Will comes to the Gundersons as a ten-year-old orphan with a broken heart and a sizeable trust fund. His adoptive mother, Beth, tends to his emotional wounds while her husband, Reverend Gunderson, has less sympathetic motives. Eight-year-old Annie is delighted to have a big brother, but as the years pass, she and Will find their feelings for each other evolving. The prim Reverend, horrified by the “inappropriateness” of the relationship, takes advantage of circumstances and attempts to wrest Will away from both Annie and his inheritance. But is love strong enough to overcome secrets and selfishness? Annie and Will leads you through the turbulent times of the Sixties through the eyes of an adoring girl and her adopted brother. A story of both triumph and pain, you will witness the blossoming relationship of two young people who are brought together by a mother’s death and then torn apart by jealousy, hatred, and greed.

From the Dust Jacket: After thirty years of being Annie McHugh, Annie McHugh discovers that she is, in fact, someone else. Her beloved and hugely respectable parents forged her birth. certificate.

She hires Gerry, a private detective with a strong look of George Clooney, to track down her real mother. But how is it that when Annie goes to confront her mother in her large mansion in the smart end of Dublin, she ends up working for her instead?

Will Annie reveal the truth to her frosty new employer? Is this the beginning of Annie’s new life? And has Annie completely finished with Gerry’s services?

Annie has decisions to make ...

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About the Author: Maureen Martella was brought up in Co. Dublin with five sisters and a brother. Having moved to England in the sixties, fallen in love with an Italian and returned home to Ireland five months pregnant, she continued to travel after having her children, ending up in Bel Air where she worked as assistant to a mortician. She now lives in rural Ireland.

From the Dust Jacket: The Annunciation is the first novel of an exciting new voice in American fiction: Ellen Gilchrist, whose volume of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, won praise on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Gilchrist is the real thing,” wrote The Washington Post. “In fact, it’s difficult to review a first book as good as this without resorting to every known superlative cliché....”

A descendant and disciple of the great school of Southern writers, Gilchrist is a master storyteller whose deftly honed characters and glittering dialogue are woven through a tapestry of landscapes and a society that is both seductive and terrifying. With an ear that is near perfect, Gilchrist captures the sounds and voices of the South, old and new. With a vision that is ironic but sympathetic, she sees through our everyday hypocrisies and seeks the very heart of human endeavor.

Amanda, who at fourteen had her illegitimate child taken from her, is now a rich, bored, middle-aged would-be writer who has left her husband and decadent life in New Orleans for the hill country of Arkansas. She is engaged in a competition to translate the work of an obscure eighteenth-century French poetess, whose own illicit affair led to her imprisonment and eventual suicide.

Amanda finds herself infatuated with a student—a musician, an intense but unsophisticated local boy. What at first appears to be only a sexual fling becomes a grand and impossible passion. Amanda discovers she is pregnant, as was the woman whose poems she re-creates, and we watch fascinated as the parallel stories of these women unfold, each ending in a burst of brilliance and tragedy. The Annunciation is a rich and assured first novel. As the Times Literary Supplement said, “Gilchrist’s manner is both stylish and idiomatic—a rare and potent combination.”

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About the Author: Ellen Gilchrist lives in New York, and writes poetry as well as fiction. She was “raised in the Mississippi delta, which is essentially a British colony, and was taught to think of myself as an Englishwoman and a Scot.” She served as a contributing editor of the Courier from 1975 to 1978 and was the recipient, in 1979, of a Fellowship Grant in Fiction from the US National Endowment for the Arts.

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By the Same Author: Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior (1994, University Press of Mississippi), among others.

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Compiler’s Note: See also, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist by Margaret Donovan Bauer (1999, University Press of Florida).

From the Publisher: Angie (Evangelina) Evans—prominent attorney specializing in lesbian legal issues, partner in a committed relationship, mother to an adopted daughter—seems to many to have the best of all worlds. To herself, however, she is caught amid the contradictions that make up her life. Devoted to her own daughter, passionately involved in her legal work, and committed to her lover, Angie, nevertheless, has a difficult relationship with her own mother, must constantly struggle for support within her law group to continue her work, and is involved in a seemingly pointless affair with a legal intern. As she fights to make sense of the labels that have been applied to her—mother, daughter, lover, lesbian—Angie finds her crisis of identity boiling over.

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About the Author: Ruthann Robson is a professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law.

From the Back Cover: I was an ordinary eighties California girl, dead before my time, until psychic Amanda Lee Minter pulled me out of the time loop where I was reliving my death over and over. Now I’m Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire. I decided to put my spooky talents to use in helping Amanda Lee track down bad guys and killers (including my own).

