John Irving Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mum with a baseball and believes—correctly, it transpires—that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish Dr Dolder, Owen's shrink, drunkenly driving his VW down the school's marble steps is a marvellous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose". When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't change the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy—from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum—the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history and God. —Tim Appelo

Salman Rushdie No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollahs decreeing his death. Furore aside, it is a marvellously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's astonishing powers of invention are at their best in this Whitbread Prize winner.

Jodee Blanco

Claude Steiner

Karen Armstrong

Mark Jacobson

Stephen King

Stieg Larsson

Anne Rice In The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice returns to her indomitable Vampire Chronicles and recaptures the gothic horror and delight she first explored in her classic tale Interview with the Vampire . The story begins in the aftermath of Memnoch the Devil. Vampires from all over the globe have gathered around Lestat, who lies prostrate on the floor of a cathedral. Dead? In a coma? As Armand reflects on Lestat's condition, he is drawn by David Talbot to tell the story of his own life. The narrative abruptly rushes back to 15th-century Constantinople, and the Armand of the present recounts the fragmented memories of his childhood abduction from Kiev. Eventually, he is sold to a Venetian artist (and vampire), Marius. Rice revels in descriptions of the sensual relationship between the young and still-mortal Armand and his vampiric mentor. But when Armand is finally transformed, the tone of the book dramatically shifts. Raw and sexually explicit scenes are displaced by Armand's introspective quest for a union of his Russian Orthodox childhood, his hedonistic life with Marius, and his newly acquired immortality. These final chapters remind one of the archetypal significance of Rice's vampires; at their best, Armand, Lestat, and Marius offer keen insights into the most human of concerns.

The Vampire Armand is richly intertextual; readers will relish the retelling of critical events from Lestat and Louis's narratives. Nevertheless, the novel is very much Armand's own tragic tale. Rice deftly integrates the necessary back-story for new readers to enter her epic series, and the introduction of a few new voices adds a fresh perspective—and the promise of provocative future installments. —Patrick O'Kelley

Eliot Greenspan

Flora Fraser

John W. Scott

ZIDE, Gray

Michael Gelb

Dava Sobel Everyone knows that Galileo Galilei dropped cannonballs off the leaning tower of Pisa, developed the first reliable telescope, and was convicted by the Inquisition for holding a heretical belief—that the earth revolved around the sun. But did you know he had a daughter? In Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel (author of the bestselling Longitude) tells the story of the famous scientist and his illegitimate daughter, Sister Maria Celeste. Sobel bases her book on 124 surviving letters to the scientist from the nun, whom Galileo described as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and tenderly attached to me." Their loving correspondence revealed much about their world: the agonies of the bubonic plague, the hardships of monastic life, even Galileo's occasional forgetfulness ("The little basket, which I sent you recently with several pastries, is not mine, and therefore I wish you to return it to me").

While Galileo tangled with the Church, Maria Celeste—whose adopted name was a tribute to her father's fascination with the heavens—provided moral and emotional support with her frequent letters, approving of his work because she knew the depth of his faith. As Sobel notes, "It is difficult today ... to see the Earth at the center of the Universe. Yet that is where Galileo found it." With her fluid prose and graceful turn of phrase, Sobel breathes life into Galileo, his daughter, and the earth-centered world in which they lived. —Sunny Delaney

Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman expose the fallacies of standard management thinking in First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. In seven chapters, the two consultants for the Gallup Organisation debunk some dearly held notions about management, such as "treat people as you like to be treated"; "people are capable of almost anything"; and "a manager's role is diminishing in today's economy." "Great managers are revolutionaries," the authors write. "This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place."

The authors have culled their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup during the past 25 years. Buckingham and Coffman outline "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and selecting staff for talent—not just knowledge and skills. First, Break All the Rules offers specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job. For instance, the authors show ways to structure a trial period for a new worker and how to create a pay plan that rewards people for their expertise instead of how fast they climb the company ladder. "The point is to focus people toward performance," they write. "The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for this." Written in plain English and well organised, this book tells you exactly how to improve as a supervisor. —Dan Ring

Maguelonne ToussaintSamat

Mireille Guiliano Mireille Guiliano, author of the immensely popular French Women Don't Get Fat returns with another book revealing secrets to living the good life. Branching off of her first book that dispelled the notion that you have to avoid everything wonderful in order to lose weight, with French Women for All Seasons, Guiliano suggests that the trick to living life to the fullest is to stay attuned to the "rhythms of the year" (that, and remembering that moderation is the key). Her new book offers new ideas for seasonal entertaining, shopping, cooking, and exercising. Want to know more? Watch our exclusive video message from Guiliano below. Want to know more about yourself? Take our "How French Are You?" quiz and discover your inner Frenchwoman. —Daphne Durham

Watch the video (high bandwith)Watch the video (low bandwith)

The Mireille Guiliano Quiz: How French Are You?

In French Women Don't Get Fat, Mireille Guiliano laid out a general program for reaching the weight at which you can feel bien dans ta peau (comfortable in your own skin). Now, in French Women for All Seasons, she teaches you peu à peu (little by little), how to make over your whole life for maximum pleasure. Here you will find, not only more specific advice on preparing for the bikini season (with dozens of new slimming tricks and delicious recipes), but also Mireille's secrets to looking and feeling great throughout each season of the year. But before learning to become a French woman for all seasons, take this short quiz to find out how much of one you already are. Your inner French Woman—we all have one!—may already be more developed than you suspect! Find out now how close your daily habits are to bringing you optimum pleasure.

1. Your idea of the ultimate chocolate fix is?
a. A chocolate Entenmann's donut.
b. A Hershey bar.
c. Godiva truffles.
d. One or two pieces of high-quality dark chocolate.

2. How do you take your coffee?
a. I don't drink coffee.
b. Can't stand it without cream and three sugars.
c. I add Equal and skim milk for low-cal pleasure.
d. A small cup of freshly brewed coffee needs no lightening or sweetening.

3. What should the salespeople at the mall know about you?
a. I don't wear prêt à porter!
b. I'm a sucker for the latest trends for the season—I love being in fashion.
c. I'll buy an amazing pair of shoes before I pay my rent.
d. I find a few items to accompany the best pieces in my closet—I just want to refresh my wardrobe.

4. You're throwing a party in a couple of weeks. What's your plan of action?
a. I obsess about the menu, wonder how I'll ever find the time even to plan, and when the big day comes I spend the entire time in the kitchen while my guests (usually) drink too much.
b. I call a caterer, of course. What do I know about such things, and why should I care?
c. I set out a bag of chips and a bag of pretzels and ask everyone to bring a bottle.
d. I choose a few favorite food items to serve, some store-bought delicacies, some easy to prepare but impressive treats, add some personal serving touches, sit back and relax while the guests ooh and ahh.

5. Which of the following drinks will you serve at the party?
a. Whatever the guests bring.
b. Margaritas (Frozen—is there another kind?).
c. Wine, vodka, beer… hospitality is variety.
d. A thoughtfully chosen wine and mineral water—keep it simple and always give guests water with their alcohol.

6. You've just gone to the market and found wonderful fresh basil, but you got so excited about it that you bought too much. What do you do?
a. What would I be doing at the market? What's basil again?
b. I chop some in my pasta, but eventually have to throw the rest away.
c. I have a pesto pack-down that night!
d. I try to invent a new dish for using it while it's fresh (substituting it for another herb I might otherwise use); the rest I make into pesto and freeze it in ice cube trays (one cube is perfect for a single pasta serving).

7. Au restaurant, you're most likely to order:
a. A cheeseburger with fries.
b. A large salad with ranch dressing.
c. Vegetable lasagna.
d. Grilled hangar steak with wine sauce.

8. When the waiter comes to your table to take your drink order, you:
a. Order up Grey Goose.
b. Let someone else advise—wine lists are intimidating.
c. Remember the rule that white goes with fish and red goes with meat.
d. Choose Champagne—it goes with just about anything.

9. How much wine do you typically drink with dinner?
a. None—alcohol is fattening.
b. Keep 'em coming—I—I've read wine is heart smart!
c. A few glasses—I know my limits.
d. Usually one, but if I want more, I’ll have another half glass.

