An abandoned safe deposit box in a New York City bank is opened to reveal a bundle of old letters, photographs and priceless jewellery. Court clerk Jane Willoughby is charged with discovering more about the mystery of the box's owner, the late Marguerite Wallace Pearson di San Pignelli. Why did Marguerite never claim these most precious possessions? Who are her heirs? Are they still alive? After arranging for the jewellery to be valued, Jane and Christie's auctioneer Phillip Lawton are thrown together in a quest to find out more about Marguerite's story. But neither of them could imagine where the contents of the box could lead them . . . or how it will change their lives forever. An extraordinary, sweeping story from master storyteller Danielle Steel.

A literary love story that rivals those celebrated in earlier classics. "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" In Helprin s rhapsodic rendering . . . "In Sunlight and in Shadow" is . . . the romance of life itself. " Los Angeles Times" In the summer of 1946, New York City pulses with energy. Harry Copeland, a World War II veteran, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as each falls for the other in an instant. They pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine s choice of Harry over her longtime fiance endangers Harry s livelihood and threatens his life. In the end, Harry must summon the strength of his wartime experience to fight for Catherine, and risk everything. In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, ["In Sunlight and in Shadow"] is a spiritual pendant to Winter s Tale and every bit as extraordinary . . . Even the most stubbornly resistant readers will soon be disarmed by the nobility of the novel s sentiments and seduced by the pure music of its prose. "Wall Street Journal" [NO AUTHOR PHOTO] Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of Winter s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, The Pacific, Memoir from Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, Ellis Island, and numerous other works. "

From New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky, a delectable novel following one Manhattan block as an ancient cheesecake recipe-and a conniving landlord-change the Upper West Side forever. West 86th Street knows its desserts. It's the 1970s, and poppyseed strudel, praline ice cream cake, and New York cheesecake are as integral to Manhattan's Upper West Side as clustered pigeons, suited doormen, and greasy diners. That is, until Cato comes to town. Cato the Elder, a Roman born in 234 BCE, is credited with the earliest written recipe ever found. A recipe for . . . cheesecake. No cream cheese, no graham cracker crust, somehow savory and sweet, the recipe is enigmatic-and suddenly, it's all anyone on West 86th Street can talk about. The Katsikases, a Greek cheesemaking family who immigrated to open a restaurant in New York, added Cato's pastry to their menu as a ploy to attract “upscale” diners. After a glowing write-up in the Times , the recipe becomes a neighborhood fixation-and the Katsikases' patriarch, Art, buys up as much of the block's real estate as he can. As the portentous pastry appears in the lives of the old-school residents Art is pricing out of their apartments, a sidewalk view of West 86th Street emerges: A high-profile family planning a high-pressure bat mitzvah, a painter's muse with a terrible secret, an eccentric art collector plotting revenge. Sometimes laced with green M&Ms, sometimes with sage, sometimes with spite, Cato's cheesecake heralds change as West 86th Street is transformed for good.

"New York Times" bestseller An unforgettable novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, told "with humor and optimism...through the eyes of an irresistible heroine" ("People")--from the acclaimed author of "The Red Tent." Anita Diamant's "vivid, affectionate portrait of American womanhood" ("Los Angeles Times"), follows the life of one woman, Addie Baum, through a period of dramatic change. Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, to finding the love of her life, eighty-five-year-old Addie recounts her adventures with humor and compassion for the naive girl she once was. Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, "The" "Boston Girl" is a moving portrait of one woman's complicated life in twentieth century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world. "Diamant brings to life a piece of feminism's forgotten history" ("Good Housekeeping") in this "inspirational...page-turning portrait of immigrant life in the early twentieth century" ("Booklist").

This sequel to "The Immigrants" depicts the life of Barbara Lavette, daughter of the son of a poor Italian immigrant and a woman of San Francisco's elite, from the Depression through World War II.

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees – among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks – they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they’re no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, they’re stuck.Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic but comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere – or Canada, as it turns out.The Free World is the glorious debut novel by David Bezmozgis, whose collection of stories was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and who was recently included in the New Yorker’s prestigious ‘20 under 40’ list.