It’s taken time to figure out exactly how that will work (our first case was definitely a learning experience for all involved), so when a young woman asks Amanda Lee for help convincing her best friend to leave a dangerously hot-tempered boyfriend, I’m ready and willing to use our collective powers on her behalf. But some people are dangerous not only to the living—especially when there are darker forces involved...

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About the Author: Chris Marie Green is a full-time writer who has published under her own name and the pseudonyms Crystal Green and Christine Cody.

From the Dust Jacket: Jenny Brown has three simple wishes: to enjoy a happy marriage, to have a job she loves, and to be reunited with her birth mother. But after moving from academic Cambridge to suburban San Diego, Jenny finds her biologist husband more interested in his transgenic mice than in her. She’s fired from her job, she can’t locate her mother, and she’s even giving up on motherhood herself.

Then she stumbles onto the Institute of Affirmation, a quirky adult education center where every idea is a good one. With courses like Drawing Blindfolded and Home Cooking for Pets, it doesn’t appear to be Jenny’s kind of place. Yet she finds herself returning again and again. Could it be that the Institute of Affirmation with its disarming director, Michael, has something she needs after all? The answer is yes!

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About the Author: Sara Lewis is the author of two other novels, But I Love You Anyway and Heart Conditions, and the collection Trying to Smile and Other Stories. Booklist has called her work “popular fiction at its best.” She lives in San Diego with her husband and two children.

From the Dust Jacket: On Valentine’s Day, 1946, Tommy Sweatt, a North Carolina man with a fifth-grade education and a teeth-grinding desire to amount to something, becomes the father of twin sons. He names them Thomas Edison Sweatt and Jack Dempsey Sweatt, and he drives them, from the cradle on, to be the best and the brightest. For a time they both are. When Jack, nicknamed “Lucky,” contracts polio in the fall of 1954, he becomes figuratively invisible to his father. Tom Ed and Lucky’s relationship is weakened by their father’s obvious preference for the former, and as soon as he is able, Lucky disassociates himself from his family.

It is now 1992: Tom Ed is the good ol’ boy Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina in a heated race and Lucky returns with a mind to reconnect with his estranged family. Infidelity, deception, pride, and a rich man’s secret wrath conspire to turn the election—and the fortunes of the Sweatt family—in directions no one could have foreseen.

Set against the murky backdrop of Southern politics and the Christian Right, ambition and the tidal pull of family, Answers to Lucky is a novel of remarkable power and indelible effect.

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About the Author: Howard Owen was born and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on the edge of his grandfather’s farm. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, deputy managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the author of Littlejohn and Fat Lightning. He lives with his wife, Karen, in Midlothian, Virginia.

From the Dust Jacket: From the glamorous uptown world of opera to the seedy underbelly of New York City’s worst tenements, a page-turning roller-coaster ride of kidnappings, betrayals, bribes, hidden identities, and twisted intrigues.

By 1908 Francesca Frascatti has reached the pinnacle of success in the opera world. A fiery-haired Neapolitan diva with an infamously volatile temperament, Francesca secretly aches with regret for having given up her daughter, Maria Grazia, on the road to stardom, and she has come to America to find her and make amends. By night Francesca appears as Tosca, alternately delighting and tyrannizing the Manhattan Opera House; by day, she and Dante Romano, a detective posing as her lover, search for her daughter, who has reportedly moved to America to find a better life. Francesca and Dante must brave a sordid maze of Black Hand spies, corrupt Tammany Hall police officers, and greedy hooligans to reach Maria Grazia before her cunning and haughty grandfather can spirit her away to Italy and out of her scandalous mother’s reach forever.

At the opera house, Mina DiGianni, a gentle Italian lace maker from the Lower East Side tenements, becomes Francesca’s costume dresser and confidante. Like Francesca, Mina is haunted by her past, and by a secret she’s been keeping. Caught between the joyful hope of a new child growing inside her and the painful reality of her husband’s abuse and philandering, Mina discovers new possibilities while working for Francesca ... and is bewildered to find herself falling in love with Dante. When Mina’s husband and his mistress betray her, Mina realizes the terrible price her choices have exacted. As Mina and Francesca’s worlds intertwine, and then collide in a shocking turn of events, both women face the greatest challenges of their lives: to finally lay their pasts to rest and to embrace the present.

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About the Author: Jacqueline DeJohn was inspired to write Antonio’s Wife by her father’s stories about her grandmother Filomina, who came to America as a mail-order bride. This is her first novel. She lives in New York City.