10. You're traveling and a sumptuous breakfast buffet is included in the cost of your hotel room. What do you do?
a. I load up on eggs, bacon, muffins, and pancakes, but make sure to hit hotel gym later.
b. I load up on eggs, bacon, muffins, and pancakes to get me through the day—it—it's free, and I don't eat that way at home, so what's the harm?
c. I can't be trusted around any all-you-can-eat spread; I skip breakfast.
d. I choose one day to indulge at the buffet (compensating with lighter lunch and dinner), but order room service for the rest of my trip to avoid overdoing it.

11. What is your ideal workout?
a. Does channel surfing count?
b. An hour at the gym, wailing on the Cybex.
c. I eat healthfully so I can spend less time exercising.
d. I walk everywhere, and enjoy some Yoga a couple of times a week.

12. Mireille Guiliano says in French Women Don’t Get Fat that her "secret weapon" is plain yogurt. If you want to sweeten it, what do you add?
a. Sweet 'n Low or Equal.
b. Sugar.
c. Spoonful of maple syrup or honey.
d. Fresh fruit.

13. You have an after-hours party to attend for work. Pick an outfit that will take you most elegantly from day to night.
a. A short suit skirt with a tank top and a jacket that you'll be able to take off later—if you've got it, flaunt it!
b. Designer jeans with a top you saw in Vogue.
c. Your trusty black dress, but you'll dress it up with trendy baubles for evening.
d. A trimly cut dress paired with simple jewelry or a scarf.

14. In the fall, you eat:
a. Strawberries.
b. Asparagus.
c. Peaches.
d. Apples.

15. Le dessert is served! You choose to have:
a. A big piece of cake—you only live once.
b. A small slice (or two) of apple tart—an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
c. A piece of pie or cake, but you'll share it with a friend.
d. Nothing overly sweet—instead you go for a piece of seasonal fruit or cheese.

Results:
Allow 1 point for "a" answers, 2 points for "b" answers, 3 points for "c" answers, and 4 points for "d" answers. Add up your total points and find out how French you are based on the scale below.

Not Very French At All (15-25 points)
You are a true American woman. You're busy and don't always have time to entertain or cook. Your treats are sweet or salty. But Mireille says in French Women for All Seasons, "When foods are bursting with natural taste—as opposed to being artificially flavored, laden with fat and salt, or just plain tasteless—the experience of eating them is more satisfying, and we can content ourselves with less." Start reading to find out how you can change your approach to eating, and how all of Mireille's secrets about fashion, entertaining, wine—and more—can change your life.

Potentially French (26-36 points)
You're already aware of your indulgences, and realize you have great potential for improvement. You just need a little coaching on how to maximize style, taste and pleasure without sacrificing your waistline or sanity. "The key," Mireille says in French Women for All Seasons "is to cultivate your own intuition of your offenders and pleasures and adjust each accordingly by degrees that suit you." Start reading to find out how you can change not only your relationship with food, but how Mireille's secrets about fashion, entertaining, wine—and more—can change your life.

You're Almost French! (37-47 points)
You value quality over quantity. But we've all been known to stress out about a party or get weak in the knees in front of a chocolate donut. In French Women for All Seasons, Mireille says, "French women don't get fat because they know the secret of pleasure. But the secret to pleasure is cultivation: a life of ongoing exploration, experimentation, practiced enjoyment, and—most important—self discovery." Check out French Women for All Seasons for tips about how to entertain and dress, new recipes, and most importantly, how to remain bien dans sa peau.

Une Vraie Française (48-60 points)
You may have already read French Women Don’t Get Fat and taken it to heart or you simply have an inner French woman. Either way, you've unlocked the secret of pleasure—it—it's the most important part of life. But again as Mireille says in French Women for All Seasons, "the secret to pleasure is cultivation: a life of ongoing exploration, experimentation, practiced enjoyment, and—most important—self discovery." Read the book to find out how to keep this process going throughout the winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Gregory Maguire

Stephen King In 1985, 39-year-old Stephen King announced in public that his pseudonymous alter ego, Richard Bachman, was dead. (Never mind that he revived him years later to write The Regulators.) At the beginning of The Dark Half, 39-year-old writer Thad Beaumont announces in public that his own pseudonym, George Stark, is dead.

Now, King didn't want to jettison the Bachman novel, titled Machine Dreams, that was he working on. So he incorporated it in The Dark Half as the crime oeuvre of George Stark, whose recurring hero/alter ego is an evil character named Alexis Machine.

Thad Beaumont's pseudonym is not so docile as Stephen King's, though, and George Stark bursts forth into reality. At that point, two stories kick into gear: a mystery-detective story about the crime spree of George Stark (or is it Alexis Machine?) and a horror story about Beaumont's struggle to catch up with his doppelganger and kill him dead.

This is not the first time that Stephen King has written a dark allegory about the fiction writer's situation. As the New York Times writes, Misery (1987) is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death. The Dark Half is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes, the fratricidal twin who occupies "the womblike dungeon" of his imagination." —Fiona Webster

Anne Rice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

John Irving

Anthony Bourdain

Stephen King Since his first novel was published in 1974, Stephen King has stretched the boundaries of the written word, not only bringing horror to new heights, but trying his hand at nearly every possible genre, including children's books, graphic novels, serial novels, literary fiction, nonfiction, westerns, fantasy, and even e-books (remember The Plant?). With Lisey's Story, once again King is trying something different. Lisey's Story is as much a romance as it is a supernatural thriller—but don't let us convince you. Who better to tell readers if King has written a romantic thriller than Nora Roberts? We asked Nora to read Lisey's Story and give us her take. Check out her review below. —Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts, who also writes under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, is the author of way too many bestselling books to name here (over 150!), but some of our favorites include: Angels Fall, Born in Death, Blue Smoke, and The Reef.

Stephen King hooked me about three decades ago with that sharply faceted, blood-stained jewel, The Shining. Through the years he's bumped my gooses with kiddie vampires, tingled my spine with beloved pets gone rabid, justified my personal fear of clowns and made me think twice about my cell phone. I've always considered The Stand—a long-time favorite—a towering tour de force, and have owed its author a debt as this was the first novel I could convince my older son to read from cover to cover.

But with Lisey's Story, King has accomplished one more feat. He broke my heart.

Lisey's Story is, at its core, a love story—heart-wrenching, passionate, terrifying and tender. It is the multi-layered and expertly crafted tale of a twenty-five year marriage, and a widow's journey through grief, through discovery and—this is King, after all—through a nightmare scape of the ordinary and extraordinary. Through Lisey's mind and heart, the reader is pulled into the intimacies of her marriage to bestselling novelist Scott Landon, and through her we come to know this complicated, troubled and heroic man.

Two years after his death, Lisey sorts through her husband's papers and her own shrouded memories. Following the clues Scott left her and her own instincts, she embarks on a journey that risks both her life and her sanity. She will face Scott's demons as well as her own, traveling into the past and into Boo'ya Moon, the seductive and terrifying world he'd shown her. There lives the power to heal, and the power to destroy.

Lisey Landon is a richly wrought character of charm and complexity, of realized inner strength and redoubtable humor. As the central figure she drives the story, and the story is so vividly textured, the reader will draw in the perfumed air of Boo'ya Moon, will see the sunlight flood through the windows of the Scott's studio—or the night press against them. Her voice will be clear in your ear as you experience the fear and the wonder. If your heart doesn't hitch at the demons she faces in this world and the other, if it doesn't thrill at her courage and endurance, you're going to need to check with a cardiologist, first chance.

Lisey's Story is bright and brilliant. It's dark and desperate. While I'll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King's wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems.

A few of them have sharp, hungry teeth. —Nora Roberts

Thomas L. Friedman

Stephen J. Bigelow

Richard Preston In New York City in the late nineties, a 17-year-old girl heads off to her private school despite having a cold. Unfortunately, Kate Moran is talented, beautiful and the first character in Richard Preston's first novel, so her chances for survival are probably not good. In fact, by art class her nose is gushing mucus and she's severely disoriented. Within seconds, it seems, she's in convulsions and, most bizarrely, can't stop biting herself. All the reader can do is hope she'll die quickly, but Kate's body still has a few more disgusting turns to undergo, and the author—a Jacobean master of ceremonies par excellence—takes us through them in bizarre and bloody detail.

