Based on a analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, this book is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book are constantly and comically frustrated.

When two maps surface, each bearing the same hidden riddle, nineteen-year-old Elias, a royal mapmaker, sets sail with King Ulises to uncover long-held secrets behind the mysterious disappearance of the king's two young brothers eighteen years earlier. Eighteen years ago two princes of the island kingdom of St. John del Mar were kidnapped and murdered by the rival kingdom of Mondrago. Elias grew up without his father, killed trying to protect the...

Juliet Nicolson pieces together colorful personalities, historic moments, and intimate details to create a social history of the two years following the Great War in Britain. Not since Nicolson's The Perfect Summer have we seen an account that so vividly captures a nation's psyche at a particular moment in history. The euphoria of Armistice Day 1918 vaporizes to reveal the carnage that war has left in its wake. But from Britain's despair emerges new...

Bobi Conn was raised in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia. This memoir presents her account of survival despite being born poor, female, and cloistered in the Appalachian region.

Keeping his deathbed promise to his father--to free the small town of Mir Ali in Pakistan's Tribal Areas from oppressors--Hayat is forced to make terrible choices during a single morning when his brother, Sikander, and his troubled wife, Mina, are taken hostage by members of the Taliban.

It's 1968 in America. Change is blowing in the wind, but seemingly far removed from the unrest in the cities is the small town of Mill Valley, where for generations the shadow of the Bellows family has loomed large. It is in their mansion on the edge of town that Sarah, a young girl with horrible secrets, turned her tortured life into a series of scary stories, written in a book that has transcended time.

"Nestled in the hills of West Virginia lies White Sulphur Springs, home to the Greenbrier Resort. Long a playground for presidents and film stars, the Greenbrier has its own gravitational pull. Over ten decades, four generations of the Zelner family mustgrapple with their place in its shadow . . . and within their own family. In 1942, young mother Sylvia is desperate to escape her stifling marriage, especially when it means co-running Zelner's general...