From the Back Cover: Meet feisty, fun-loving Ruby Ross—thirty-four, mad red hair, mad (in general), adopted and searching for answers ... like, precisely whose genes are responsible for the mad red hair ... She’s impulsive, compulsive and unaware of what she’s about to unleash in her quest for the truth.

Isobel Ross is larger than life (despite being a serial dieter) and lives in a picturesque cottage in Donegal in the grounds of a manor-house hotel—but why are the new hotel-owners so keen to get rid of her? She’s harbouring secrets from the past and fiercely protective of her adopted daughter Ruby. Can she stop the wilful Ruby from opening a nasty can of worms?

Throw in Ruby’s forthcoming nuptials to the lovely Luke, a bling-loving bridesmaid in the shape of her best friend Frankie, a wedding planner called Gabriel who wears more make-up than the bride-to-be and you have chaos. Add to the mix a dusty box found by chance which leaves many questions unanswered, and you have a bewildered and rather ferocious Ruby asking is there ... Anyone for Me?

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About the Author: Fiona Cassidy is more locally known as Fionnuala McGoldrick. She still retains the Christian name given to her by her birth mother before she was adopted at four months old. She is an only child and grew up in Galbally, Co Tyrone. She currently lives in Donaghmore with her partner Philip and their collective children. She has recently given up work to pursue a career in writing and teaches creative writing classes and facilitates workshops when she can. She enjoys reading, collects quirky unusual jewellery and loves anything to do with angels.

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By the Same Author: Anyone for Secrets? (2012), among others.

From the Publisher: Ruby Reilly has just discovered the missing link in her life in the form of her birth mother. Everyone is happy except possibly her adoptive mother Isobel. In order to alleviate the tension Ruby decides to distract everyone (or perhaps drive everyone to distraction) by engaging in another manhunt ... this time for her birth father with unexpected consequences.

Frankie McCarthy’s relationship with her step-daughter has blossomed in the last few years but sours spectacularly as soon as a man becomes involved in the equation. Will Frankie be able to save the wilful Angelica from the clutches of the manipulative Jerome or will the teenager continue along her dangerous path just to spite her?

Jodi McDermott has arrived in Swiftstown because that’s where the bus dropped her off after she ran away! The former PR goddess has been reduced to living in a smelly flat where the feng shui is definitely not working and her neighbours never tire of whispering about her. Will she ever be able to reclaim her life or will the legacy of the betrayal she suffered haunt her forever?

Appearances can be deceiving and you just never know what happens behind closed doors... Anyone for Secrets?

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About the Author: Fiona Cassidy is more locally known as Fionnuala McGoldrick. She still retains the Christian name given to her by her birth mother before she was adopted at four months old. She is an only child and grew up in Galbally, Co Tyrone. She currently lives in Donaghmore with her partner Philip and their collective children. She has recently given up work to pursue a career in writing and teaches creative writing classes and facilitates workshops when she can. She enjoys reading, collects quirky unusual jewellery and loves anything to do with angels.

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By the Same Author: Anyone for Me? (2010), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the fast track for promotion to management within the Laundry, the super-secret British government agency tasked with defending the realm from occult threats. Assigned to External Assets, Bob discovers the company (unofficially) employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations that may embarrass Queen and Country.

So when Ray Schiller—an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill—becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the brilliant, beautiful, and entirely unpredictable Persephone Hazard to infiltrate the Golden Promise Ministries and discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. And it’s Bob’s job to make sure Persephone doesn’t cause an international incident.

But it’s a supernatural incident that Bob needs to worry about—a global threat even the Laundry may be unable to clean up.

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About the Author: Charles Stross, born in 1964, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of-six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 Hugo Award for best novella (“The Concrete Jungle”), Stross has had his work translated into more than twelve languages. He has worked as a pharmacist, software developer, and tech-industry journalist.

From the Dust Jacket: It’s said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wing can start a chain reaction that leads to an unstoppable storm. In the same way, random twists of fate and transitory acts of kindness and cruelty can shape our destinies, just as we affect the people around us ... sometimes in ways we can’t possibly imagine.

Jody ts a likable young man getting by in New York City at the turn of the millennium. On the surface, he seems to have it together, with friends, family, a decent job, and a steady string of girlfriends. But a secret history has left Jody scarred and broken inside, lacking faith in the future or himself. Like the ceaseless pull of a black hole, his buried secrets hold him back, defining him, until his trajectory crosses the path of three very different women, who, in their own ways, hold out the tantalizing possibility of healing, connection ... or self-destruction.

Approaching the Speed of Light is a thoughtful, deeply moving tale about the things we cannot leave behind—and how, sometimes, we have to go through the black hole to come out the other side.

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About the Author: Victoria Lustbader, a former book editor, lives on eastern Long Island with her husband, author Eric Van Lustbader. Her previous novels include Hidden and Stone Creek.

From the Dust Jacket: This a novel that is epic in conception. Its action, which courses the years from the Turkish massacres of 1895 to the close of the Russian Revolution, centers in that cradle land of races that lies between the Black and the Caspian Seas, of which the focal point is Ararat, the great mountain from which, it is held, Noah looked upon the receding waters.

Ararat is a story of the meek, the gentle people who have inherited no part of the earth, of their struggle to preserve their identity, and of their lost and homeless children. It is a story of racial clashes, of War and Revolution, of cruelty and heroism. It tells of two heroes, each representative of the polarities of human reliance: Amos Lyle, Texas cowhand turned missionary, who finds himself shepherding his flock before the storm of Turkish wrath, a biblical figure with a simple faith in God’s goodness and an overweening reliance in His will; and Paul Stepanovitch Markov, an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, educated with a single ideal-the sufficiency of human will to meet any exigency. And it tells of Paul Stepanovitch’s journey from his own and the world’s illusion to an end that all men seek—from childhood on the banks of the Dasta, into the army, the decadent society of St. Petersburg, the War, prison and the firing squad, escape and rebirth into a new and entirely different life.

It is, in epitome, the story of survival, of the resources which men call upon in defending themselves, their culture, their race, their ideals, from the engulfing torrents of disaster. And as the record alone of one man’s adventures within the memory of living men, this is an unforgettably dramatic narrative.

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About the Author: A native of pioneer Oklahoma (his father made the “race” in ’93), Elgin Groseclose left for Persia in 1920 upon completion of his course at the University of Oklahoma. For two years he taught in the Presbyterian Mission School at Tabriz, and, on a relief mission to southern Russia, he visited the famous Alexandropol orphanage where 17,000 children were being cared for by the Near East Relief. On his return journey to America, he was imprisoned by the Russian Cheka on suspicion of espionage.

Dr. Groseclose entered Government service in 1923, and pursued his education at the American University in Washington, where he received his Ph.D. An economist by profession, he has been an editor of Fortune on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, and is at present an official of the U.S. Treasury Department. He is married and has three daughters.

Dr. Groseclose is the author of Money: The Human Conflict, a work in perspective economics, and of The Persian Journey of the Reverend Ashley Wishard and his Servant Fathi, a short novel which attracted unusual attention two years ago.

From the Dust Jacket: Cara and Douglas, a young married couple in the Midwest, are on a reproductive adventure, a journey through love, physical intimacy, childbirth, abortion, and birth control. “A body’s all you have to get through life in,” declares the impulsive, loving Cara, finding herself pregnant for a third time. Not at all sure she wants another child, she’s already in love with this child, and her relationship with her unborn baby takes on the dimensions of an affair; their rapport, in the intimate space of her own body, begins to exclude her husband and her other children.

Cara finds herself questioning abortion with a startling lack of bias—social, political, or religious. She must decide between disrupting the balance of her established family and her own life, and saying good-bye to a person who will never sit at her dinner table or play with her other children. Cara’s spirited grappling with these problems counterpoints Douglas’s compassionate analysis as they alternate between being the couple that is their marriage, and being two separate people in two separate bodies and sexes.

At once a romance and a comedy of passion, Are You Mine? is an intimate map of the obstacle course of life’s choices, a set of hurdles and predicaments so fraught with complication that every woman must negotiate it according to her own needs, circumstances, and desires. By the end of the book, Cara and Douglas, parents and lovers in the middle of America, have achieved an understanding that is at once amusing and troubling, but that is based above all on an affirmation of their own integrity.

Her first two novels have established Abby Frucht as one of our most exciting young novelists—“sensual,” “spellbinding,” and “enchanting” (The New York Times Book Review). Her new novel, Are You Mine? is her richest and most provocative yet.

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About the Author: Abby Frucht is the author of two novels: Snap, a New York Times notable book, and Licorice, a Quality Paperback Book Club best-seller, as well as Fruit of the Month, a story collection that won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She lives in Wisconsin.

From the Back Cover: From the age of nineteen, Emma Victor has had to bring up her much younger sister Stella. It has shaped both their lives.

Stella is nearly grown-up now, and needs Emma differently. Emma’s nurturing instincts extend to her work as an aromatherapist, and are a part too of her relationship with the unreliable but irresistible Gavin. But something is missing. Emma has to confront her deepest need—a need she’s been denying for years—and embark on the search for her birth mother.