Clearly, whatever Kate had was a head cold with a scientific vengeance. Preston's heroine, Alice Austen, a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, realizes—in the first of several gripping autopsy scenes—that the girl's nervous system had been virtually destroyed. So far, only one other person is known to have died in the same way, but he was a homeless man. Austen must connect the two cases, seemingly linked only by the subway, before the media gets hold of them and fuels a bout of mass hysteria- -and before the virus's creator can kill again.

The Cobra Event is itself a paranoia-fest, a provocative thriller that makes you wonder exactly how much bioterrorism is taking place in the real world. Preston, best known for his terrifying chronicle of the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone, and other impeccably researched nonfictions, is not content to create fast-paced nightmarish scenes. His novel is, instead, a complex morality tale anchored in uncomfortable fact. Preston is keen to convey the "invisible history" of bioweapons engineering and, equally, to show the unsung heroism of his scientific detectives (along with that of the nurses and technicians who literally sacrifice their lives for medicine). Like their creator, these characters are not without a sense of humour. One calls the manmade virus "the ultimate head cold". Readers will never forget literally dozens of scenes and will never again see the subway, rodents, autopsy knives, and—above all—runny noses in the same light.

Malcolm Gladwell : For Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling The Tipping Point explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell's major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls `thin-slicing'. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. Much of this is utterly mysterious but some of the most astonishing and useful examples of thin-slicing can be learned.

 

Gladwell hopes to convince us that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled so instead of merely praising the mysterious process of instinct and intuition he is interested in those moments when our instincts betray us, the situations where our powers of rapid cognition can go awry, where we fail to read the signs. Most disturbing of all is the degree to which culturally determined preconceptions and prejudices control us. Without reducing matters to racism and sexism Gladwell shows us that there are facts about people's appearance—their size or shape or color or sex—that can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations which explains why utter mediocrities (such as U.S. President Warren Harding) can sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility; or why tall people earn substantially more than their shorter colleagues; or why car salesmen unconsciously charge prices according to race and gender.  

Gladwell's conversational prose style is concise, informative, accessible and entertaining. The stories, scientific findings and psychological tests are consistently surprising whether he is dealing with speed-dating, record promotions, police shoot-outs, the human face, or the reasons doctors get sued. —Larry Brown END

Anita Diamant Jewish tradition is a gift and a challenge. Living a Jewish Life is your guide to the cultural and spiritual treasures of Judaism, explained in ways that address the choices posed by modern life. From hanging a mezuzah to celebrating a wedding, from lighting Sabbath candles to choosing a synagogue that's right for you and your family, you will find "why-to's" and "how-to's" in these pages, which are tuned to both the realities of the modern world and the timeless, grounding rhythms of Jewish tradition.

Spanning the spectrum of liberal Jewish thought — Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform, unaffiliated, new age and secular — this book provides a sensitive and practical introduction to making Judaism a meaningful part of your life.

Filled with anecdotes, lore, memorable quotations, history, prayers and ceremonies, Living a Jewish Life celebrates the diversity, joy and fulfillment of Jewish life today. This book is filled with your Jewish choices.

Dominick Dunne

ROBERT J. SERLING

Suzannah Dunn

Martin Kirk, Brooke Boon

Anthony Bourdain Kitchen Confidential is for diners who believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase. Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years.

Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller—a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: "There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favour well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection.... But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it." —Sumi Hahn

Alice Steinbach

J. Edward Chamberlin

Brian L. Weiss

Dalai Lama As a primer on living the good life, few books compete with How to Practice, another profound offering from the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Westerners may be confused by the book's title, assuming that it focuses solely on Buddhist meditation and prayer techniques. Though it does address meditation and prayer, at its core this is a book that demonstrates how day-to-day living can be a spiritual practice. There are two ways to create happiness:The first is external. By obtaining better clothes, better shelter, and better friends we can find a certain measure of happiness and satisfaction. The second is through mental development, which yields inner happiness. However, these two approaches are not equally viable. External happiness cannot last long without its counterpart.... However, if you have peace of mind you can find happiness even under the most difficult circumstances. As he has in previous books (An Open Heart, The Art of Happiness), the Dalai Lama reminds us that developing peace of mind means paying attention to our daily attitudes and choices as well as taking the time to meditate and be prayerful. The six-part book covers Buddhist meditation techniques and visualization exercises as well as daily thoughts and actions that foster morality and wisdom. —Gail Hudson

Nick Bantock

Alfredo Tradigo

Anne Rice Anne Rice wasn't the first writer to show vampires as sexy—there are powerfully perverse sexual undercurrents in Bram Stoker's Dracula, granddaddy of all modern vampire novels. But Rice's 1976 Interview With the Vampire made vampirism lusher and more explicitly attractive. Though there's still a dark and messy side (as with sex), non-vampires are irresistibly tempted by perks like immortality and great good looks. Pandora, one of many follow-ups, is the partial autobiography of a heroine born human in Augustan Rome and still undead today. Much of it reads like historical romance, but involvement with the cult of Isis makes Pandora dream about blood-drinking ... Characteristically for Rice, the romantic climax—foreshadowed from paragraph one—means finding not true love but true vampirism with Mr Right. Indeed the horror aspect has almost vanished and draining people of their blood is considered acceptable since Pandora and friends kill only bad guys. (Compare the morality of Terry Pratchett's on-the-wagon vampires, who make do with animal blood from kosher butchers.) Sensuality alternates with dollops of historical research and references to previous novels such as The Vampire Lestat— referred to by title—whose events readers are expected to remember. Pandora is written for, and will satisfy, Rice's many established addicts. —David Langford

Marshall B. Rosenberg

Maya Angelou

Frank M. Loewenberg, Ralph Dolgoff

Stephen King Stephen King's most gripping and unforgettable novel, Bag of Bones, is a story of grief and a lost love's enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by the secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire.

Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving even four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and who can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his word processor.

Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares of the house by the lake. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike finally returns to Sara Laughs, the Noonans' isolated summer home.

He finds his beloved Yankee town familiar on its surface, but much changed underneath — held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who twists the very fabric of the community to his purpose: to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here — and what do they want of Mike Noonan?

As vivid and enthralling as King's most enduring works, Bag of Bones resonates with what Amy Tan calls "the witty and obsessive voice of King's powerful imagination." It's no secret that King is our most mesmerizing storyteller. In Bag of Bones — described by Gloria Naylor as "a love story about the dark places within us all" — he proves to be one of our most moving.

Alice Walker Vivid poems of “breakdown and spiritual disarray.” Writing these, Walker says, “led me eventually into a larger understanding of the psyche, and of the world.” What finally marks this volume is the strong sense of change and, ultimately, of forgiveness as a part of growth.

Augusten Burroughs Fans of Augusten Burroughs's darkly funny memoir Running with Scissors were left wondering at the end of that book what would become of young Augusten after his squalid and fascinating childhood ended. In Dry, we find that although adult Augusten is doing well professionally, earning a handsome living as an ad writer for a top New York agency, Burroughs's personal life is a disaster. His apartment is a sea of empty Dewar's bottles, he stays out all night boozing, and he dabs cologne on his tongue in an unsuccessful attempt to mask the stench of alcohol on his breath at work. When his employer insists he seek help, Burroughs ships out to Minnesota for detoxification, counseling, and amusingly told anecdotes about the use of stuffed animals in group therapy. But after a month of such treatment, he's back in Manhattan and tenuously sober. And while its one thing to lay off the sauce in rehab, Burroughs learns that it's quite another to resume your former life while avoiding the alcohol that your former life was based around. This quest to remain sober is made dramatically more difficult, and the tale more harrowing, when Burroughs begins an ill-advised romance with a crack addict. Certainly the "recovered alcoholic fighting to stay sober" tale is not new territory for a memoirist. But Burroughs's account transcends clichés: it doesn't adhere to the traditional "temptation narrowly resisted" storyline and it features, in Burroughs himself, a central character that is sympathetic even when he's neither likable nor admirable. But what ultimately makes this memoir such a terrific read is a brilliant and candid sense of humor that manages to stay dry even when recalling events where the author was anything but. —John Moe

Daniel Boulud

Dan Diamond, Eric Zweig

Larry Niven In Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers Larry Niven created Known Space, a universe in the distant future with a distinctive and complicated history. The centre of this universe is Ringworld, an expansive hoop-shaped relic 1 million miles across and 600 million miles in circumference that is home to some 30 trillion diverse inhabitants. As in his past novels, Niven's characters in The Ringworld Throne spend their time unravelling the complex problems posed by their society.

