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 Stephen King · Scribner

by Tom Clancy · Putnam

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 David Baldacci · Warner

When cop-turned-attorney John Fiske comes to Washington to investigate his brother's murder, he unearths decades-old secrets and discovers the truth is anything but simple in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. It's never what it seems... Young attorney Michael Fiske broke the law when he took Rufus Harms's prison letter from the Supreme Court. But he also sealed his own fate. Suddenly everyone who has anything to do with Harms or his appeal mysteriously dies. Now Michael's brother John, a cop turned attorney, comes to Washington to find out why his brother was murdered--and what it had to do with a crime that Harms committed twenty-five years before. But the one man who can help John, the one man who knows what really happened more than two decades ago--and why--has escaped from prison and is running for his life.

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 James Patterson · Little, Brown

by J. K. Rowling · Levine/Scholastic

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 Jewel Kilcher · HarperCollins

Now available in paperback--the bestselling collection of intimate poetry from singer-songwrier Jewel, one of today's most beloved popular music artists. (Poetry)

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 Alice McDermott · Farrar, Straus & Giroux

by Arthur Golden · Knopf

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

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.