Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America.Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany, New York.For the n...

When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health.But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great...

Jonathan Hemlock, the art professor and mercenary who first excited readers with his daring exploits in The Eiger Sanction, returns for another masterful adventure. Jonathan has gone to England to rest, but his vacation is interrupted when the head of British Intelligence needs his highly skilled services. Blackmailed into performing another "sanction"—a top-secret political assassination—Jonathan must take over the mission of an agent whose murder was so bizarre and terrifying th...

An intimate early novel from James A. Michener, now remembered as the beloved master of the historical epic, The Fires of Spring unfolds with the bittersweet drama of a boy’s perilous journey into manhood. David Harper is an orphan, seemingly doomed to loneliness and poverty. As an adolescent con artist and petty thief, David spends his days grifting at an amusement park, the place where he first learns about women and the mysteries of love. Soon he discovers that his longing to e...

In a renovated Gothic church on Long Island lives Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor and world-renowned mountain climber who finances his black-market art collection by working as a freelance assassin.Now, Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps: the Eiger. His target is one of his three fellow climbers. The problem is that the people who hired him at CII can't tell him which...

Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Called by the Los Angeles Times “one of the most imposing novels of the decade,” it was eventually translated into more than thirty languages. A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, The Painted Bird is a dark masterpiece that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is th...

Nicholai Hel, born in the ravages of World War I China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, and raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go master, survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world’s most artful lover and its most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel’s secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection—shibumi.No...

In sinister industrial England, fifteen-year-old Gustine is a "dress lodger," a prostitute who rents a beautiful blue dress from her landlord to attract a higher class of clientele. By day a potter's assistant, by night a courtesan of the streets, Gustine works to support her fragile only child, born with a remarkable anatomical defect.Surgeon Henry Chiver is a prisoner of his own past, implicated in a series of killings in Edinburgh in which beggars were murdered so that the corps...

Dear Libby, It occurs to me that you and your two children have been living with your mother for—Dear Lord!—two whole years, and I'm writing to see if you'd like to be rescued.The letter comes out of the blue, and just in time for Libby Moran, who—after the sudden death of her husband, Danny—went to stay with her hypercritical mother. Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape: a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Before she can talk he...

Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild's wedding. An only child whose mother has just died, Laura is resentful of her boisterous, careless cousins, and desperate for th...

Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn't until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What's more, after being separated as infants, she and her sister had been, for a time, part of a secret study on separated twins. Paula Bernstein, a married writer and mother living in New York, also knew she was adopted, but had no inclination to find her birth mother. ...

The Van Ripper women have been the talk of Tarrytown, New York, for centuries. Some say they’re angels; some say they're crooks. In their tumbledown "Stitchery," not far from the stomping grounds of the legendary Headless Horseman, the Van Ripper sisters—Aubrey, Bitty, and Meggie—are said to knit people's most ardent wishes into beautiful scarves and mittens, granting them health, success, or even a blossoming romance. But for the magic to work, sacrifices must be made—and no one knows tha...