Are You My Mother? takes its title from a children’s book that Emma used to read to Stella, about a baby bird who, finding his mother gone, feels the panic of abandonment. Profoundly moving and emotionally honest, the novel chronicles Emma’s search for her birth mother and her own place in the world, while exploring fundamental questions ab the nature of mothering, and the ties that bind us.

Anyone who’s ever felt unsure of where they belong will identify with Emma’s plight, and her funny, sad journey towards the discovery of her sense of self.

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About the Author: Louise Voss has been in the music business for ten years, working for Virgin Records and EMI, and then as a product manager for an independent label in New York. More recently she has been Director of Sandie Shaw’s company in London. She lives in south-west London with her husband and daughter.

Zoë hesitated a moment. She had not thought of changing her name, but now she felt all at once that as a slave she must cut off all connection with her former life. What if the personage who was to buy her should turn out to have known her mother, and even herself, and should recognise her by her name? A resemblance of face could be explained away, but her face and her name together would certainly betray her. It was not so much that she feared the open shame of being recognised as Michael Rhangabé’s adopted daughter; she had grown used to the meaning of the word slavery during those last desperate days. But people would not fail to say that Kyrfa Agatha had sold her adopted daughter into slavery in order to save herself and her own children from misery. Zoë could prevent that, and she only hesitated long enough to choose the name by which she was to be known.

“Call me Arethusa,” she said.

From the Back Cover: Like the rare Mother Argonaut, which cradles her young but is not attached, Anna Tougas was destined to cast off her child and start a new life.

That the purpose of that life was revolution was a mystery to Maude Digby until she determined to discover her family origins. Her reunion with Anna triggers their arrest under the War Measures Act and ignites a family firestorm of shock, bewilderment, and sense of betrayal.

Though the plot centres on the dramatic and tragic events of the 1970 October Crisis in Québec, the novel spans several decades as Maude’s discovery takes the story back to 1950 and propels it forward to the 1995 Sovereignty Referendum, and later still into a new generation.

Argonauta is the story of five people living in a tumultuous time, their choices, and the effect of those choices on those they love—within and without the family tree.

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About the Author: Deborah A. M. Phillips (Lapointe) has published articles and poetry in both English and French. She has a degree in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and resides in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver.

Argonauta, her debut novel, set in Québec during the 1970 October Crisis, is an unsettlingly realistic portrait of a family torn by their own crisis of separation and identity. Though Argonauta reads like a thriller it also exposes acutely the cultural and familial tensions of the dispossessed.

From the Dust Jacket: It is 72 B.C. and the Spartacus Slave Revolt is raging through the countryside of southern Italy, terrorizing the citizens of Rome, when Gordianus the Finder receives an urgent summons from a mysterious client, calling him to the luxury resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

The overseer of a great villa has been killed and all the evidence seems to point to two slaves believed to have since run off to join Spartacus. The master of the house is Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and he has invoked an ancient Roman law: When slave kills master, justice demands the death of every slave in the household. So in three days, as a part of the funeral games, ninety-nine slaves will be slaughtered in the arena. Crassus has been asking the Senate to grant him a special military command against Spartacus; by decreeing the harshest possible punishment against the remaining slaves, he has turned a potential political embarrassment into a political coup.

The truth of the murder is more complicated than it appears; its twisted path leads Gordianus on an extraordinary journey, from a hellish descent into the hold of a Roman slave galley, to an eerie visit to the Cumaen Sibyl, ending at a harrowing gladitorial match. As the hour of the slaughter nears, Gordianus finds himself caught in a web of tantalizing but elusive evidence. But as he begins to discern the solution, he realizes the truth may lead to his own destruction.

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About the Author: Steven Saylor, author of Roman Blood (SMP, 1991), is a free-lance writer and editor. He studied history at the University of Texas at Austin and his stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He lives in San Francisco, where he is at work on his next novel.

From the Dust Jacket: I heard Pal in my head: “Word of a good deed travels far. Word of a bad deed even farther.” And, apparently, even travels off into the future. Years ahead, still remembered with fascination. Like how my father used to slow down the car back in Illinois when we’d get near the former home of the guy who left his wife and baby to run off with the nun who taught him in ninth grade. It still transfixed us....

Now I was living in one of those kinds of houses, a destination point for those continuing to hand Lucy’s story down through the generations. Vehicles braking as they approached the cement letters spelling out PANEK. Drivers narrating: “Right there—that was the home of a crazy girl...”

