In the stillness of the courtroom a bookseller stands accused of selling a book. Is it a work of sensitive genius or an execrable volume of pornography? Could it have driven a respectable college boy to commit brutal rape? And who is the author of the novel at the vortex of a storm of sensation and controversy?"Michael Barret has been asked by a friend to join him in a small law partnership, but has also been offered a huge salary to go into big business. He's certain of his choice, till he is given a chance to be involved with a major case involved with protecting free speech.The case is about the explicit book "The Seven Minutes", which some people consider pornography, while others, Barret included, feel is impressive literature. The main focus of the prosecution's case is a teenager who bought the book, and was soon after arrested for rape. According to the prosecution, the book insinuated the boy to do what he did, so it must be banned.The novel follows the course of the trial, as both Barret and the prosecutor search for reputable witnesses to prove their side.

Coming-of-age novel.

Mercy of a Rude Stream marks the astonishing return of Henry Roth, sixty years after the publication of his classic novel Call it Sleep . A book of time, memory, and desire, this new novel is set in the New York of World War I: a colorful vibrant, carelessly brutal city where an immigrant boy, Ira Stigmanm is coming of age. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Ira begins to discover the genius and the burden of his imagination, as he takes his first tentative steps toward adulthood. A contempoary of the great modernist writers, Roth is being rediscovered by a new generation of readers.

This Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel brings together memories of childhood and Parisian society before and during the First World War. This adaptation is based on Harold Pinter's screenplay, written at the request of the film director Joseph Losey in 1972. 'Remembrance of Things Past' premiered at the Royal National Theatre in November 2000.

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2025 Both sweeping and intimate, a majestic novel of love and war that brilliantly evokes the drama and turbulence of medieval France Thierry Villar is a well-known—even notorious— tavern poet, familiar with the rogues and shadows of that world, but not at all with courts and power. He is an unlikely person, despite his quickness, to be caught up in the deadly contests of ambitious royals, assassins, and invading armies. But he is indeed drawn into all these things on a savagely cold night in his beloved city of Orane. And so Thierry must use all the intelligence and charm he can muster as political struggles merge with a decades-long war to bring his country to the brink of destruction. As he does, he meets his poetic equal in an aristocratic woman and is drawn to more than one unsettling person with a connection to the world beyond this one. He also crosses paths with an extraordinary young woman driven by voices within to try to heal the ailing king—and help his forces in war. A wide and varied set of people from all walks of life take their places in the rich tapestry of this story. A new masterwork from the internationally bestselling author of All the Seas of the World , A Brightness Long Ago , and Tigana , Written on the Dark is an elegant tour de force about power and ambition playing out amid the intense human need for art and beauty, and memories to be left behind.

Greg Rucka has earned a devoted following for his edgy Atticus Kodiak thrillers, Finder , Keeper , and Smoker . Now, in an electrifying new suspense novel, Rucka puts us in the heart and brain of Kodiak's friend and lover, Bridgett Logan, a young woman living life on her own terms--and living it on the edge. Shooting at Midnight . It began with a promise made to a friend, made when they were both teenagers. Now, years later, the friend wants to collect. All Bridgett Logan has to do is keep her word and the vow she made: Commit a murder. Now two men are desperately trying to find Bridgett. One to save her. The other--to kill her.

The gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances. They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books. Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare du Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality. As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.

"The Assassins' Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier's family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking . George Packer's first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating an account of America's most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam."--Back cover.

The beloved actor and screenwriter Gene Wilder's first novel, My French Whore , set during World War I, delicately and elegantly explores a most unusual romance. It's almost the end of the war and Paul Peachy, a young railway employee and amateur actor in Milwaukee, realizes his marriage is one-sided. He enlists, and ships off to France. Peachy instantly realizes how out of his depth he is—and never more so than when he is captured. Risking everything, Peachy—who as a child of immigrants speaks German—makes the reckless decision to impersonate one of the enemy's most famous spies. As the urbane and accomplished spy Harry Stroller, Peachy has access to a world he could never have known existed—a world of sumptuous living, world-weary men, and available women. But when one of those women—Annie, a young, beautiful and wary courtesan—turns out to be more than she seems, Peachy's life is transformed forever.

Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Long Night of White Chickens marked the brilliant debut of Francisco Goldman's internationally acclaimed writing career. The Long Night of White Chickens is a novel born of two worlds: It is the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by a patrician Guatemalan mother, and his relationship with Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young Guatemalan orphan sent by his grandmother to live with his family as a maid. When, years later in the 1980s, Flor is murdered in Guatemala, Roger returns to uncover the truth of her death. There he is reunited with Luis Moya, a childhood friend, and together they venture on a quest into Flor's life that will have unexpected, and unforgettable, repercussions.

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2013 WINNER OF THE SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE 2013 What if everything you'd ever wanted was no longer enough? Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. But then Rachel's cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid - and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many. 'Wonderful...witty...an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali' Stylist

By the award-winning and bestselling author of Journey to the River Sea, a novel that sings with characteristic Ibbotson warmth and wit.Eva Ibbotson's charming and warm-hearted tale, A Secret Countess was originally published as A Countess Below Stairs.Anna, a young countess, has lived in the glittering city of St Petersburg all her life in an ice-blue palace overlooking the River Neva. But when revolution tears Russia apart, her now-penniless family is forced to flee to England. Armed with an out-of-date book on housekeeping, Anna determines to become a housemaid and she finds work at the Earl of Westerholme's crumbling but magnificent mansion. The staff and the family are sure there is something not quite right about their new maid - but she soon wins them over with her warmth and dedication.Then the young Earl returns home from the war - and Anna falls hopelessly in love. But they can never be together: Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel - and anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks . . .

A hundred years ago, in the Himalayan peaks of Nanvi Dar, the daughter of an English earl is kidnapped by a huge hairy monster. In a secret valley Agatha Farley is introduced to a family of motherless yetis and devotes her life to their upbringing. She teaches them to speak, tells them stories and insists on polite manners. But as the decades pass, tourists come to the mountains, a hotel is built and yeti-hunters arrive. Agatha knows that there is one place in the world where they would be protected - her ancestral home at Farley Towers. When a boy and his sister stumble upon her hidden valley, she knows she has found the courageous people who will carry out her plan. The excited yetis are smuggled into the bridal suite at the hotel. A freezer lorry is waiting to put them into semi-hibernation on the long trip home. But the baby yak that has fallen in love with the youngest yeti foils the refrigeration plan and they set off on a hugely entertaining road trip half way across the world. In the Sultan of Aslerfan's kingdom the yetis release all the animals from his zoo. In the Alps they rescue a lost child in a blizzard. In Spain, the yak creates chaos at a bullfight. But when they arrive in England, a terrible shock awaits them at Farley Towers... This early novel, never submitted for publication, contains all the trademark qualities that made Eva's subsequent books so successful; comedy, loveable and eccentric characters, perfectly-crafted plotting, and inspiring themes of tolerance, kindness to animals, and the defeat of cruelty.

Widely heralded for her bestselling first novel ( Feed My Dear Dogs ) and award-winning stories ( Sister Crazy , also nominated for the Orange Prize), Emma Richler finally returns with a dazzling major novel with the power of A.S. Byatt's Possession , the wit and wonder of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life --about a sister and her adopted brother with a one-of-a-kind connection: a profoundly moving, original love story about the unbreakable ties that bind, and the choices we make or create for ourselves. Zachariah and Rachel are brother and sister. Well, not exactly. They are star-crossed lovers. Well, not exactly. Rachel is the cherished daughter of a Russian family living in London--the richly imagined, mysterious Wolffs; Zach is her parents' adopted son who arrived from the orphanage with one sweater, a head of curls and a dexterous set of fists. As children, they became as close as two people can be. But when they crossed a forbidden line, there was no going back. Now, as an adult, coping with their father's furious rebuttal of Zach, Rachel sets herself the task of inventing a family history for her beloved. And so she brings to life his imagined ancestry--from a tavern-educated boxer in Dickensian times, to a Hussar at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic Wars--even as their troubles in present-day Camden Town build to yet another point of no return. Cartwheeling through history, filled with art and science, fairy tales and folk songs, tsars and foundlings, epic battles in the prize ring and on the Eastern Front, and characters that take over our hearts, Be My Wolff is riveting--wondrous, funny and tragic and of astonishing imagination and beauty.

At fifteen Ruby left home, got herself an agent and became a film star. Now twenty, she lives alone, in a world of hotels and fast food. Destructive and charming, cutting is Ruby's hobby. Her hair, her arms and occasional tattoos - her newest accessory is a bloodline necklace. Ruby is a seductive blend of heroine and whore. She has left the man who loves her, been fired by her agent, and is starring in a film opposite the delectable Aslan. It is quite possibly her last chance. Striking, funny and razor sharp, Thin Skin is a novel in which we see that sometimes you have to look over the edge in order to see your way back.