Alice Hoffman

Calif.) Rolling Stone (San Francisco

Linda McCartney

C. J. Sansom A story of Tudor England. Meet Matthew Shardlake, Esq — "The sharpest hunchback in the courts of England." "Sansom seems to be have been born with, or instinctively acquired, that precious balance of creatiity and research that lets a mystery set in another time walk a delicate line between history and humanity." —Chicago Tribune

Mary Carlomagno

KATHRYN HARRISON

Amanda Foreman

Bill Evans, Marianna Jameson

Martha Stewart Living Magazine

Sharon Kay Penman

Karen Dionne

Peter Reid

Thomas Cahill

Donna Woolfolk Cross

Richard Fletcher In a work of splendid scholarship that reflects both a firm mastery of difficult sources and a keen intuition, one of Britain's foremost medievalists tells the story of the Christianization of Europe. It is a very large story, for conversion encompassed much more than religious belief. With it came enormous cultural change: Latin literacy and books, Roman notions of law and property, and the concept of town life, as well as new tastes in food, drink, and dress. Whether from faith or by force, from self-interest or by revelation, conversion had an immense impact that is with us even today. It is Richard Fletcher's achievement in this superb work that he makes that impact both felt and understood.

Paula H. Deen

Denise Giardina

Robert Fulghum Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten, turns his inspirational ponderings to the rituals that fill and inform our daily lives, from brushing our teeth to the grand rituals responding to birth, life, and death.

Mark Kurlansky

Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Chrissy Donnelly

Stephenie Meyer Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: Stephenie Meyer, creator of the phenomenal teen-vamp Twilight series, takes paranormal romance into alien territory in her first adult novel. Those wary of sci-fi or teen angst will be pleasantly surprised by this mature and imaginative thriller, propelled by equal parts action and emotion. A species of altruistic parasites has peacefully assumed control of the minds and bodies of most humans, but feisty Melanie Stryder won't surrender her mind to the alien soul called Wanderer. Overwhelmed by Melanie's memories of fellow resistor Jared, Wanderer yields to her body's longing and sets off into the desert to find him. Likely the first love triangle involving just two bodies, it's unabashedly romantic, and the characters (human and alien) genuinely endearing. Readers intrigued by this familiar-yet-alien world will gleefully note that the story's end leaves the door open for a sequel—or another series. —Mari Malcolm

James Carroll

Stephenie Meyer

Morrison

Junichiro Tanizaki

Robert J. Sternberg

William Arroyo

J. Maarten Troost

John Irving

Hans Finzel

James Hewitt

Douglas Adams

Anne Rice

Anthony Bourdain

Dalai Lama XIV Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho

Dick Francis

J Maarten Troost

Margery Kempe

Colleen McCullough

Lucy Leu

Julia Fox

Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Alice Walker A natural evolution from the earlier, much-acclaimed collection In Love & Trouble, these fourteen provocative and often humorous stories show women oppressed but not defeated. “[Walker] shrinks from no moral or emotional complexity, and she writes consummately skillful short stories” (Alice Adams, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle).

O. Henry

Grace Paley

American Psychological Association

Philippa Gregory

Mike Dolgushkin, John W. Scott

Philippa Gregory

Bernard Cornwell

Paul Grushkin, Cynthia Bassett, Jonas Grushkin There is nothing like a Greatful Dead concert!

Since 1965, there have been over 3,000 Greatful Dead concerts, from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to the Gizeh Pyramids.At each of them, someone has stepped "on the bus" and become a Dead Head.

Now, all of the Dead Head voices and visions have come together. Greatful Dead: The Official Book of the Dead Heads is a splendid mixture of musicians, dancers and costumed participants — a portrait of a singulau band and its remarkable following. It is a ticket to a Dead concert and an invitation to join in the celebration.

If you've ever experienced the greatful Dead at their best — or if you've always wondered what they are all about — open this book and see what happens. You may find yourself in complete agreement: There is nothing like a Greatful Dead concert.

Philippa Gregory

Giada de Laurentiis

John W. Scott, Mike Dolgushkin, Stu Nixon

Jay Atkinson

Henry Miller

Mark Bittman

Jeff Carlson

Philip Pullman

Bob Dylan

Katherine Neville

Kazuo Ishiguro The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second world war, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him—oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, beautifully crafted novel— namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.

Frank McCourt For 30 years Frank McCourt taught high school English in New York City and for much of that time he considered himself a fraud. During these years he danced a delicate jig between engaging the students, satisfying often bewildered administrators and parents, and actually enjoying his job. He tried to present a consistent image of composure and self-confidence, yet he regularly felt insecure, inadequate, and unfocused. After much trial and error, he eventually discovered what was in front of him (or rather, behind him) all along—his own experience. "My life saved my life," he writes. "My students didn't know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere." At the beginning of his career it had never occurred to him that his own dismal upbringing in the slums of Limerick could be turned into a valuable lesson plan. Indeed, his formal training emphasized the opposite. Principals and department heads lectured him to never share anything personal. He was instructed to arouse fear and awe, to be stern, to be impossible to please—but he couldn't do it. McCourt was too likable, too interested in the students' lives, and too willing to reveal himself for their benefit as well as his own. He was a kindred spirit with more questions than answers: "Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens."

As he did so adroitly in his previous memoirs, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt manages to uncover humor in nearly everything. He writes about hilarious misfires, as when he suggested (during his teacher's exam) that the students write a suicide note, as well as unorthodox assignments that turned into epiphanies for both teacher and students. A dazzling writer with a unique and compelling voice, McCourt describes the dignity and difficulties of a largely thankless profession with incisive, self-deprecating wit and uncommon perception. It may have taken him three decades to figure out how to be an effective teacher, but he ultimately saved his most valuable lesson for himself: how to be his own man. —Shawn Carkonen

Nancy Faust Sizer

Rick Reilly

Anne Rice

Charles Benn

Khaled Hosseini

Karen Armstrong

Janet Evanovich Low-rent bounty hunter Stephanie Plum reaches depths of personal experience that other women detectives never quite do. In Hot Six, for example, a sequence of new and hideous cars bite the dust; she finds herself lumbered with a policeman's multiply incontinent dog; and she has several bad skin days. All this when she is trying to prove her distinctly more competent colleague and occasional boyfriend Ranger innocent of a mob hit; avoid the heavies trailing her in the hope of finding him; and cope with a wife-abusing bail defaulter with nasty habits, such as setting Stephanie on fire. The peculiar joy of this series is the comic sense of place; Plum's New Jersey is one where everyone you meet, even the most dangerous of criminals, was at school with you, or stole your mother's first boyfriend, or gave your great-aunt a middling good recipe for meatloaf. Evanovich has built up an attractive cast of comic characters with Stephanie's extended family and those of her two boyfriends, the dashing and sinister Ranger and Joe Morelli (the cop whose family are only too keen on his marrying Stephanie). Hot Six will not disappoint either her fans or newcomers. —Roz Kaveney

John Steinbeck

Michael Farquhar

Murdoch

Thomas Bulfinch

Joe Casad Many organisations are choosing to deploy Windows 2000 on their networks precisely because of the power and flexibility that Active Directory promises. Windows 2000 Active Directory represents a complete guide to Active Directory services and certain aspects of their use. You might think of this book as the Active Directory equivalent of one of those big guides to Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop: It's big, procedure-rich, and organised around the features of the software rather than around the engineering considerations that are central to using it. Its focus on the features isn't a shortcoming, just a characteristic.

A typical section has to do with Replication Monitor, a diagnostic and observation program that's part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. In this section, the author first provides a quick statement of where Replication Monitor is and what it does, then gives steps for using it. These steps could benefit from more illustrations, but they're not bad. He then goes through options—synchronising with a replication partner, checking Update Sequence Number (USN), and so on—before listing a replication log and giving a bit of comment on it. He repeats the strategy for scores of other features, capabilities, and utilities, with a detailed document (that assumes little on the part of the reader) as a result. —David Wall, amazon.com

Topics covered: An overview of Active Directory's purpose and architecture, followed by detailed guides to each of its features and capabilities. Coverage deals with replication, security, users and groups, and systems administration issues such as installation.

