Hardcover Fiction

by Tom Wolfe · Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The essential collection of Tom Wolfe’s writing on a turning-point era in modern American culture. The Purple Decades brings together the author's selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play. It was in the 1960s and 1970s—those “purple decades”—that Tom Wolfe rose to fame as one of the late-twentieth-century pioneers of American literature. He became the foremost chronicler of the gaudiest period in American history, much of which is spread out before us in these selections from nine of his books. Wolfe’s innovations in style, his feats as a reporter, and his insights into modern American life dominated a period of widespread experimentation in the writing of nonfiction. Wolfe’s contributions to the language of the purple decades range from the phrases “the right stuff” to “radical chic,” the latter of which he coined in 1970, when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers in his apartment on Park Avenue; and on to “the Me Decade,” as the 1970s were dubbed as soon as Wolfe’s essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” appeared in 1976. The complete texts of “The Last American Hero” and “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” and long sections of “Radical Chic” and The Right Stuff, are included here in The Purple Decades. Generous selections from both From Bauhaus to Our House and The Painted Word also appear here, as well as many stories from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, and Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. When Tom Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965, Newsweek predicted: “This will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.” In these pages the falcon flies with big talons, and an even bigger grin, across the first two decades of Tom Wolfe’s literary career.

by James Patterson · Little, Brown

by Robert Jordan · Tor/Doherty

by Anne Rice · Knopf

Armand, the nubile Venetian, the living, breathing remnant of the high Renaissance, narrates his own story here, and his world-weary perspective is a subdued contrast to the bombast of Rice's usual hero, the egomaniacal rock star/French fop Lestat. A complicated, sexually ambiguous pretty boy with an evolving but perpetually twisted relationship to Christianity, Armand at times comes across as endearingly muddled as any modern teen. Unfortunately, he can also be just as irritating. He may be 500 years old, but Armand apparently still has neither the depth to passionately probe his religious mysteries with convincing fervor nor the sense of humor to see the ridiculousness of his quests.

by Mary Higgins Clark · Simon & Schuster

Retired cleaning lady Alvirah Meehan sets out to reunite a mother with a daughter who was stolen as a baby eight years earlier. The mother left her pram outside a church and the pram was taken by a church thief to hide his loot.

by Barbara Kingsolver · Harper Flamingo

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility. Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

by Stephen King · Scribner

by Danielle Steel · Delacorte Press

Victoria Henderson, on the verge of scandal, is forced by her father into a loveless marriage with widower Charles Dawson, but even wedlock cannot tame Victoria's spirit, and she and her identical twin sister Olivia decide to pull a switch that has both terrible and wonderful repercussions.

by Ken Follett · Crown

by Fannie Flagg · Random House

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is the funny, serious, and compelling new novel by Fannie Flagg, author of the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (and prize-winning co-writer of the classic movie). Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.

by Tom Clancy · Putnam

by Arthur Golden · Knopf

by Richard Paul Evans · Simon & Schuster

The love story of David and MaryAnne Parkin and the storms that their relationship must face when the blissful state of romance vanishes into real-life challenges and difficulties.

by Johanna Lindsey · Avon

In 1882, New York socialite Sharisse Hammond meekly accepts her father's order to marry Joel Parrington ... until she discovers that Joel and her younger sister are deeply in love. The only way for Sharisse to avoid a disastrous marriage, and her father's wrath, is to leave town for a while, posing as a mail-order bride, keeping her identity a secret. Of course, she has no intention of marrying roughbred Arizona rancher Lucas Holt, and she's certain he could never want a pampered society woman. Sharisse feels lucky that Lucas is willing to delay the marriage, but she isn't prepared for the way his kisses send her blood racing. Luke is charming and gentle most times, but frightening, cold, even cruel sometimes ... like his twin brother, Slade, who has more than once almost had his way with her. How can her body betray her so easily? How can it delight in such two very different men. Sharisse is terrified that Luke will discover who she really is, and that she's using him to bide time. She has yet to learn that Luke has his own dark secrets to hide, has no intention of ever marrying her.. and has been watching her every move with Slade.

by Jamie Lee Curtis. Illustrated by Laura Cornell · Cotler/HarperCollins