Literary Life

Christophe has been in the New World only a year when his native guides abandon him to flee their Iroquois pursuers. A Huron warrior and elder named Bird soon takes him prisoner, along with a young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, whose family he has just killed, and holds them captive in his massive village. Champlain's Iron People have only recently begun trading with the Huron, who mistrust them as well as this Crow who has now trespassed onto their land; and her people, of course, have become the Huron's greatest enemy.

The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force more than a father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at 14 by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way.

From the New York Times best-selling author of A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here comes an exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go. With all the same charm of his best-selling full-length novels, here Fredrik Backman once again reveals his unrivaled understanding of human nature and deep compassion for people in difficult circumstances. This is a tiny gem with a message you'll treasure for a lifetime.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them, in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul, they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.

Barry Laverty, M.B., can barely find the village of Ballybucklebo on a map when he first sets out to seek gainful employment there, but already he knows that there is nowhere he would rather live than in the emerald hills and dales of Northern Ireland. The proud owner of a spanking-new medical degree and little else in the way of worldly possessions, Barry jumps at the chance to secure a position as an assistant in a small rural practice. At least until he meets Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.

Booka Audiobooks brings you, for the first time in English and accompanied by an original music score, The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes. This is the book that founded a literary genre during the Spanish Golden Age: the picaresque novel. Lazarillo is a boy of humble origins. After his stepfather is accused of thievery, his mother asks a wily blind beggar to take Lazarillo on as his apprentice. Little Lazaro develops his cunning while serving the blind beggar and several other masters.

Lauren Francis-Sharma's 'Til the Well Runs Dry opens in a seaside village in the north of Trinidad where young Marcia Garcia, a gifted and smart-mouthed 16-year-old seamstress, lives alone, raising two small boys and guarding a family secret. When she meets Farouk Karam, an ambitious young policeman, the risks and rewards in Marcia's life amplify forever.

In the powerful, haunting stories of Munro’s collection, men and women, in the midst of contemporary quandaries and crises, recall the long-buried yearnings, dreams, and hard choices that have given shape to their lives.

A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating, but her brain is still active - for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life - and the lives of others, outcasts like her.

The story of a relationship that everyone thought was forever and which is now in danger of being for never, The Break is about getting older and staying in love when life, real life, is trying to pull you apart.

Hardacre is the sweeping rags to riches story of the Hardacre family. This dramatic family saga follows generations of the Hardacres from Victorian times to the 1950s. Set against the backdrop of major historical events, Hardacre traces the family's humble beginnings to their position of great wealth. Sam Hardacre makes a tough yet honest living as a fish gutter. But he has ambitions for a life far removed from the harsh existence on the quays of the north English coast. Through drive and determination he builds a business empire and amasses a fortune.

Cuatro compañeros de universidad se trasladan a Nueva York, donde solo cuentan con su amistad y su ambición para abrirse camino. Willem es guapo, amable y quiere ser actor; JB es un pintor ingenioso y a veces cruel, dispuesto a destacar en el difícil mundo del arte; Malcolm es un arquitecto soñador, y Jude es el joven retraído, brillante y enigmático que pronto se convertirá en el epicentro del grupo.

C'est pas moi, je le jure?! étonne par sa fraîcheur et sa verve, par sa vision du monde de l'enfance, par son imaginaire débridé. À trente-neuf ans, soit l'âge qu'aurait aujourd'hui son petit héros, l'auteur est manifestement resté très près de ses premières années. - Marie-Claude Fortin, Voir

Throughout her childhood, Carlisle Martin got to see her father, Robert, for only a few precious weeks a year when she visited the brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village he shared with his partner, James. Brilliant but troubled, James gave Carlisle an education in all that he held dear in life—literature, music, and, most of all, dance.

When Helena inherits her grandparents' apartment in Athens, she is overwhelmed with memories of the summers she spent there as a child, when Greece was under a brutal military dictatorship. Her remote, cruel grandfather was one of the regime's generals and as she sifts through the dusty rooms, Helena discovers an array of valuable objects and antiquities. How did her grandfather amass such a trove? What human price was paid for them? Helena's desire to find answers about her heritage dovetails with a growing curiosity for archaeology.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire.

"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was 10 years old." Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations - those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming.

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.

In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub "The Dreamers", who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile. Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States.

Imogen's brother, Johnny, disappeared thirty years ago, ostensibly the victim of a drowning accident - a story to which everyone but Imogen subscribes. Johnny was too good of a swimmer, she reasons, and his body was never found. Imogen alone believes that he is still alive. To get to the truth, she dives into her memory and her family's history, all the way back to World War I-era Ireland and the long-buried events that forever changed them.