Selected eBooks: 2012

Waiting at the Paris airport, two immigrants from Djibouti reveal parallel stories of war, child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs, and hunger. Bashir is recently discharged from the army and wounded, finding himself inside the French Embassy. Harbi, whose wife, Alice, has been killed by the police, is there too--arrested earlier as a political suspect. An embassy official mistakes Bashir for Harbi's son, and as Harbi does not deny it, both will be exiled to France, Alice's home country.

Matthew Kirkpatrick's debut, Light without Heat, is an inventive, surprising collection of short stories full of odd, marginal characters rendered with surreal humor and lyrical, often beautiful language. Stories in the collection explore the flawed nature of memory, workplace malaise, the isolation of home, and the last throes of ending love. No two stories in Light without Heat are the same, yet all of them work toward sharing human experience in new, innovative ways.

"Safe as Houses," the debut story collection of Marie-Helene Bertino, proves that not all homes are shelters. The titular story revolves around an aging English professor who, mourning the loss of his wife, robs other people's homes of their sentimental knick-knacks. In Carry Me Home, Sisters of Saint Joseph, a failed commercial writer moves into the basement of a convent and inadvertently discovers the secrets of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. A girl, hoping to talk her brother out of enlisting in the army, brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet, dreamy North Of.

Dog Eat Dog is a remarkable record of being young in a nation undergoing tremendous turmoil, and provides a glimpse into South Africa's pivotal kwaito generation and life in Soweto. Dingamanzi Makhedama Njomane, a college student in South Africa who spends his days partying, skipping class, and picking up girls. But Dingz, as he is known to his friends, is living in charged times, and his discouraging college life plays out against the backdrop of South Africa's first democratic elections, the spread of AIDS, and financial difficulties that threaten to force him out of school.

A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt, feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly assimilates this information and all returns to normal. Faced with this virtual invisibility-for no matter what actions he takes, the world seems to take no notice-Andreas is cut adrift from the certainties of his life.

On Captivity is the first translation into English of Del Cautiverio, Manuel Ciges Aparicio's account of his imprisonment in the notorious La Cabaña fortress in Havana during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98). Ciges's account includes detailed observations concerning prison organization, perceptions of political events and personalities of the time, as well as graphic descriptions of the daily life of the men confined in the infamous prison.

The novel follows the life of "half-foreign" Marion Ascough - a character based on Eaton's own sister - while never identifying her "foreignness." Escaping the unrelenting racial discrimination her family endures in Quebec, Marion follows her dream of being an artist by moving to New York, where she becomes "Canadian" instead of ethnic - a more palatable foreignness. Having successfully stripped herself of her ethnicity, Marion continues to experience discrimination and objectification as a woman, failing as an artist and becoming an artist's model.

When you step inside Patrick Lawler's Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town. Patrick Lawler's novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.

Kabul, Afghanistan, 1979: CIA station chief Lucius Burling, an idealistic but flawed product of his nation's intelligence establishment, barely survives the assassination of the American ambassador. Burling's reaction to the murder, and his desire to understand its larger meaning, propel him on a journey of intrigue and betrayal that will reach its ultimate end in the streets of Shanghai, months after 9/11.

The novel begins with generous stories about Captain Eighty, his young wife, the poker-playing genius named Quiver, and their children and grandchildren who live on a rustic houseboat. Captain Shammer, an extraordinary grandson reared on the houseboat and with no formal education, is appointed the chairman of a troubled Department of Native American Indian Studies at a prominent university.

In "The World of a Few Minutes Ago, " award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character's internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings.

Newly widowed Natalie Waters expects only nostalgia and solitude at her quiet, rustic cabin. But the wilderness conceals more than one perilous mystery. Where in Wisconsin's Northwoods did the notorious gangster John Dillinger hide $210,000 following a violent FBI shootout? And why do the local timberwolves incite so much rage among Natalie's neighbors?

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists.

Pat Faunce yearns for more than his carefree New York life and his open relationship with Stu, an airline pilot. Above all, he wants to be a father. He persuades a reluctant Stu to move to Cape Cod, where they enlist Debora, a charismatic Brazilian immigrant, as a surrogate mother. But the men's attempt to have a child creates new emotional complications--with Stu's parents and sister, with Debora and her husband, and with each other.

In the Shade of the Shady Tree is a collection of stories set in the Western Australian wheatbelt, a vast grain-growing area that ranges across the southwestern end of the immense Australian interior. Kinsella's stories offer glimpses into the lives of the people who call this area home, as the reader journeys from just north of the town of Geraldton to the far eastern and southern shires of the region. The land itself is a dominant character, with dust, gnarled scrubland, and the need for rain underpinning human endeavor.

