The beautiful orphan, Albertine, is trapped in her lover's Paris apartment. She longs for his wealth and status, and hopes he will make her safe. Sickly and pampered, he is lured by her verve, the ease of her body, the pleasures he suspects are lurking in her past. Gradually, as they circle each other, their love starts to suffocate them both.

"For the first fifty pages you'll swear that Harrison has been rummaging in an old trunk. Here's that tired old theme...the lost community of Aztecs who have been cut off in a hidden valley by a landslide centuries ago. Presently they will discover the outside world--our world. The stalwart Aztec maverick may even fall in love with a beautiful white explorer... Of course, any reader of Analog Magazine should know harry Harrison better than that. There are rumblings, even in the first chapters. The Aztecs are blond--that old Fair God bit again. Someone is feeding the vultures meat from an unspecified source. And surely we're not supposed to accept a snake-headed goddess? Trust Uncle Harry. On page 55, young Chimal follows the goddess through a secret door in the cliffs, with his whole tribe hunting him, & the story turns inside out."--P. Schuyler Miller

"Gillian Freeman is among the finest contemporary novelists." - Brigid Brophy, New Statesman "It is altogether an astonishing novel for a young woman to have written. The story describes, convincingly and touchingly, the brief, sensual affair ... between a sailor on leave and a young schoolteacher ... their frank sexual attraction for each other is given a warm and compelling context ... a novel that has the ring of truth." - Times Literary Supplement "This novel is successful in an honest and unpretentious way." - The Guardian When Freda Mackenzie, an eminently respectable young schoolteacher with a stockbroker father and a background of tennis, riding and university, meets Derek Smith, a big blond sailor from the East End of London, she tells herself that she sees him only as a challenge, that she simply enjoys watching his reactions as she introduces him to good food, good films, good music. But their friendship develops into something more: Derek awakens in Freda a latent sensuality, a passionate joy in the act of love she has never before experienced or even imagined. As their affair becomes more intense, Freda and Derek find themselves torn between their feelings for each other and their very different social backgrounds-and they have only three short weeks in which to make their choice . . . Critically acclaimed on its initial publication and later recognized by critic Mary Cadogan as "considerably in advance of its time", Gillian Freeman's first novel, The Liberty Man (1955), returns to print for the first time in almost 40 years. This edition features a new introduction by Edward Thorpe and a reproduction of the original jacket art.

Venture into this alarmingly convincing world, meet the horse whose stubbornness changed history, or the man damned to everlasting love, or the murderer who confessed... and confessed... and confessed. Learn, too the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile, or what really happened to Ambrose Bierce. And ponder, if you can, the case of Simple Simon, who lost the only important thing he had--and never even missed it. Lean back, relax, take a long look at the world of Kersh. You may never recover.

Eli Silver is a pediatrician in Upstate New York who has accidentally let his only child die. The Sorensons are a childless couple who move from house to house, rebuilding old structures in an effort to rebuild their lives. Elizabeth Bean is a working woman-- unmarried, pregnant, and determined to bear her child. The lives of these people intersect, and eventually interlock, through circumstances that involve both the vagaries of bodily functions and emotional extremes, and the love of parents for children and of men and women for each other.

'I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.' Stephen Maserov has problems. A onetime teacher, married to fellow teacher Eleanor, he has retrained and is now a second-year lawyer working at mega-firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche. Despite toiling around the clock to make budget, he's in imminent danger of being downsized. And to make things worse, Eleanor, sick of single-parenting their two young children thanks to Stephen's relentless work schedule, has asked him to move out. To keep the job he hates, pay the mortgage and salvage his marriage, he will have to do something strikingly daring, something he never thought himself capable of. But if he's not careful, it might be the last job he ever has... Warm, dramatic, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with the narrative pull of a thriller, Maybe the Horse Will Talk is a love story, a reflection on contemporary marriage, and on friendship. It is also an unflinching examination of sexual harassment in the workplace and an expose of corporate corruption that taps directly into the pulse of our times. 'Australia's outstanding social novelist' ( Times Literary Supplement ), Elliot Perlman '. . . has many things working in his favor as a novelist- curiosity, erudition, daring and a gift for seducing readers into going along with him for the ride. He'll get you where you want to go . . .' ( Washington Post )

I was winning when I met your gaze . . . So begins the confession of Gwendolen Harleth: dazzling beauty, wilful vivant and gambler of hearts: who bet her strength against her cruel husband, staked it all on the love of Daniel Deronda, and played her way back to a winning hand. With the profound insight of her acclaimed biographies, Diana Souhami fashions a real life for this most mercurial and magnetic of literary heroines, plotting Gwendolen's course in step with the drama of the age as a pioneer of women's aspirations in our own.