Tom Parker Bowles

Michael Getz, John Dwork

Douglas Coupland A collection of essays by Douglas Coupland, whose first novel Generation X received critical acclaim. In his mid-30s, Coupland writes about what it means to grow up and the realization that he is not young anymore. Essays include observations on parents his age at Grateful Dead concerts who seem intent on preserving a youthful reckless and carefree lifestyle at the expense of their children, to the "gristled leather bachelors" and "straw-permed sex androids from Planet 1971," to mourning his own sense of youthfulness as he revisits old haunts in his native Vancouver.

George Carlin

Michael Pollan

Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp

Amy Tan

Stephen King 100% RETURN & REFUND POLICY, WE COMBINE SHIPPING ON MULTIPLE PURCHASES !!! CELL BY STEPHN KING PUBLISHED SCRIBNER. BNOOK NO DUST JACKET IN VERY GOOD CONDITION !!!

David G. Dodd

David McCullough

China Galland

Christina Schwarz For 19th-century novelists—from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James—social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn't Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation. Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighbouring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonourable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm. Within a year, though, her beloved sister Mathilde drowns under mysterious circumstances. And when Mathilde's husband, Carl, returns from the war, he finds his small daughter, Ruth, in Amanda's tenacious grip, and she will tell him nothing about the night his wife drowned. Amanda's parents, too, are long gone. "I killed my parents. Had I mentioned that?" muses Amanda. I killed them because I felt a little fatigued and suffered from a slight, persistent cough. Thinking I was overworked and hadn't been getting enough sleep, I went home for a short visit, just a few days to relax in the country while the sweet corn and the raspberries were ripe. From the city I brought fancy ribbon, two boxes of Ambrosia chocolate, and a deadly gift... I gave the influenza to my mother, who gave it to my father, or maybe it was the other way around." Schwarz is a skilful writer, weaving her grim tale across several decades, always returning to the fateful night of Mathilde's death. Drowning Ruth displays her gift for pacing and her harsh insistence on the right ending, rather than the cheery one. —Regina Marler

Roger Angell, Nothing But You

Anne Rice

Mark Kurlansky After basking in the shallows of success that surrounded Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky turns his attentions to the people who first hunted it and in doing so may have discovered America before John Cabot could say Isparsortalderatu. In a sense The Basque History of the World is the natural successor to Cod, for it grows organically from that book's early chapters. It unfolds the dramatic tale of the Basques as they fight off the challenges of the Vikings, the Romans, the Muslims and, for centuries now, the Spanish; proudly defensive of the remote and rugged hills on the edge of the Pyrenees, where Shakespeare set Love's Labour's Lost and that echoes with their peculiar agglutinating tongue. They are possibly Europe's aborigines and their language, unlike any other, was reputed to originate from, variously, the Tower of Babel, Atlantis and even the Garden of Eden. What's for certain is that it has defined their being when all else has been taken from them and that today, emerging from the shadow of the Franco regime's persecution, Europe's oldest nation wants to be its newest state. Kurlansky's recipe is reassuringly and familiarly unorthodox: intermingled with a stirring narrative are maps, photographs, pieces of reportage, quirky facts and, of course, recipes—the Basques are justly proud of their fish—and bean-based cuisine, something Kurlansky is not slow to savour. Where Cod was not simply about a big fish in The Big Pond but embraced the thorny problem of global over-fishing, The Basque History of the World does not confine its scope to the two and a half million people living in the seven Basque provinces. It speaks of violently modern and pervasive issues such as the notion of nationhood, borders and identity, and does so in a slyly humorous yet always passionate way. Be warned: This is not insipid, literary chloroform. What the imperious Kurlansky has written is a magnificently personal and driven tribute to a people and culture that have spellbound him for years and will warm the cockles of your heart (before adding them to a Ttoro stew). —David Vincent

Jane Austen

Douglas Adams

A. J. Jacobs

Sam Zien

Debora Tkac

James Patterson

Alison Weir The prolific Scottish historian Alison Weir, in her new book Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley, grapples painstakingly with a mystery that has dogged history for centuries.

At midnight on February 9 1567, a violent explosion ripped apart Kirk o'Field, the Edinburgh residence of Lord Darnley, the 20-year-old King and second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. His unmarked body was found lying under a tree, together with that of his valet. The cause of his death and its perpetrators have remained obscured since that night, though Mary was a prime suspect in her husband's murder. Her apparent apathy regarding the murder investigation was regarded with deep suspicion but more incriminating were the infamous "Casket" letters, said to have been written by her to her lover Lord Bothwell, the supposed architect of Darnley's assassination. Yet if Mary had good reasons for wanting her (Catholic) husband dead, then so had much of Scottish nobility.

Using contemporary evidence Weir argues exhaustively that the letters could have been the work of forgers employed by Protestant lords "laying snares for the queen". Sympathetic to Elizabeth I, intent on justifying Mary's subsequent imprisonment and forcing her abdication, the prospect of a young foreign Catholic queen, unversed in diplomacy, refusing a Protestant alliance through marriage was anathema to the Scottish lords. Weir's book claims that Mary's fate was sealed as much by the country of which she was monarch as by Elizabethan England.

Alison Weir's carefully researched addition to the wealth of material on the myth and reality of Mary Queen of Scots is too long, at 600 pages, but nevertheless makes for a thoughtful, scholarly and compelling read. —Catherine Taylor

Elizabeth Kostova Some stories can be told again in endlessly different ways. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right—that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous. From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence.

Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly. Kostova rations her thrills very carefully so that we jump out of our chair at quite slight surprises, especially when we have come to expect buckets of blood and loud bangs. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford. Kostova is particularly good on the sights and sounds of remote country places and the taste of real peasant food—this sensuous realism does not always go with her other skill, the creation of imagined documents and folksongs that feel as real and true as what might be actual.

This is a quietly good book rather than a spectacular debut, with some uncomfortable twists in its tail; her heroine-narrators are, and perhaps remain, in the most serious of jeopardies. —-Roz Kaveney

Michael B. First, Allen J. Frances, Harold Alan Pincus

Anthony Bourdain A Cook's Tour is the written record of Tony Bourdain's travels around the world in his search for the perfect meal. All too conscious of the state of his 44-year old knees (Crunch! Pop! Snap!) after a working life standing at restaurant stoves, but with the unlooked-for jackpot of Kitchen Confidential as collateral, Mr Bourdain evidently concluded he needed a bit more wind under his wings.

The idea of "perfect meal" in this context is to be taken to mean not necessarily the most upscale, chi-chi, three-star dining experience, but the ideal combination of food, atmosphere and company. This would take in fishing villages in Vietnam, bars in Cambodia and Tuareg camps in Morocco (roasted sheep's testicle, as it happens); it would stretch to smoked fish and sauna in the frozen Russian countryside and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. It would mean exquisitely refined kaiseki rituals in Japan after yakitori with drunken salarimen. Deep-fried Mars Bars in Glasgow and Gordon Ramsay in London. The still-beating heart of a cobra in Saigon. Drink. Danger. Guns. All with a TV crew in tow for the accompanying series—22 episodes of video gold, we are assured, featuring many don't-try-this-at-home shots of Tony in gastric distress or crawling into yet another storm drain at four in the morning.

You are unlikely to lay your hands on a more hectically, strenuously entertaining book for some time. Our hero eats and swashbuckles round the globe with perfect-pitch attitude and liberal use of judiciously placed profanities. Bourdain can write. His timing is great. He is very funny and is under no illusions whatsoever about himself or anyone else. So far, so PJ O'Rourke. But most of all, he is a chef who got himself out of his kitchen and found, all over the world, people who understand that eating well is the foundation of harmonious living. —Robin Davidson

Leslie Alcock

Mitch Alborn This true story about the love between a spiritual mentor and his pupil has soared to the bestseller list for many reasons. For starters, it reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. It also plays out a fantasy many of us have entertained: what would it be like to look those people up again, tell them how much they meant to us, maybe even resume the mentorship? And we meet Morrie Schwartz—a one of a kind professor, whom the author describes as looking like a cross between a biblical prophet and Christmas elf. Finally, we are privy to intimate moments of Morrie's final days as he lies dying from a terminal illness. Even on his deathbed, this twinkling-eyed mensch manages to teach us all about living robustly and fully. Kudos to author and acclaimed sports columnist Mitch Albom for telling this universally touching story with such grace and humility. —Gail Hudson

Bryan Acton, Peter Duncan

Cathleen Medwick

James Patterson, Howard Roughan

Posie Graeme-Evans The thrilling climax to the trilogy that began with The Innocent and The Exiled brings Posie Graeme-Evans's bittersweet story of two lovers divided by the throne of England to its dramatic conclusion.