When Robyn Panek is summoned by her ailing Uncle Pal to operate his pony ring for one final season and then close down his beloved Massachusetts farm, her twenty-two years away from the vacation spot of her youth seem an unbridgeable gap. But she is pulled by forces stronger than her memories to try to piece together the events of that last childhood summer—when a dark mystery and chilling rumors swirled about her former friend, Lucy Dragon. They called her crazy..and Robyn must at last uncover the truth about Lucy’s strange and sudden vanishing—and make peace with her first love, Frankie. Now, the future of Pal’s six ponies, who pace the ring five times for a dollar a ride, is as uncertain as Robyn’s own, as she confronts the past she ran from so long ago and comes to terms with the life she has made for herself.

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About the Author: Suzanne Strempek Shea received the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction in recognition of her contribution to the literature of the New England region. A former reporter for the Springfield (MA) Untion-News and the Providence (RI) Journal, she is the national bestselling author of the highly acclaimed novels Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, and Lily of the Valley. A freelance writer, her work has appeared in national publications, and was included in the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories. She also was featured in . the 1998 PBS documentary The Polish Americans. Suzanne lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, Tommy, a columnist for the Union-News.

From the Back Cover: “Are you certain, Myrddin?” Arthur whispered anxiously. Everyone is watching. “What if it will not work?”

“It will, as you say, ‘work.’ Just do as I have told you.”

Arthur nods grimly, and steps up to the great keystone where the sword stands, its naked blade stuck fast in the heart of the stone.

Thus begins the third and final book in The Pendragon Cycle. bringing to a close Stephen R. Lawhead’s grand vision of fiction’s greatest monarch, revealing a new side to the dearly loved tales of King Arthur.

In order to bring about the Summer Kingdom—the reign of peace and prosperity foreseen by Taliesin—Arthur must first unite the petty British kings under his banner as High King and Pendragon of the Island of the Mighty. A period of intense warfare and considerable treachery follows with Arthur narrowly prevailing, greatly aided by Merlin’s guidance and counsel. But that is only the beginning....

Wave upon wave of barbarian troops, traitorously assisted by some of the defeated British kings, batter Arthur’s depleted forces. Once again, following an epic struggle against terrible odds, the High King prevails. Peace reigns, the Summer Kingdom flowers, but only for a season. Soon Arthur will face his greatest test—a deadly trap set by the sorceress Morgian with his beloved Queen Gwenhwyvar as the bait!.

Strikingly original, beautifully haunting, filled with the intermingled joy and sorrow that so characterize Celtic life. Arthur brilliantly concludes one of the best-loved sagas in Western literature.

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About the Author: Stephen R. Lawhead spent a year and a half in England researching and writing Arthur. He is also the author of the award-winning epics the Empyriam Saga and The Dragon King Trilogy.

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By the Same Author: Taliesin (1987), Merlin (1988), Pendragon (1994), and Grail (1997).

The dust jacket of As Though They Had Never Been says this is the vivid, compassionate and deeply moving story of 12-year-old Pasquale, one of the hungry children of Giovanni Rossano, a fisherman who has recently drowned.

The back cover of the U.S. paperback edition describes The Wanton Boys as the “brutally realistic story of Pasquale Rossano, a young boy, who ran away from the fishing village he grew up in.” He ran away to Naples, where he “joined other street urchins” who were seeking “love, a little food and warmth, ... where they tried to find a place in the sun of life. These urchins were scorned, fore-doomed and damned by the world to a living hell of a bat-filled, rat-infested, disease filled existence. They learned cruel lessons that only the young must learn when adult life is thrust upon them. They learned the bestiality of animal lust and forbidden passion from prostitutes and homosexuals; they found that they were less than human and that the poor, the starving and the weak have no place in life. This is every wayward youth’s story—an unflinching, true-to-life, memorable novel that you will not soon forget.”

From the Dust Jacket (U.S. Edition): Anna is a young Danish woman living in London at the turn of the century. Homesick and lonely for her husband, she keeps her innermost thoughts in a diary. When she dies, these memoirs, spanning sixty years, will be published to international acclaim and huge commercial success. But as Anna’s granddaughter discovers many years later, one entry has been cut out of the original journals, which may shed light on an unsolved multiple murder—the stabbing death of an elderly woman and her daughter—and the mysterious disappearance of an infant child. Vintage Vine, this novel alternates between passages from Anna’s best-selling memoirs and the thoughts of Anna’s granddaughter, recent heir to Anna’s estate. With unforgettable characters and a plot rich in complexity, the mystery unfolds like a dark flower, petal by petal. Another tour de force from Barbara Vine.

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About the Author: Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine’s first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won an Edgar Award, the highest honor of the Mystery Writers of America. A Fatal Inversion won the English equivalent, the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award. Her most recent novel, King Solomon’s Carpet, was published in 1992. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who holds honorary doctorates from the University of Essex and the University of Bowling Green, Ohio, Barbara Vine has one grown-up son and lives with her husband and two cats in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk, England.