Someone is brutally murdering men in New York City, and Max Segal, the nervous, sophisticated detective assigned to the case, is struggling to find the killer before even morey observed social satire and side-splitting humor by the author of the bestselling Love Kills.

The first collection of stories from the author of Arctic Summer and In a Strange Room Damon Galgut's first collection of stories transports us to 1980s South Africa where politics begins at home. The family that small circle of beings where love should flourish can be an arid and alienating territory where hatred and violence may ignite. The title novella is set in a house far out of town, at the end of a dust road that rises up into the mountains. The desperate bondage of family life is revealed to a mother as she sits at her sons bedside where he lies sick, perhaps dying. Galgut's understated prose unpicks the emotional paradoxes of family life with a surprising, surreal twist. In a world where some of the most intimate relationships are those between strangers, Small Circle of Beings describes how children must learn to pull away from their parents if they are to find their own way.

The third book (after The Family Trade and The Hidden Family ) in the saga of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross, in which Miriam gets into deadly trouble. Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip, business journalist in Boston, she discovered (in The Family Trade ) that her family comes from an alternate reality, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is too much like the mafia for comfort. In addition, starting with the fact that women are family property and required to breed more family members with the unique talent to walk between worlds, Miriam has tried to remain an outsider and her own woman. She started a profitable business in a third world she has discovered, outside the family reach (recounted in The Hidden Family ). She fell in love with a distant relative, but he died saving her life. Now, however, in The Clan Corporate , Miriam may be overreaching. And if she gets caught, death or a fate worse is around the bend. There is, for instance, the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife. But they'd never make her do that, would they?

'In case you had not noticed,' writes Adam Thirlwell in his first novel, Politics, 'in this book I am not interested in anything so small as the history of the USSR. I am not writing anything so limited.' In this epic miniature, therefore, Politics tells the story of three kids in their twenties falling in love with each in London. And, simultaneously, it tells other, smaller stories- of Stalin on the phone, Mao in the bathroom, Osip Mandelstam in another bathroom, Adolf Hitler on all fours, and Milan Kundera in an argument. Politics is not (quite) about politics.

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.

Whether set in the urban decay and horror of the world we know, in Lovecrafts Arkham, in Pugmires own Sesqua Valley, or in places and locales somewhere in between the mundane and decadent world of Pugmires visions, this collection of 14 Lovecraftian tales selected by the author seek to evoke similar strains (albeit in a bit more melancholic melody) of cosmic dread, terror and isolation as contained in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. This collection includes the following stories: Beyond the Realm of Dream, Graffito Flow, The Hour of Their Appetite, Cool Mist, Dust to Dust, Necronomicon, Gates Closed by Darkness, The Baleful God, Drink the Moon, The Thing in the Glen, The Audient Void, The Hungry Place, A Piece of Stone and The Totem Pole. This is the authors first trade paperback collection, and the stories have been revised by the author for this publication. Cover and 15 interior illustrations by Stanley C. Sargent, inspired by the art of the Maya and Moche (pre-Incan) civilizations.

Marblehead is a huge work, encompassing all of 1927, a year in which H.P. Lovecraft, researching a book he'd been hired to write for the Nazis, travels the East Coast in the company of Charles Sylvester Viereck. It was written in the 70s but, except for a bowdlerized version published by Arkham House, was essentially lost until the early 21st century. This edition contains every word of the original 165,000 word opus.

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part. The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

Past Continuous is a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition.

A young boy who loves to dance listens as his father retells the story of the night he was born, which coincided with the opening of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

Paul Stevens is a bookseller in the marginalized world of used books, a lover of Flaubert and Dickens, young, unsure of himself - until he meets Judith and is drawn into her secret world.

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping older man in a fancy car appears at school one day offering her luxuries her single mother cannot afford, Nina believes he's her ticket out of her dumpy little town. Ignoring the danger signs and her mother's constant pleas, which end in exhausting screaming matches, she packs a suitcase and leaves home after one last fight. Ten days later, a terrified Nina, her dress torn, is hiding in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment after witnessing a murder she cannot talk about. She is discovered by one of the building's tenants, a confused, lonely old widow who mistakes her for the granddaughter she hasn't seen for a long while, not since her son moved his family to America. "You've come back to me, Dana'le." Instead of correcting the mistake, the desperate Nina jumps at the chance for a place to hide. Hiding from her mother and the dangerous man who are both frantically searching for her, Nina settles into the old woman's apartment. But how long can Nina possibly hide out until the poor woman realizes she's not who she says she is, or before someone else, her homesick son in America who keeps calling, or the lovely local neighbors who drop by with groceries, catches on?

A historical fiction that presents the life and loves of Jacqueline of Hainault, thrice married, thrice imprisoned and ransomed; the extraordinary 15th-century life of a women who endured the power politics of the courts of England, Burgundy, and France.