Hardcover Fiction

by John Grisham · Doubleday

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In a plush Virginia office, a rich, angry old man is furiously rewriting his will. With his death just hours away, Troy Phelan wants to send a message to his children, his ex-wives, and his minions—a message that will touch off a vicious legal battle and transform dozens of lives. Nate O'Riley is a high-octane Washington litigator who's lived too hard, too fast, for too long. His second marriage in a shambles, and he is emerging from his fourth stay in rehab armed with little more than his fragile sobriety, good intentions, and resilient sense of humor. Returning to the real world is always difficult, but this time it's going to be murder. Rachel Lane is a young woman who chose to give her life to God, who walked away from the modern world with all its strivings and trappings and encumbrances, and went to live and work with a primitive tribe of Indians in the deepest jungles of Brazil. In a story that mixes legal suspense with a remarkable adventure, their lives are forever altered by the startling secret of The Testament. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

by Nora Roberts · Putnam

Four-year-old Olivia MacBride's parents were Hollywood's golden couple - until the monster destroyed their beautiful home and took Livvy's mother away from her for ever. The monster with her father's face... Protected by her grandparents, Olivia grows up in the sanctuary of the lush rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula, and learns to bury the past deep within her. Despite the years that have passed, she still yearns to know the truth about her childhood. And now she just might get the chance. Noah Brady, a young writer, wants to tell the story that has become a part of Hollywood history. But before Olivia can confront her past, she must safeguard her future. For the monster walks again...

by John le Carré · Scribner

by Tami Hoag · Bantam

by Maeve Binchy · Delacorte Press

by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins · Tyndale

THE FIFTH TRUMPET JUDGMENT-A PLAGUE OF SCORPION LIKE LOCUSTS LED BY APOLLYON, CHIEF DEMON OF THE ABYSS-IS SO HORRIFYING THAT MEN TRY TO KILL THEMSELVES BUT ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DIE.

by Elmore Leonard · Delacorte Press

The sequel to Chili Palmer's hit movie Get Leo tanked and now Chili's itching for a comeback. So when a power lunch with record-label executive and former associate Tommy Athens ends in a mob hit, he soon finds himself in an unlikely alliance with organized-crime detective Darryl Holmes and the likely next target of Russian gangsters. But where others see danger, Chili Palmer sees story possibilities. Enter Linda Moon, a singer with aspirations that go further than her current gig in a Spice Girls cover band. Chili takes over as Linda's manager, entering the world of rock stars, pop divas, and hip-hop gangstas. As he wings his way to success in the music business with his trademark cool, Chili manipulates his adversaries and advances his friends, all the while basing the plot of his new film on the action that results. Be Cool is rife with drama, jealousy, and betrayal, and all Chili needs to do is survive to make a new box-office hit.

by Barbara Taylor Bradford · Doubleday

Barbara Taylor Bradford has become one of the world's most cherished storytellers, having written fourteen bestselling novels that went on to become enduring favorites. In A Sudden Change of Heart, readers are once again invited to fall under the spell of a magical weaver of tales at her most seductive. Laura Valiant and Claire Benson are best friends from childhood and have remained exceptionally close through the turmoil of adult life. They have much to celebrate: Laura is a partner in a challenging and successful art dealership in New York, and her marriage to the handsome and always amiable Doug seems to come right from a storybook. Though divorced from her French husband, Philippe Lavillard, Claire delights in her precocious daughter, Natasha. But the two friends' lives do not follow the paths we imagine they will, and when Claire is confronted with sudden tragedy, she naturally turns to Laura for help. When the long-hidden history of the Lavillard family intersects with Laura's investigation into artwork stolen by the Nazis during the war, Barbara Taylor Bradford's gripping tale reaches a dramatic and unexpected crescendo. A Sudden Change of Heart revolves around overcoming adversity as well as celebrating life's joy; ultimately, it is a moving expression of the triumph of the human spirit and the healing power of love.

by J. K. Rowling · Levine/Scholastic

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 Robin Cook · Putnam

Dr. Jack Stapleton and Dr. Laurie Montgomery must race against the clock to prevent an unthinkable catastrophe in this “frightening” (Publishers Weekly) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author hailed as “the master of the medical thriller” (The New York Times). Experts do not question whether a bio-terrorism event will occur in the United States, only when. . . . New York City cab driver Yuri Davydov is an angry, disillusioned Russian émigré poised to lash out at the adoptive nation he believes has denied him the American Dream. A former technician for the vast Soviet biological weapons system, Yuri possesses the technical knowledge to carry out his vengeance on a horrific scale, especially after teaming up with a pair of far-right survivalists who share his abhorrence of the United States government. Dr. Jack Stapleton and Dr. Laurie Montgomery are confronted with two seemingly disparate cases in their work as forensic pathologists in the city’s medical examiner’s office. They hardly suspect that the deaths could be related, but soon they begin to connect the dots, and the question then becomes whether or not they will solve the puzzle before Yuri and his comrades unleash the ultimate terror: a modern bioweapon.

by Elizabeth Strout · Random House

In a small town in New England, a girl has an affair with her schoolteacher. Amy Goodrow lives with her protective single mother and the novel examines the way the scandal affects their relationship.

by Patricia Cornwell · Putnam

Judy Hammer has been sent to Richmond, Virginia to help clean up their police force, and while she is there, she joins her deputy chief in the most challenging case of their career.

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 Sue Miller · Knopf