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By the Same Author: Grasshopper (2000).

From the Dust Jacket: With August Judith Rossner returns to contemporary New York, the setting of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, to explore the lives of two women, each unique yet both reminding us in startling ways of ourselves and others.

Dr. Lulu Shinefeld is a psychoanalyst in her forties. She is twice divorced and the mother of three children. Dawn Henley, her new patient, is a beautiful, talented Barnard College freshman who has behind her a disastrous childhood, little of which she can remember when she enters treatment with Dr. Shinefeld. August portrays their parallel lives: Dawn’s in a series of analytic sessions that have the suspense of a taut thriller, Lulu’s through episodes with her children, husbands, and lovers that constitute a superb comedy of manners about cosmopolitan life in the latter part of the twentieth century.

August is a tour de force by a writer who has always been distinguished by her ability to tell a story without sacrificing compassion and understanding for the people about whom she writes. It will be a revelation to those who know her only through Looking for Mr. Goodbar or, for that matter, through any one of her six previous novels. August combines the narrative power of Emmeline and Rossner’s earlier works with the ribald wit of Attachments. It is a compelling story that will be many things to each of its readers.

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About the Author: Judith Rossner’s previous novels are To the Precipice (1966), Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969), Any Minute I Can Split (1972), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975), Attachments (1977), and Emmeline (1980).

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By the Same Author: Emmeline (1980, Simon & Schuster), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: Thirteen years ago, Mike and Mandy August gave birth to a lie. A lie so well guarded, they’ve practically come to believe it themselves.

Now they live happily with their two terrific kids in a big white colonial with a tennis court in Westport, Connecticut.

And then, suddenly, it all starts to go to pieces.

What is the secret that almost rips the August family apart? That propels Mike on an odyssey that takes him from Connecticut to Los Angeles to San Francisco and up into the mountains of Aspen, Colorado?

Whom is he trying to protect? What is he trying to hide?

The answers, and the incredible scheme Mike devises to solve his problems, make up the plot of Slosberg’s gripping first novel.

It is a sensitive and exciting story of what happens to a happy family when tragedy strikes. When their lives are peeled apart, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf, layer by layer, baring their hearts for the whole world to see.

It is a beautifully written book. But even more, it is a story that takes over and draws you beyond its words into the lives of its people.

Its tenderness will move you.

Its action will engross you.

Its warmth will make you laugh. And its grief will make you cry. So mix a drink, settle into your favorite chair. And find out. WHO ARE THE AUGUST STRANGERS? AND WHY ARE THEY STRANGERS AT ALL?

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About the Author: Mike Slosberg works for a large advertising agency in New York City and lives with his wife and two children in Westport, Connecticut. This is his first novel.

From the Dust Jacket: Over thirty years, in the course of conversations that take place across Europe, a man named Jacques Austerlitz tells a nameless companion of his ongoing struggle with the riddle of his identity. A small child when he immigrates alone to England in the summer of 1939, Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh couple who raise him, and he strains to orient himself in a world whose natural reference points have been obliterated. When he is a much older man, fleeting childhood memories return to him, and he obeys an instinct he only dimly understands and follows their trail back to the vanished world he left behind a half century before, the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe.

With this work of devastating beauty and pathos, W.G. Sebald has found a way to give form and substance to the previously unimaginable. Austerlitz is the most magnificent expression to date of an uncanny literary vision whose newness seems less like an invention than like the miraculous return of a forgotten sense.

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About the Author: W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. Since 1970 he has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 he was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His three previous books have won a number of international awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize.

A novel about the moral decision of a woman who must choose between her adopted son and her lover.

From the Dust Jacket: Hillary Birdsong’s idyllic New England childhood comes to a sudden halt by the death of her beloved older brother. Brokenhearted, Hillary seeks consolation in city boy Miles. At sixteen she finds herself pregnant, a shame to her fractured family. With few choices available to her—her parents won’t help her raise the child and Miles doesn’t offer any support—she gives her baby boy up for adoption. And so, for the next eighteen years, she quietly and achingly yearns for the day her son might contact her.

A touching portrait of a broken family, the reverberating effects of an adolescent’s necessarily adult decision, and survival after the ravages of devastating loss, B-Mother is an exquisitely realized drama, a story whose characters and moments of grace you won’t soon forget.

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About the Author: Maureen O’Brien has taught writing at Trinity College, the University of Hartford, and St. Joseph College, and currently teaches at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. This is her first novel. She lives in Connecticut.