As England tears itself apart in the War of the Roses, Anne de Bohun lives far from the intrigues of cities and courts. Once King Edward IV's mistress, Anne has found safety with their son in Brugge. But now Edward himself is a hunted fugitive, and Anne's real father, King Henry VI, rules again from Westminster. Summoned by an enigmatic message from her lover, Anne is drawn once more to the passion, the excitement, and the deadly danger that Edward brings into her life. But now, the girl who was once a penniless servant has a child to protect and an inheritance to defend. Can she let her love for Edward threaten everything she has? Or will she need his help to protect her from the powerful enemy who means to destroy her?

Boasting an extraordinary heroine and intense, intersecting plots, The Uncrowned Queen is a dazzling and satisfying finale to Anne de Bohun's incredible story.

At age 67, the perennially youthful John Updike may at last qualify as something of an elder statesman. But the Best American Short Stories annual—whose greatest hits package Updike has now assembled—is almost a generation older, having commenced publication in 1915. This staying power allows the hefty Best American Short Stories of the Century to perform double duty. It is, on the one hand, a priceless compendium of American manners and morals—a decade-by-decade survey of how we lived then, and how we live now. Yet Updike very consciously avoided the sociological angle in making his selection. "I tried not to select stories because they illustrated a theme or portion of the national experience," he writes in his introduction, "but because they struck me as lively, beautiful, believable, and, in the human news they brought, important." In this he succeeded: the 55 fictions that made the grade are most notable for their human (rather than merely historical) interest.

So who got in? There are a good number of cut-and-dried classics here, including Hemingway's "The Killers," Faulkner's "That Evening Sun Go Down," and Philip Roth's acidic spin on religious connivance, "Defender of the Faith." In other cases, major authors are represented by relatively minor works. Yet it's hard to quibble with the inclusion of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, J.F. Powers, Eudora Welty—particularly when you take into account that their second-tier creations are fully the equal of anybody else's masterpieces. And the final third of the book really does constitute an honor roll of contemporary American fiction, with brilliant entries by Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov. (For the latter, Updike actually succumbed to his own idolatry and bent the rules for admission—but nobody who reads the hallucinatory "That in Aleppo Once..." will regret it.) It goes without saying that fiction fans will be complaining about the editor's sins of omission well into the next century. But no matter how you slice it, this remains an elegant and essential advertisement for the short form. —James Marcus

Caroline P. Murphy

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E Raynor

Augusten Burroughs

Thomas L. Friedman Updated Edition: Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim in The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists—the optimistic ones at least—are inevitably prey to.

What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments—when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East—is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete—and win—not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. (He doesn't forget the "mutant supply chains" like Al-Qaeda that let the small act big in more destructive ways.)

Friedman has embraced this flat world in his own work, continuing to report on his story after his book's release and releasing an unprecedented hardcover update of the book a year later with 100 pages of revised and expanded material. What's changed in a year? Some of the sections that opened eyes in the first edition—on China and India, for example, and the global supply chain—are largely unaltered. Instead, Friedman has more to say about what he now calls "uploading," the direct-from-the-bottom creation of culture, knowledge, and innovation through blogging, podcasts, and open-source software. And in response to the pleas of many of his readers about how to survive the new flat world, he makes specific recommendations about the technical and creative training he thinks will be required to compete in the "New Middle" class. As before, Friedman tells his story with the catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes that readers of his earlier books and his New York Times columns know well, and he holds to a stern sort of optimism. He wants to tell you how exciting this new world is, but he also wants you to know you're going to be trampled if you don't keep up with it. A year later, one can sense his rising impatience that our popular culture, and our political leaders, are not helping us keep pace. —Tom Nissley

Where Were You When the World Went Flat?

Thomas L. Friedman's reporter's curiosity and his ability to recognize the patterns behind the most complex global developments have made him one of the most entertaining and authoritative sources for information about the wider world we live in, both as the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and as the author of landmark books like From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. They also make him an endlessly fascinating conversation partner, and we've now had the chance to talk to him about The World Is Flat twice. Read our original interview with him following the publication of the first edition of The World Is Flat to learn why there's almost no one from Washington, D.C., listed in the index of a book about the global economy, and what his one-plank platform for president would be. (Hint: his bumper stickers would say, "Can You Hear Me Now?")

And now you can listen to our second interview, in which he talks about the updates he's made in "The World Is Flat 2.0," including his response to parents who said to him, "Great, Mr. Friedman, I'm glad you told us the world is flat. Now what do I tell my kids?"

The Essential Tom Friedman </!— begin3pak ——>
From Beirut to Jerusalem
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Longitudes and Attitudes </!— end6pak ——> More on Globalization and Development

China, Inc. by Ted Fishman
Three Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

William Faubion Within these pages you will find an insider's guide to the best Arizona has to offer.

Brian M. Fagan "Climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage," writes archeologist Brian Fagan. But it shouldn't be, not if we know what's good for us. We can't judge what future climate change will mean unless we know something about its effects in the past: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". And Fagan's story of the last thousand years, centered on the "Little Ice Age," reminds us of what we could end up repeating: flood, fire, and famine—acts of God exacerbated by acts of man.

For all that he takes a broad—a very broad—view of European history, Fagan's writing is laced with human faces, fascinating anecdotes, and a gift for the telling detail that makes history live, very much in the style of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. When Fagan talks about the voyages of Basque fishermen to American shores (probably landing before Columbus sailed), he puts in the taste of dried cod and the terrifying suddenness of fogs on the Grand Banks. The Great Fire of London, what it was like when the Dutch dikes broke, the Irish Potato Famine, the year without a summer, ice fairs on the Thames, and volcanoes in the South Pacific—Fagan makes history a ripping yarn in which we are all actors, on a stage that has always been changing. —Mary Ellen Curtin

Jane Smiley It takes a great deal of faith to gear a novel this horse-besotted to the general public. Horse love is one of those things either you get or you don't, and for the vast majority of the populace, horse stories tend to read like porn written for 13-year-old girls. The good news, then, is that while a love of all things equine is not a prerequisite for enjoying Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven, a love of human perversity is. Racing, after all, is at worst a dangerous, asset-devouring folly and at best an anachronism, as one of her horse trainers notes:The Industry Leaders had made it their personal mission to bring horse racing to the attention of the general public, with the NFL as their model and television as their medium of choice, which was fine with Farley, though his own view was that horse racing out at the track, newspaper reading, still photography, placing bets in person, and writing thank-you notes by hand were all related activities, and football, ESPN, video, on-line betting, and not writing thank-you notes at all were another set of related activities. A crucial piece of information for Smiley fans is that, among her many novels, Horse Heaven most resembles Moo. (And there's even a pig!) In fact, with these two books it appears that this versatile author has finally found a home in which to unpack her impressive gifts: that is, the sprawling, intricately plotted satirical novel. Her target in this case is not academia but horse racing—less commonly satirized but, here at least, just as fruitfully so. Wickedly knowing, dryly comic, the result is as much fun to read as it must have been to write.

None of which means that Horse Heaven is a casual read. For starters, one practically needs a racing form to keep track of its characters, particularly when their stories begin to overlap and converge in increasingly unlikely and pleasing ways. Perhaps it says something about the novel that the easiest figures to follow are the horses themselves: loutish Epic Steam, the "monster" colt; the winsome filly Residual; supernaturally focused Limitless; and trembling little Froney's Sis. And that's not to forget Horse Heaven's single most prepossessing character, Justa Bob—a little swaybacked, a little ewe-necked, but possessed of a fine sense of humor and an abiding disdain for winning races by anything but a nose.