A murder in a crowded Broadway theater presents a full house of suspects--the first in this classic mystery series starring Ellery Queen Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it's packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen. With the help of his son Ellery, a bibliophile and novelist whose imagination can solve any crime, the Inspector attacks this seemingly impenetrable mystery. Anyone in the theater could have killed the unscrupulous lawyer, and several had the motive. Only Ellery Queen, in his debut novel, can decipher the clue of the dead man's missing top hat.

Sent to a therapeutic community for autism at the age of eleven, Todd Aaron, now in his fifties, is the Old Fox of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel normal again. Undone by these pressures, Todd attempts an escape to return home to his younger brother and to a childhood that now inhabits only his dreams. Written astonishingly in the first-person voice of an autistic, adult man, Best Boy with its unforgettable portraits of Todd s beloved mother, whose sweet voice still sings from the grave, and a staffer named Raykene, who says that Todd reflects the beauty of His creation is a piercing, achingly funny, finally shattering novel no reader can ever forget."

This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew's Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” Praise for Andrew's Brain “Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorow's remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks—the best kind.” — USA Today “ Andrew's Brain is cunning. . . . [A] sly book . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. . . . One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he's both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He's a fool, but he's no innocent. . . . Andrew may not be able to enjoy his brain, but Doctorow, freely choosing to inhabit this character's whirligig consciousness, can.” — The New York Times Book Review “A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [ Andrew's Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.” — The Sunday Times (London) “Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons they've never imagined.” — The Plain Dealer “Andrew's ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.” —Associated Press “[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.” — More “A quick and acutely intelligent read.” — Entertainment Weekly From the Hardcover edition.

"Ted Fullilove, aka Mr. Peanut, is not like other Ivy League grads. He shares an apartment with Goldberg, his beloved battery-operated fish, sleeps on a bed littered with yellow legal pads penned with what he hopes will be the next great American novel, and spends the waning malaise-filled days of the Carter administration at Yankee Stadium, waxing poetic while slinging peanuts to pay the rent. When Ted hears the news that his estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, he immediately moves back into his childhood home, where a whirlwind of revelations ensues. The browbeating absentee father of his youth is living to make up for lost time, but his health dips drastically whenever his beloved Red Sox lose. And so, with help from a crew of neighborhood old-timers and the lovely Mariana--Marty's Nuyorican grief counselor--Ted orchestrates the illusion of a Sox winning streak, enabling Marty and the Red Sox to reverse the Curse of the Bambino and cruise their way to World Series victory. Well, sort of David Duchovny's richly drawn Bucky F&%@ing Dent is a story of the bond between fathers and sons, Yankee fans and the Fenway faithful, and grapples with the urgent need to find our story in an age of irony and artifice. Culminating in that fateful moment in October of '78 when the meek Bucky Dent hit his way into baseball history with the unlikeliest of home runs, this tragicomic novel demonstrates that life truly belongs to the losers--that the long shots are the ones worth betting on. Bucky F&%@ing is a singular tale that brims with the hilarity, poignance, and profound solitude of modern life"--

Most arguments for or against abortion focus on one question: is the fetus a person? In this provocative and important book, David Boonin defends the claim that even if the fetus is a person with the same right to life you and I have, abortion should still be legal, and most current restrictions on abortion should be abolished. Beyond Roe points to a key legal precedent: McFall v. Shimp. In 1978, an ailing Robert McFall sued his cousin, David Shimp, asking the court to order Shimp to provide McFall with the bone marrow he needed. The court ruled in Shimp's favor and McFall soon died. Boonin extracts a compelling lesson from the case of McFall v. Shimp--that having a right to life does not give a person the right to use another person's body even if they need to use that person's body to go on living-and he uses this principle to support his claim that abortion should be legal and far less restricted than it currently is, regardless of whether the fetus is a person. By taking the analysis of the right to life that Judith Jarvis Thomson pioneered in a moral context and applying it in a legal context in this novel way, Boonin offers a fresh perspective that is grounded in assumptions that should be accepted by both sides of the abortion debate. Written in a lively, conversational style, and offering a case study of the value of reason in analyzing complex social issues, Beyond Roe will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, and to anyone interested in the debate over whether government should restrict or prohibit abortion.