From the Dust Jacket: The Baby Merchant can afford to be discriminating. He is very good at what he does.

In our hard-driving consumer culture, people will do anything to get what they want, but what if all you want is a baby of your own? Among careerists who postpone parenthood, fertility problems abound. Adoptions have always been difficult, and now you can forget about “shopping” abroad, because America’s borders have been closed by the Centers for Disease Control. Babies are high-end commodities in this economy, microchipped at birth to protect them from theft.

When medicine fails you and you can’t adopt, Tom Starbird’s your man. Soft-spoken, as charming as he is efficient, the baby merchant will steal a child for you. For a price. If you pass his tests.

This is Starbird’s mission in life. He rescues “unwanted” babies and delivers them to loving homes. But even do-gooders get tired. Tom is shutting up shop when unrelenting Jake Zorn, the Television Conscience of Boston, blackmails him into doing one last job. Zorn’s barren wife, Maury, wants a baby, but they can’t adopt. Zorn will do whatever it takes to bring one home.

A conscientious provider, Tom locates a supplier. Translation: a mother with a child she doesn’t want. This brings him up against lovely, rebellious Sasha Egan, an artist planning to have her baby and give it up. Stalked by her unborn child’s father, Sasha is on the run. She has no way of knowing that Starbird has targeted her. Or that the baby she never wanted is the one thing in life she will do anything to keep.

One last job, Tom tells himself, tracking the fleeing pregnant girl into rural Georgia. Then I quit. Everything goes smoothly until he makes a terrible mistake.

He gets in too deep with the supplier—and the product.

This new novel by the author of the award-winning Thinner Than Thou is a swift, hair-raising ride through the anxiety of a pregnant woman on the run, the compelling love-hate relationship between hunter and hunted, the nature of guilt, and the excitement of a near future that is, for all intents and purposes, already here.

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About the Author: Kit Reed is the author of the Alex Award-winning Thinner Than Thou and many other novels. Her most recent short fiction collection is Dogs of Truth. Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award; collections of her short fiction have been finalists for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Kit Reed lives in Middietown, Connecticut, and teaches at Wesleyan University.

Natalia, a Clemson University student, and her boyfriend Seth learn that they are unexpectedly pregnant. Abortion seems to be the logical solution, but Natalia has second thoughts as the procedure nears. Amanda and David Pope have spent years trying to conceive and are desperate for a child. They turn to adoption agencies to assist them, but are rejected again and again. Finally they find Gloria Sanchez, an adoption agent who is willing to help them. Months go by without any birth mothers showing interest in the Popes, but then Gloria’s daughter, Natalia, comes home from college and confesses her pregnancy. Gloria suddenly finds herself arranging for the Popes to adopt her own granddaughter. Amanda and David’s lifelong dreams of parenthood appear to be fulfilled until Seth comes back into Natalia’s life, urging her to keep the baby so they can raise her together. Natalia must then make a choice that will change all of their lives forever.

Everyone in Kingswood Heights, Ohio, knows that Corrin McCrae, a stubby little P.R. director with great legs, chipmunk cheeks, a moderate overbite, and an oddball sense of humor that’s often in conflict with her short fuse, is a success. A 42-year-old widow, she’s vice president of an advertising and public relations agency and the mother of beautiful, brilliant 16-year-old Shelley, who’s headed for a career in medicine. Corrin also is blessed with close friends, especially Tom Fielding, the rector of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, who has a secret only Corrin knows; Barbara Gibson, her college sorority sister; and Rob Haley, a client who becomes a lover. However, when Shelley becomes pregnant, the relationships that have formed Corrin’s support structure undergo seismic change. In an odyssey that takes her from Ohio to Maine to Florida, she suffers the greatest tragedy of her life and learns that family ties, whether by blood or affinity, are the ones that last. About the Author: Gretchen Hirsch is the author or co-author of six nonfiction titles, including Talking Your Way to the Top: Business English That Works; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Difficult Conversations; Bud Wilkinson: An Intimate Portrait of an American Legend; and Womanhours: A 21-Day Time Management Plan That Works. Two of her co-authored books, Helping Gifted Children Soar: A Practical Guide for Parents and Teachers and A Love for Learning: Motivation and the Gifted Child, were named Arizona Best Books by the Arizona Book Publishing Association; the latter also won an Indie Award of Excellence, an iParenting Award of Merit, and a Legacy Book Award from the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented. A resident of Columbus, OH, Gretchen is “Chief Surgeon” at Midwest Book Doctors (www.midwestbookdocs.com), where she offers editorial services for authors seeking representation or publication. She blogs at writebetternow.blogspot.com.