Strange Haven


Book Description

The author, part of the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai, tells of his experiences growing up in the ghetto under Japanese occupation.




Strange Heaven


Book Description

Strange Heaven is tearfully hilarious, as funny and appalling as real life. Bridget Murphy, almost 18, has gone to Halifax from industrial Cape Breton, had her baby, and given it up for adoption. She's apathetic, the doctors decide, so they transfer her to the psych ward of the children's hospital. There, she's cooped up with five seriously disturbed teenagers and a flock of wan children. Sent home for Christmas, Bridget faces domestic uproar. Her grandmother, Margaret P., raves and prays from her bed, banging the wall with her bedpan. Bridget's kind-hearted parents, Robert and Joan, also take care of Robert's mentally handicapped brother, Rollie. Joan's efforts to keep the lid on are no match for Robert's wild profanity, Margaret's dementia, and Rollie's efforts to join the fray. Bridget's boozy friends, her whining ex-boyfriend, and the family chaos make up a "strange heaven" in which her apathy starts to lift. Her vague plan to hibernate at home forever is off. Whatever she does, her drifting days are over.




Scribner's Magazine


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The Palace of Strange Girls


Book Description

Blackpool, England, 1959. The Singleton family is on holiday. For seven-year-old Beth, just out of the hospital, this means struggling to fill in her 'I-Spy' book and avoiding her mother Ruth's eagle-eyed supervision. Her sixteen-year-old sister Helen, meanwhile, has befriended a waitress whose fun-loving ways hint at a life beyond Ruth's strict rules. But times are changing. As foreman of the local cotton mill, Ruth's husband, Jack, is caught between unions and owners whose cost-cutting measures threaten an entire way of life. And his job isn't the only thing at risk. When a letter arrives from Crete, a secret re-emerges from the rubble of Jack's wartime past that could destroy his marriage. As Helen is tempted outside the safe confines of her mother's stern edicts with dramatic consequences, an unexpected encounter inspires Beth to forge her own path. Over the holiday week, all four Singletons must struggle to find their place in the shifting world of promenade amusements, illicit sex, and stilted afternoon teas in this touching and evocative novel.




Scribner's Magazine


Book Description




Paraíso


Book Description

Like a Coen brothers noir south of the border, Paraíso is a genre-bending story about love, sibling relationships, and the dark side of paradise. Peter and Wendy—their mother chose the names—felt as close as twins, despite their difference in age. As teens, they fled their wealthy Philadelphia home in the family station wagon and headed for Mexico, only to be discovered sleeping in the car on the banks of the Mississippi, in Huck Finn country. Now, many years later, estranged by an apparent betrayal as profound as their family's dysfunction, the two live separate lives, Peter as an editor in New York, Wendy as an edgy sports photographer with a taste for risk. With a new book out and an invitation to Los Cabos, she drives the Mercedes inherited from their father to Baja California, finally completing the trip begun twenty years earlier. But when the engine fails near a small town named Paraíso—Paradise—she lingers, exploring its underside in an affair with a dangerous man and, all too suddenly, becoming witness to a vicious crime. Meanwhile, in New York, Peter can't help but think of Wendy. When, from his apartment in lower Manhattan, he watches the Twin Towers fall on a beautiful September day, he knows it's time to leave his comfortable life, go find Wendy, and make peace with his long-lost sister. A noirish tale reminiscent of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, Paraíso traces the journey from a mother's dark secret to a place where love, and even perfect love, is possible. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.




The Strange Sighting


Book Description

Alice England and her friends are back with a mystery that throws them straight in the deep end. Alice has a special talent. When she touches the belongings of the dead people who come through her father's funeral home, she discovers things about their lives – and their deaths. Marine biologist Stingray Bolland dies suddenly, but no one suspects anything sinister. That's until Alice learns that he was studying a new species in the waters around Damocles Cove – and he saw something mysterious right before he died. More and more people are reporting a weird creature in the cove, and there are claims it's a storm kelpie of Scottish legend. Then, on a sightseeing boat tour, Alice and her friends spot something astonishing. Could the legend be true? As fate, fortune and science collide, Alice must uncover what's really going on in Damocles Cove. Maybe the truth is even stranger than the legend.




The Day of rest


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What a Hazard a Letter Is


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The Great Bonanza


Book Description