Then there are the humans, including but not limited to socialite Rosalind Maybrick, her husband Al (who manufactures "giant heavy metal objects" in "distant impoverished nationlike locations"), a Zen trainer, a crooked trainer, a rapper named Ho Ho Ice Chill, an animal psychic, and a futurist scholar, as well as attendant jockeys, grooms, and hangers-on. (Not to mention poor, ironically named Joy, a few years out of Moo U and still having problems relating.) It's a little frustrating to watch this cast come and go and fight for Smiley's attention; you glimpse them so vividly, and then they disappear for another hundred pages, and it breaks your heart.

But there are certainly worse problems a novel could have than characters to whom you grow overattached. A plot this convoluted would be one, if only it weren't so hard to stop reading. There are elements of magic realism, astounding coincidences, unabashed anthropomorphism. (At one point—while Justa Bob throws himself against his stall in sorrow at leaving his owner's tiny, wordless mother behind—this reviewer cried, "Shameless!" even as she began to tear up.) Improbably, it all works. Horse Heaven is a great, joyous, big-hearted entertainment, a stakes winner by any measure, and for both horse lovers and fans of Smiley's dry, character-based wit, a cause for celebration on par with winning the Triple Crown. —Mary Park

Mark Kurlansky To make the history of a fish interesting, invigorating and moving is an almost impossible feat that Mark Kurlansky accomplishes fantastically well in this compact, learned, beautifully written gem of a book. Cod traces humankind's involvement with what was once one of the world's most plentiful foodstuffs. The Basque people, who Kurlansky suggests found America before Columbus, could only fish and forage (for whale meat) as far as they did because of the huge schools of cod they found, caught and salted as they went. Centuries before this Vikings had travelled from Norway across to Canada—the exact range of the Atlantic cod. Interspersed with old and forgotten recipes Cod becomes a fitting requiem to a fish no-one believed would ever become scarce nor become such a telling metaphor for our careless treatment of the sea, its bounty and our wider environment. —Mark Thwaite

Thomas Cahill Desire of the Everlasting Hills is another present from the pen of Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews.

In this, the third volume of the bestselling Hinges of History series, he knits together history, politics, sociology, and faith with contemporary insights that yield remarkable results. After painting with broad brush strokes an entertaining picture of the Greek, Jewish, and Roman world, Cahill focuses on Jesus. With illuminating deductions and clever speculation, Jesus is seen though the eyes of his biographers in their Gospel accounts. Each of these authors' lives is reconstructed in such a way that the richness of their writing and their subject matter is wonderfully enhanced.

The section on Paul, detailing how his life and letters shaped the early church, should be required reading for every student of the Bible. From his beginnings in the cosmopolitan city known as Tarsus through his calling, like the patriarchs and prophets before him, he becomes "the perfect vehicle for this moment in the development of the Jesus Movement." His mix of Greek reasoning with rabbinical training casts the stories of the early church into a thoughtful theology. He is seen here as the earliest egalitarian who not only impacted the early church but all of western civilization.

Cahill challenges many traditional religious ideas, while also taking on some of the more radical contemporary interpreters of biblical literature. As with the other volumes in this series, the marginal notes are filled with a wealth of interesting information. Combining his own fresh translation of many New Testament highlights with respect and humour, Thomas Cahill's book is for the believer and non-believer alike. —Tracy Danz

J. K. Rowling Order your copy of the newest book in the Harry Potter Series, The Tales of Beedle the Bard! It contains all five wizarding fairy tales left to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Only one tale, The Tale of the Three Brothers, was recounted in that book. The other four are revealed here for the very first time.

Anne Rice

M. F. K. Fisher, Joan Reardon

Philippa Gregory

Kim Cattrall, Mark Levinson With its cream and deep burgundy cover, Satisfaction comes in sophisticated packaging that is pretty enough for women, but not too frilly for their partners. Even the briefest glance through the 140 or so pages is enough to gauge that this is neither a clinical manual, nor an excuse for titillation. From Fritz Drury's pensive illustrations that evoke a strong sense of the deepest connection through sex, to the concise and readable text, this is a sensitive and inspiring approach.

Kim Cattrall's TV persona Samantha Jones might be the super-confident man-eating sex-pot in Sex and the City, but anyone expecting a brassy, bold attitude will be disappointed. Cattrall reveals with touching honesty that her TV character is not only far removed from her real personality, but that until she met husband Levinson at 40, she was convinced she wasn't a sexual woman.

The authors' aim is to encourage couples to communicate through trying out a variety of techniques, on the basis that communication is the key to sexual satisfaction for both man and woman. Illustrations of the techniques suggested are helpfully enhanced by some nifty symbols indicating crucial directions. And you might even have a few laughs over mastering the likes of clitoris twitching and turbo tongue. —Lorna V

John Irving

Ken Dryden

Laurien Gardner

Tim O'Brien

Maya Angelou

Nancy Goldstone

Laurie R. King

Leonie Frieda Poisoner, despot, necromancer — the dark legend of Catherine de Medici is centuries old. In this critically hailed biography, Leonie Frieda reclaims the story of this unjustly maligned queen to reveal a skilled ruler battling extraordinary political and personal odds — from a troubled childhood in Florence to her marriage to Henry, son of King Francis I of France; from her transformation of French culture to her fight to protect her throne and her sons' birthright. Based on thousands of private letters, it is a remarkable account of one of the most influential women ever to wear a crown.

Dennis Saleebey

Virginia Woolf

Ina Garten

Keith Sherwood

Philippa Gregory The Wideacre estate is bankrupt. The villagers are living in poverty and Wideacre Hall is a smoke-blackened ruin. But, in the Dower House, two children are being raised in protected innocence.

Equal claimants to the estate, rivals for the love of the village, they are tied by a secret childhood betrothal but forbidden to marry. Only one can be the favored child. Only one can inherit the magical understanding between the land and the Lacey family that can make the Sussex village grow green again. Only one can be Beatrice Lacey's true heir.

Sensual, gripping, sometimes mystical, The Favored Child sweeps the reader irresistibly into the eighteenth century, a revolutionary period in English history. This rich and dramatic novel continues the saga of the Lacey family started in Philippa Gregory's bestselling and enduringly popular Wideacre.

Pasquale Dibello

Alice Walker However much we like Alice Walker's fictional characters, it's still a treat when she speaks in her own voice, whether in essays or poems. The poems in this work show the impressive range that voice has, from the outrage of "First, They Said," to the quiet and lovely "These Mornings of Rain," to poems about family. Walker makes a lyrical world big enough to seamlessly weave these disparate parts together.

David G. Bauer

Michael Getz, John Dwork

Larry Dark

Philippa Gregory

Jack Weatherford

John Steinbeck

James C. Collins, Jerry I. Porras, Jim Collins This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of Excellence. The authors, James C Collins and Jerry I Porras, spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings—along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else.

Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.

Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success of this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks. Thus Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard to Texas Instruments, and so on. The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counter-examples—in fact, the majority of the "visionary" companies, including giants such as 3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They were characterised by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment" to the company.

The comparison with the business "B" team does tend to raise a significant methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary" in the first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve "visionary" status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead to Rome that the book is less practical than it might appear. But that's exactly the point of an eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful company had no master plan, little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead it had an atmosphere in which bright people were both keen to see the company succeed and unafraid to "try a lot of stuff and keep what works." —Richard Farr

David Colbert

Alison Weir

Karen Armstrong "I have decided to try again", Karen Armstrong writes at the beginning of The Spiral Staircase, in explaining why she is telling her life story for a second time, 20 years after doing so in Beginning the World. "We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter." That's a clue to the sort of open-minded and intensive inquiry that Armstrong is capable of, which has made her, in those 20 years, a bestselling theologian and historian of religion, known for such hugely popular books as The Battle for God, A History of God, and Islam: A Short History.