The Past Ahead is the story of the destinies of two people after their experiences of the genocide in Rwanda. Isaro is orphaned, exiled, and now returned to her native country. Niko is a character in a novel that Isaro writes to help her understand her country's recent horrific past. Isaro's quest to recover the memory of the life she has lost is haunted by her nightmare imaginings, whose horror is given expression through Niko, a mute social outcast.

Reaching 20,320 feet into and above the clouds, the peak of Denali is the highest and coldest summit in North America. In this novel of adventure, adversity, and ambition by renowned mountaineer and writer Nicholas O'Connell, four men set out to conquer it. In the course of their ascent the group battles avalanches, fierce winds, and mind-numbing cold before their bond begins to splinter, leading inexorably to tragedy.

For more than two thousand years, Old London Bridge evolved through many fragile wooden forms until it became the first bridge built of stone since the Roman invaders. In this stunningly original novel, Old London Bridge is as much a living, breathing character as its architect, the priest Peter de Colechurch, who began work on it in 1176, partly to honor Archbishop Thomas à Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral.

Anthropologist Kevin Jones takes the reader on a journey into the world of the Aché, hunter-gatherers of the deep jungles of Paraguay. The Aché were among the last tribal peoples to come into peaceful contact with the outside world, with some bands leaving the forest only in the late 1970s. Jones was fortunate to live among them while conducting ethnoarchaeological fieldwork as part of his graduate studies. Jones tells the story of a fictional Aché band forced to deal with the tribulations of living in a forest gradually diminished by the loggers and farmers.

Sefer delicately explores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwar generation. The novel's protagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living in Vienna--someone whose professional life puts him in daily contact with the traumas of others but who has found it difficult to address his own family background, especially his memories of his father. During a two-week trip to his father's birthplace, Kraków--a visit he has long postponed--he begins to sort out some of his feelings and to connect with a past the memory of which is swiftly disintegrating.

The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father's abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. In other stories Bosworth's narrators--a mother left to care for her son's suicidal dog, an editor haunted by a dog-eared manuscript--seem to grab hold of the reins and run off with their fates.

A troubled Episcopal priest and would-be activist, Malcolm Walker has failed twice over--first in an effort to shock his New England congregants out of their complacency and second in an attempt at suicide. Discharged from the hospital and haunted by images of the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, he heads home to the mountains of northwestern South Carolina, the state's "dark corner," where a gathering storm of private grief and public rage awaits him.

It's 2047 in Dayton, Ohio. In response to food and water shortages, the U.S. government has developed an enormous, and powerfully successful, agricultural area--the "Heartland Grid"--just north of the city. In the meantime, in the wake of declining American power a multinational force has established itself in Cleveland. Behind these quickly shifting alliances lies a troubling yet tantalizing question: what will the American future look like? Sharp and Dangerous Virtues is the story of ordinary people caught in situations they had never planned for or even imagined.

Shajar al-Durr, known as Tree of Pearls, was one of the most famous Arab queens and the only woman in the medieval Arab world to rule in her own name. Her narrative is one element of a much larger story of the unsettled political climate of thirteenth-century Egypt. In this eponymous novel, Zaydan charts the fall of the Ayyubid Dynasty and the rise of the Mamluke Dynasty through the adventures of Tree of Pearls and Rukn al- Din Baybars, a young Mamluke commander who eventually triumphs as the ruler of Egypt.

Elizabeth Dodd explores a variety of landscapes, reading the records left by inhabitants and by time itself. In spring in the Yucatán peninsula, she marks the equinox among the ruins of the Maya. In summer in the Orkney Islands, she considers linguistic and historic connections with Icelandic sagas. In tallgrass country in the fall, she observes bison and black-footed ferrets returning to their ancestral landscape. In winter in the canyons of the Ancestral Puebloans, she notes the standstill positions of the sun and the moon.

It's been a year since the body of seventeen-year-old Kelsey Little was found in the river outside Dark Vespers, Nebraska. Although the town may have forgotten, those who loved her most have certainly not: Javier Martinez, her troubled ex-boyfriend and the father of the child no one knew she was carrying; Sam and Hank, her parents, whose marriage is coming apart under the pressure of grief and not-knowing; and Ike Parrish, a reclusive eccentric whose clairvoyant "river spells" compel him to come forward with information about Kelsey's disappearance and death.

In this funny, brainy, thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer looks at romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the information age. In ten captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love--whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child--drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak.

When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: "Take me back the way I came." And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo.