As she lay on her deathbed, Stella Folger had some things to say to her husband. Like "You should paint the living room. I noticed there were brown spots on the ceiling." And "Be sure to take the car in for a tune-up every three months." In life, Stella always took care of business. In death, she's doing the same. Because Stella is communicating with Roger from her hotel room in Heaven-and it seems that entering paradise hasn't made her any less bossy. The truth is, she still cares about Roger. She worries about him. She loves him-so much, in fact, that she's determined to find him a new wife, someone to take care of him like she did. But as the celestial matchmaking progresses, one thing becomes clear: according to his departed wife, no woman on earth could be good enough for Roger Folger...

At times in his life, Tom Harris is a dull schoolboy, an apprentice barber, a delinquent husband, an old man with a monkey who drinks at the Green Man Pub, "il professore Harris" at the University of Genoa, and possibly a murderer. But the question of who the elusive Tom Harris really is, and what crimes he has really committed, obsesses the narrator of this novel. Tom Harris can perhaps be described as a sort of philosophical detective story, ingeniously plotted and wittily told with a stylistic virtuosity on par with the most playful works of Raymond Queneau.

A story of Venice today and Venice in its illustrious past, this novel gives the reader a portrait of the modern-day film world and a clue to the passions behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic work. Jessica Pruitt, a Hollywood actress in her forties has come to Venice to judge the film festival.

When Anna and Sadie discover the diaries of their mother, Rebecca, in the days following her death, they learn that her life was far more complex than either of them knew: a garment worker in early-1900s New York; the reluctant wife in an arranged marriage to an ailing and abusive husband; the improbable friend of a pregnant prostitute.But the diaries reveal more than just surprising details about Rebecca's life: they also point to a family secret - and questions about Sadie's true parentage.The Featherbed is a gripping family saga that moves between the tenements of New York's Lower East Side and the stately homes of Toronto's Annex. Strong in plot, character, setting, and style, it is a fully-realised debut from an assured writer.

Patricia Marx is one of the finest comic writers of her time, as readers of The New Yorker and fans of Saturday Night Live already know. Her fiction debut is an endlessly entertaining comic novel about one woman’s romantic fixation on her first boyfriend.

A conventional Italian honeymoon becomes a psychic journey in this haunting novel. A new and inspired translation by Peter Hargitai.

David Leavitt's reputation has rested upon stories and novels that explicate a sedate, upper-middle class world of reserved emotions and sexuality. In his new collection of three novellas Arkansas, he explores new territory. Droll, surprising, and very sexy, these works often shock and startle the reader. In "The Term Paper Artist," a writer named David Leavitt writes school papers for cute undergraduates in exchange for sexual favors, and in "Saturn Street." a gay man who delivers lunches to homebound people with AIDS falls in love with one of his clients. Beautifully written and alarmingly funny, Arkansas is one of the best works of gay fiction in years.

“I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.” So begins A Wall of Light , a novel which chronicles a single day in the life of Sonya, a thirty-two-year-old deaf woman about to break out of her predictable routine. Sonya lives in Tel Aviv with her protective half-brother, Kostya; their household has dwindled from five to two. Anna, their mother, is now in a nursing home and Noah, Kostya’s son, is living in Berlin. Kostya, wracked with guilt for the tragedies that have befallen Sonya, also grapples with the memory of his wife, Iris, a lawyer murdered in the course of a dangerous investigation seventeen years earlier. As we move through Sonya’s day, Noah and Anna narrate their stories as well. Noah’s journal entries cover the years 1980-1993, and Anna’s letters to Andrei, her married lover in Russia, are written in 1957, after Anna has emigrated to Israel to build a new life for herself and her son, Kostya. While Sonya’s story moves rapidly through the events of a single day, Noah and Anna’s voices take the reader back in time, filling in the circumstances that have led Sonya to this pivotal moment. We learn that Sonya has already endured two catastrophes. At age twelve, a medical mishap leaves her deaf, and at eighteen, while studying at university in Beersheba, Sonya is assaulted by two hoodlums. Throughout the novel, Sonya’s experiences, instigated by both human error and human evil, are echoed by the larger, political violence that haunts modern Israel. While Noah’s and Anna’s voices shed light on Sonya’s journey, they also provide insights into the political and cultural fabric of Israel from the mid 1950s to the present. Noah’s journal entries, starting with his tenth birthday and ending shortly after his army service, map his coming of age. We see him wrestling with his sexual identity and first sexual encounters, the fallout from his mother’s leftist politics, and his own conscription to the army. Anna’s secret letters to Andrei offer an outsider’s perspective on the new Israeli state. The remarkable events of Sonya’s day are set in motion when her brother gives her an antihistamine. Overcome with sleepiness, she dismisses her morning class early, asking only one student, Matar, to stay behind. She wants to understand what lies behind his unusual expression. He answers that he has been involved in war crimes, and surprises Sonya by kissing her. Sonya feels that she has been roused from a long slumber and as the novel progresses we see the ways in which her awakened desire shapes her choices. She decides to take a taxi home from the university and impulsively invites the taxi driver inside and seduces him. He complies, but when she tells him she’s deaf, he flees in confusion. Sonya is convinced that she has fallen in love with him, and decides to pursue him. She solicits her brother’s help and sets out to find her lover. Sonya’s search gains in intensity and purpose as she travels to East Jerusalem. There she encounters the walls that prevent Palestinians from moving freely through the West Bank. After an Alice in Wonderland -like journey past numerous obstacles, Sonya finally makes it to her lover’s house. This second encounter leads Sonya to a central revelation: the identity of her father. As this day of awakened desire and dispelled secrets closes, Sonya is able to step out from under the protective wing of her brother into a life that reflects both the ambiguity and uncertainty of contemporary Israel and her own personal possibilities.

Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of "A Box of Ashes," one of two novellas in Little Men, is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father's dying wish by taking the old man's ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It's a long way to go just to dump some ashes, and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he's managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they're still having sex every Friday night). In "Spivak in Babylon," Little Men 's other novella, it's 1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious 30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break: a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company's expense account! A room at the fabled Chateau Marmont (Garbo's old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Hovering over all the proceedings in "Spivak in Babylon" is the genial, befuddled presence of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, who haunts Leo's dreams.

"I was on my way to look for a life of my own." A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century. This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a repressive upper-middle-class upbringing and make his way as an artist and individual, written in a single incantatory paragraph. Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the book, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margit, the difficult relationship with his parents, the fantasies of adolescence and youth, all set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a peripatetic existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness. The young narrator is largely oblivious to world events and focused instead on becoming an artist, an ambition frustrated generally by his milieu and specifically by his mother, who, herself a former actress, destroys his paintings during one of the family's moves. In the end, he turns to an older mentor, Harry Haller, a fictionalized portrait of Hermann Hesse, who encouraged and supported Weiss, and with Haller's example before him, the narrator takes his first steps towards a truly independent life. Intensely lyrical, written with great imaginative power, Leavetaking is a vivid evocation of a world that has disappeared and of the narrator's developing consciousness. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored. They are issued in handsome, well-designed editions at reasonable prices in hopes of their passing from one reader to another—and further enriching our culture.

Leo Axelrod, blocked painter, successful illustrator, lonely and alone in England, asks a girl to go with him to Greece. He doesn't know anything about her, he doesn't even know her name, but amazingly she says yes. By the author of Madness, a Novel.

A novel set in a Europe unlike the one we know, where the followers of Jesus the Christus are a despised minority group, and an old man looks after two silent children who, at night, send him troubling dreams. It examines how heroes and martyrs are made and is written by the author of "The Trap".

Book by Shavelson, Melville

__________________________________ The fabulously addictive new novel from Katie Price! Beautiful people and big personalities is the formula for great reality TV, as high-flying producer Jas knows all too well. But these days most of the drama in Jas’s life seems to be happening off screen rather than on it. From dealing with daily family conflicts to getting her ex Richard to accept that she’s just not taking him back…Jas needs a break from her own reality. Enter Mr Right – a TV show with a winning formula – which Jas has been tasked with producing. What better place to escape her own personal drama than in a lavish villa in the hills of Ibiza? But with twelve gorgeous contestants competing for the love of one perfect man, there is bound to be trouble in paradise. It's Jas's job to see through the secrets, the backstabbing and lies – and there's no shortage of any of it...

"Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) follows the four Lorimer sisters in the wake of their father's death. Penniless and reliant on each other, they decide to open a photography studio at 20B Baker Street, offering the citizens of London quality portraits. It's the 1880s and photography is not only growing in popularity and accessibility, but those with a critical eye are elevating the medium associated with quick and steady cash into a true art form. With more women entering the workforce out of necessity and rebellion, the Lorimer sisters take advantage of newfound independence as they work to survive poverty, the grind and smoke of London, fraught courtships, and melodramatic twists of fate. A novel of sisterhood, love, the female gaze and postmortem photography Levy deftly balances along the thin lines of romance and realism, art and commerce"--

Episodic novel of the life of a crippled, Jewish South African. Felix Greenspan is South African, Jewish and the victim of cerebral palsy -- like Lionel Abraham himself. Even ordinary, everyday accomplishments are difficult for him. He has his own heroes, and he finds love, rarely -- but he finds it, sometimes freely given, sometimes bought.

Dive into the suspenseful realms of "The Golden Beast," a 1926 mystery thriller penned by the prolific British writer E. Phillips Oppenheim. Renowned for his bestselling novels that soared in popularity during the interwar years, Oppenheim weaves a gripping tale that unfolds against the backdrop of a Norfolk country estate owned by the Honerton family. The story kicks off with the accidental death of Lord Honerton's son, leading to a tragic sequence of events. Seeking justice, Lord Honerton forces the execution of the gamekeeper who objected to his romantic pursuits with his daughter. A haunting curse befalls the family, and years later, the youngest son vanishes without a trace, confounding the efforts of Scotland Yard to locate him. "The Golden Beast" takes readers on a rollercoaster of suspense and mystery, exploring the repercussions of a family's dark secrets. Oppenheim's masterful storytelling keeps you on the edge of your seat, unraveling a gripping narrative that delves into the complexities of justice, tragedy, and the enigmatic ties that bind a family.