
• Enterprise
• Service
• Vocation
• Finish.

In these twelve wry, captivating stories, Jane Turner Rylands returns with more tales about the mysterious day-to-day life of Venetians, in which the conflicting forces of progress and tradition are very much at odds. Once again we become insiders, let in on the attitudes and habits of characters from all strata of Venetian society--from very different backgrounds and neighborhoods--in one of the world's most unknowable cities. Rylands makes us understand the subtle hierarchies of this Byzantine society with all its robust snobberies. The unique quirks, petty rivalries, and jealousies that lie just beneath the city's elegant veneer are brilliantly observed. Unforgettable characters from Rylands's first collection make return appearances in several stories, and many new figures are introduced. An unscrupulous former race-car driver unveils a plan to save Venice; a fiendish son plans an aphrodisiac dinner; superstition and a possible curse add to a family's very contemporary troubles over the restoration of their ancient palazzo, where a struggle ensues between decline and change. As always with Rylands's stories, we are easily drawn into this sophisticated but ultimately small-town world, and we come to understand the eccentricities of its citizens and the fragility of their future. In Across the Bridge of Sighs, Jane Turner Rylands evokes the poignant and lively world of one of our most cherished cities with all the power of a master storyteller.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)