It is the late summer of 1938, Europe is about to explode, the Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he's coming--a secret bureau within the Reich Foreign Ministry has for years been waging political warfare against France, using bribery, intimidation, and corrupt newspapers to weaken French morale and degrade France's will to defend herself. For their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don't know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris. From Alan Furst, the bestselling author, often praised as the best spy novelist ever, comes a novel that's truly hard to put down. "Mission to Paris" includes beautifully drawn scenes of romance and intimacy, and the novel is alive with extraordinary characters: the German Baroness von Reschke, a famous hostess deeply involved in Nazi clandestine operations; the assassins Herbert and Lothar; the Russian film actress and spy Olga Orlova; the Hungarian diplomat and spy, Count Janos Polanyi; along with the French cast of Stahl's movie, German film producers, and the magnetic women in Stahl's life, the socialite Kiki de Saint-Ange and the emigre Renate Steiner. But always at the center of the novel is the city of Paris, the heart and soul of Europe--its alleys and bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it was their last. As always, Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it. Praise for Alan Furst "Unfolds like a vivid dream . . . One couldn't ask for a more engrossing novel.""--The Wall Street Journal, "about" Spies of the Balkans" " " "Though set in a specific place and time, Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell."--"Los Angeles Times, " about" The Spies of Warsaw" "Alan Furst's novels swing a beam into the shadows at the edges of the great events leading to World War II. Readers come knowing he'll deliver effortless narrative."--"USA Today, " about "The Foreign Correspondent" "Positively bristles with plot, characters and atmosphere . . . "Dark Voyage" has the ingredients of several genres--the mystery, the historical novel, the espionage thriller, the romance--but it rises above all of them."--"The Washington Post, " about" Dark Voyage" "No other espionage writer touches [Furst's] stylish forays into Budapest and Berlin, Moscow and Paris. No other writer today captures so well the terror and absurdity of the spy, the shabby tension and ennui of emigre communities at the time. His characters are hopeless, lethal, charming. His voice is, above all, knowing."--"Boston Sunday Globe, " about "Blood of Victory"

Endore's classic werewolf novel--now back in print for the first time in over forty years--helped define a genre and set a new standard in horror fiction. The werewolf is one of the great iconic figures of horror in folklore, legend, film, and literature. And connoisseurs of horror fiction know that The Werewolf of Paris is a cornerstone work, a masterpiece of the genre that deservedly ranks with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Endore's classic novel has not only withstood the test of time since it was first published in 1933, but it boldly used and portrayed elements of sexual compulsion in ways that had never been seen before, at least not in horror literature. In this gripping work of historical fiction, Endore's werewolf, an outcast named Bertrand Caillet, travels across revolutionary Paris in the 1870s seeking to calm the beast within. Stunning in its sexual frankness and eerie, fog-enshrouded visions, this novel was decidedly influential for the generations of horror and science fiction authors who came afterward.

"A rollicking tale." --Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice Johnny One-Eye is bringing about the rediscovery of one of the most "singular and remarkable [careers] in American literature" (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World). In this picaresque tour de force that reanimates Revolutionary Manhattan through the story of double agent John Stocking, the bastard son of a whorehouse madam and possibly George Washington, Jerome Charyn has given us one of the most memorable historical novels in years. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude's house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, "Sir Billy" and "Black Dick," and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton. Not since John Barth's The Sotweed Factor and Gore Vidal's Burr has a novel so dramatically re-created America's historical beginnings. Reading group guide included.

In the desegregation era of the 1970s, a first grader copes with being bused to a white school in this story for young children about racism and an essential time of change. "One of the Ten Best Books of the Year," The New York Times . Brewster is excited about starting first grade . . . until Mama announces that he'll be attending Central, a school in the white part of town. Mama says they have art and music and a library bursting with books, but Brewster isn't so sure he'll fit in. And he's right. Being black at a white school isn't easy. Brewster winds up spending his first day in detention at the library. But there he meets a very special person: Miss O'Grady. The librarian sees into Brewster's heart and gives him not only the gift of books but also encourages Brewster to believe in himself. This is an invaluable, unique, view into a tumultous time and the good that came into the lives of school children.

Set in Chicago's Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park, this is the story of three families--adults and children alike--coming of age during the tumultuous, turbulent days of the Iran hostage crisis. At the close of the 1970s, the Rovners, the Wasserstroms, and the Wills-Silvermans will have to shed their pasts to cross into that new, shining decade of hope: the 80s.

The Predators combines in one novel the finest attributes of A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Carpetbaggers. It will take you on a wild odyssey through the gaudy and reckless life of Jerry Cooper--his struggles to survive in Depression-era New York, his years in Europe during the Second World War, his friends, his lovers, his life in organized crime, and his entrance into the world of high-powered international business. The Predators is the defining work of Harold Robbins's spectacular career.

They are two sworn enemies with a single obsession: a woman on the run from them both. Scott Weiss is a private detective. John Foy is a professional killer. The woman is Julie Wyant, a hooker with the face of an angel. Julie spent one night with Foy--a night of psychopathic cruelty that Foy called love. Desperate to get away from him, she vanished without a trace. And Foy wants her back. There's only one man who can find her: Weiss, the best locate operative in the business. She's begged him not to look for her, fearing he'll bring the killer in his wake. But Weiss can't stay away. Now, from a town called Paradise, through a wilderness that feels like hell, Weiss searches for Julie--and the killer follows, waiting for his chance. They are two expert hunters matching move for move--until it ends on Damnation Street.

In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain -- a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the twentieth century. But now he has a story he thinks will become his next novel: The large brass altar cross from a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan disappeared, then mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. He befriends the church's maverick rector and the synagogue's young female rabbi as they try to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why.

Paris 1899. Theaters and galleries are vibrant with artistic energy. The new Metro is under construction, and so is the site for the centennial Universal Exhibition. But there is also savage political upheaval. Asylums and jails are overcrowded. The Dreyfus Affair has released a riotous surge of anti-Semitism. Bostonian lawyer James Norton has been sent by his mother to bring back his invalid sister Elie and his younger brother Raf, a journalist., but the brutal deaths of the actress Olympe Fabre, and then of her sister Judith in the asylum of Salpêtrière, draw the siblings into a dark web of violence.

Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fiance among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther's recollections of that terrible day? Esther's granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America, "Triangle "forces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.

Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

New York City€™s Lower East Side on the eve of WWI. Abraham Cahan, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Daily Forward, receives a letter addressed to his €œBintel Brif€ column from a twenty-three-year-old girl who confesses to living in sin with her uncle and seeks his advice. The girl€™s description of her plight inflames Cahan€™s imagination; the enclosed photograph, a young woman in a white cotton shift gazing languidly up at the camera from her bed, overwhelms him with desire. €œPeering at the photograph, wondering if her slackened, unprotected presentation of herself was the aftermath of a feverish embrace, Cahan felt a ghostly invisible presence possess him, settling into the emptiness in his soul.€ Thus begins the drama of a righteous man€™s struggle to free himself from an obsession that threatens to destroy him and mortally wound his family. Desperate to fathom the mystery of her power, Cahan explores the girl€™s past only to discover that her st

Caring and compassionate, LAPD homicide detective Jessica Drake isn't about to write off the death of an elderly man found dead in a secluded area of Rancho Park as simply a heart attack. The nonresident guest at an old age home was in vigorous health, with plenty of friends...and suddenly he's mysteriously dead. Jessie suspects foul playIn search of what caused the old gentleman's death, Jessie combs the records of local retirement homes and prods the memories of the residents. She discovers that the victim was the only person in his family to come out of the concentration camps alive--and his demise is just one of a number of mysterious deaths among camp survivors. The possible connection to the Holocaust is a particularly heart-wrenching irony to Jessie, who has just recently learned of her own link to the historic atrocity. Now she's just determined to follow a twisted trail of decades-old deceit to catch a killer...and spare the survivors of the death camps from the treachery of a modern-day maniac.Caring and compassionate, LAPD homicide detective Jessica Drake isn't about to write off the death of an elderly man found dead in a secluded area of Rancho Park as simply a heart attack. The nonresident guest at an old age home was in vigorous health, with plenty of friends...and suddenly he's mysteriously dead. Jessie suspects foul play. In search of what caused the old gentleman's death, Jessie combs the records of local retirement homes and prods the memories of the residents. She discovers that the victim was the only person in his family to come out of the concentration camps alive--and his demise is just one of a number of mysterious deaths among camp survivors. The possibleconnection to the Holocaust is a particularly heart-wrenching irony to Jessie, who has just recently learned of her own link to the historic atrocity. Now she's determined to follow a twisted trail of decades-old deceit to catch a killer...and spare the survivors of the death camps from the treachery of a modern-day maniac.Caring and compassionate, LAPD homicide detective Jessica Drake isn't about to write off the death of an elderly man found dead in a secluded area of Rancho Park as simply a heart attack. The nonresident guest at an old age home was in vigorous health, with plenty of friends...and suddenly he's mysteriously dead. Jessie suspects foul play. In search of what caused the old gentleman's death, Jessie combs the records of local retirement homes and prods the memories of the residents. She discovers that the victim was the only person in his family to come out of the concentration camps alive--and his demise is just one of a number of mysterious deaths among camp survivors. The possible connection to the Holocaust is a particularly heart-wrenching irony to Jessie, who has just recently learned of her own link to the historic atrocity. Now she's determined to follow a twisted trail of decades-old deceit to catch a killer...and spare the survivors of the death camps from the treachery of a modern-day maniac.

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry -- Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin. Meanwhile Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal papers left by her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. No Saints or Angels is a powerful book in which "Mr. Klima's keen sense of history, his deep compassion for the ordinary people caught up in its toils, and his abiding awareness of the fragility and resilience of human life shine through.... Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klima is a writer able to show us what's extraordinary about ordinary life." (The Washington Times). "Ultimately, it's Prague, with its centuries of glory and misery, that gives No Saints or Angels its humane power." -- Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Washington Post Book World" A compassionate realist, [Klima] unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general ... [and] fills it with mercy." -- Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring and valuable." -- Jules Verdone, The Hartford Courant