Fiction - General

by Gail Godwin
In the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flee to the States, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter.
At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting . . .
Throughout the centuries, it was shrouded in mystery, entrusted to a precious few. But now the guardians of what has become known as the secret gospel are mysteriously dying -- their bodies scarred with the stigmata.
Quirke and Malachy Griffin were raised as brothers, though Quirke -- rescued from an Irish orphanage by Malachy's father, the eminent Judge Garrett Griffin -- was always the favored son. But Malachy married the American girl Quirke loved, and Quirke settled for her sister, who died in childbirth soon thereafter.
Larkin Conner Barkley lives like the City of Angels is hers for the taking. Young and staggeringly rich, she speeds through the city during its loneliest hours, blowing through red after red in her Aston Martin as if running for her life. Until out of nowhere a car appears, and with it the metal-on-metal explosion of a terrible accident.
Flora Fyrdraaca knows taking shortcuts in Crackpot Hall can be risky. After all, when a House has eleven thousand decaying rooms that shift about at random, there's no telling where a person might end up.
When a gorgeous woman appears at the gates of the White House bearing a mysterious letter, disgraced presidential press secretary and professional spinmeister Jonah Eastman knows that his past has finally caught up with him.
A truck driver's daughter who grows up in the front seat of her father's truck, Jo shares her father's love of country music, junk food, and the open highway. Jo's life is a perfect slice of Americana, except that their "open road" is in England, and her father -- the gentle, melancholy Bobby Pickering -- is from Northern Ireland. The only truly American thing about Jo is her mother, whom she has never met.
David Wolfe's life is approaching an exhilarating peak: he's a successful San Francisco lawyer, he's about to get married, and he's being primed for a run for Congress. But when the phone rings and he hears the voice of Hana Arif -- the Palestinian woman with whom he had a secret affair in law school -- he begins a completely unexpected journey.
When a reclusive scholar dies under obscure circumstances, reporter Paul Tomm is assigned to write his obituary. But when the coroner in the case is murdered, Tomm finds himself pursuing a story that began nine hundred years ago with the theft of alchemical instruments from the court geographer of Sicily.
When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant declares his intention to remarry, his intended turns out to be a voluptuous gold digger from the old country with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an insatiable appetite for the good life of the West.
He's a hiring partner at one of the world's largest law firms. Brilliant yet ruthless, he has little patience for associates who leave the office before midnight or steal candy from the bowl on his secretary's desk. He hates holidays and paralegals. And he's just started a weblog to tell the world about what life is really like at the top of his profession.