In the lucid yet reflective manner that is Armstrong's trademark, The Spiral Staircase recalls her painful early life as a nun, her even more painful reentry into secular society, and most compellingly, the long-undiagnosed epilepsy that made her life a horror show of phantom visions and misplaced hours. We follow Armstrong to the Middle East and elsewhere as she searches for answers to questions no less daunting than the significance of faith. Yet what drives Armstrong is her distaste for and distrust of those who see only black or white, never shades of grey. "I disliked the crusading certainty of Ayatollah Khomeini, yet I was also disturbed by the shrill rhetoric of some of Rushdie's champions", she writes in the wake of debate over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and the ensuing fatwa issued by the extremists on the Islamic right. Indeed, as religious dogma divides the world in ever new ways, Armstrong's learned views are especially resonant. But The Spiral Staircase, its name inspired by TS Eliot's poem cycle Ash-Wednesday, is not a polemic, despite Armstrong's forceful and persuasive arguments for religious tolerance. Rather, it's a beautiful letter sent by a gifted writer attempting to decode the meaning of her life. —Kim Hughes, Amazon.com

Anita Shreve

Richard Dawkins

Sasha White

Allen Carr

Anthony Bourdain

Susann Cokal

Francois Neveux

Alison Weir

Curtis Sittenfeld

Eric Jager

John Irving At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.

Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.

Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.

Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. —Valerie Ryan

David Moody

Shifra Stein

David D. Royse

Michael Palmer

David Guterson

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Charles E. Brown, Imar Spaanjaars, Todd Marks

John Irving

J. Maarten Troost

Andrew Caillard

Philippa Gregory

Anthony Blond

Eleanor Herman

Alison Weir

Ishmal Beah

Mary Gentle "It's about sex, and cruelty, and forgiveness."

Thus begins a sweeping historical adventure about two dueling swordsmen and the plot to kill a king in the grand tradition of Dorothy Dunnett and Alexander Dumas.

The year is 1610. Continental Europe is briefly at peace after years of war, but Henri IV of France is planning to invade the German principalities. In England, only five years earlier, conspirators nearly succeeded in blowing up King James I and his Parliament. The seeds of the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are visibly being sown, and the possibility for both enlightenment and disaster abounds.

But Valentin Rochefort, duelist and spy for France's powerful financial minister, could not care less. Until he is drawn into the glittering palaces, bawdy back streets, and stunning theatrics of Renaissance France and Shakespearean London in a deadly plot both to kill King James I and to save him. For this swordsman without a conscience is about to find himself caught between loyalty, love, and blackmail, between kings, queens, politicians, and Rosicrucians — and the woman he has, unknowingly, crossed land and sea to meet.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

David Sedaris

R.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;Bernstein&nbsp; Publisher: Edition:

Nancie McDermott

Dominic Streatfeild Cocaine, writes filmmaker Dominic Streatfeild, "is not some evil spawn of Satan but simply a commodity." Like other commodities, cocaine has a history. When the Spanish conquistadors came to South America and observed that Indians who chewed the leaves of Erythroxylon coca could, it seemed, march over the tallest mountain or through the densest forest for days on end, they knew they were onto something. The newcomers took to growing coca themselves, and in time their product found an audience outside the continent, with users such as Sigmund Freud, Ernest Shackleton (who "took Forced March cocaine tablets to Antarctica in 1909 for the energy boost they gave"), Duke Ellington, and, eventually, half of Hollywood to testify to its powers. Streatfeild's appropriately rapid narrative takes in such key moments and players as "the year of cocaine" 1969, when the film Easy Rider reintroduced the drug to American popular culture, and George Jung, whose exploits are chronicled in Ted Demme's film Blow, to create a portrait of the drug that ranges over centuries. Though he supports legalization, Streatfeild acknowledges the evil and corruption surrounding the trade. Drawing lessons from history, he also suggests the possibility that "cocaine will fizzle out in the year 2015 the way it did in the early twentieth century." At the close of this absorbing book, he adds, "It deserves to." —Gregory McNamee

Fiona Buckley

D.M Schnarch

Andrew Bridgeford

BILL ANDERTON

Sarah B. Pomeroy

Sharon Kay Penman

Robert Hughes

Michael Getz, John Dwork

Bill Buford

Jung Chang, Jon Halliday

Andrew Solt, Sam Egan, Yoko Ono, David Wolper

Piers Paul Read The Knights Templar remain the most glamorous, but also the most mysterious of all religious organisations. Romanticised by Walter Scott in his novel Ivanhoe and by Wagner in his opera Parsifal, the Templars have been both celebrated as ascetic martyrs, dying for the greater good of Christianity, and condemned as deviant heretics, thieves and sodomites who sold the Holy Land out to the Muslim Infidels. In his carefully researched study The Templars, the acclaimed novelist Piers Paul Read investigates the truth behind the myth. Placing his account of the rise of the Templars within a wider historical and political context, Read argues that "The Templars were a multinational force engaged in the defence of the Christian concept of a world order: and their demise marks the point when the pursuit of the common good within Christendom became subordinate to the interests of the nation state."

This approach takes Read back into the Dark Ages and the context for the first Christian Crusade that culminated in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099.In an attempt to hold on to Jerusalem and one of the holiest sites in Christendom, the Temple of Solomon, the Templars were formed as a strict religious-military order, committed to poverty, chastity and the protection of pilgrims en route to the Holy Land. Read charts their rise to political and financial power and influence throughout Europe and the Holy Land, and their bloody (and ultimately unsuccessful) conflict with the forces of Islam over the subsequent two centuries. Read's account is painstakingly recounted but often lacks the verve and pace demanded by the colourful cast of characters, including Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. The best sections of the book deal with the shockingly cynical destruction of the Order by Pope Clement V and King Philip the Fair in 1312, preceded by the torture and death of hundreds of Templars who had already fought bravely for the cross in the Holy Land. The Templars are fascinating but in his attempt to avoid the more colourful and conspiratorial stories associated with the Order, Read's book may strike some as a little turgid, despite its admirable historical detail. —Jerry Brotton

Umberto Eco The premise of Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, may strike some readers as laughably unpromising, and others as breathtakingly rich. A sixty-ish Milanese antiquarian bookseller nicknamed Yambo suffers a stroke and loses his memory of everything but the words he has read: poems, scenes from novels, miscellaneous quotations. His wife Paola fills in the bare essentials of his family history, but in order to trigger original memories, Yambo retreats alone to his ancestral home at Solara, a large country house with an improbably intact collection of family papers, books, gramophone records, and photographs. The house is a museum of Yambo's childhood, conventiently empty of people, except of course for one old family servant with a long memory—an apt metaphor for the mind. Yambo submerges himself in these artifacts, rereading almost everything he read as a school boy, blazing a meandering, sometimes misguided, often enchanting trail of words. Flares of recognition do come, like "mysterious flames," but these only signal that Yambo remembers something; they do not return that memory to him. It is like being handed a wrapped package, the contents of which he can only guess.

Within the limitations of Yambo's handicap and quest, Eco creates wondrous variety, wringing surprise and delight from such shamelessly hackneyed plot twists as the discovery of a hidden room. Illustrated with the cartoons, sheet music covers, and book jackets that Yambo uncovers in his search, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature, a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation on human consciousness. Both playful and reverent, it stands with The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before as among Eco's most successful novels. —Regina Marler

Jonah Goldberg

Philippa Gregory Two women competing for a man's heart
Two queens fighting to the death for dominance
The untold story of Mary, Queen of Scots

This dazzling novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory presents a new and unique view of one of history's most intriguing, romantic, and maddening heroines. Biographers often neglect the captive years of Mary, Queen of Scots, who trusted Queen Elizabeth's promise of sanctuary when she fled from rebels in Scotland and then found herself imprisoned as the "guest" of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his indomitable wife, Bess of Hardwick.

The newly married couple welcome the doomed queen into their home, certain that serving as her hosts and jailers will bring them an advantage in the cutthroat world of the Elizabethan court. To their horror, they find that the task will bankrupt them, and as their home becomes the epicenter of intrigue and rebellion against Elizabeth, their loyalty to each other and to their sovereign comes into question. If Mary succeeds in seducing the earl into her own web of treachery and treason, or if the great spymaster William Cecil links them to the growing conspiracy to free Mary from her illegal imprisonment, they will all face the headsman.

Philippa Gregory uses new research and her passion for historical accuracy to place a well-known heroine in a completely new tale full of suspense, passion, and political intrigue. For years, readers have clamored for Gregory to tell Mary's story, and The Other Queen is the result of her determination to present a novel worthy of this extraordinary heroine.

Wayne Coffey

Jeffrey Eugenides

Joseph Campbell

Adrian Tinniswood

Cather

Robin Maxwell

Amy Tan At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.

A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline—along with her own remorse over past rancor—and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."

Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting: I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds. Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. —Victoria Jenkins

Stephen King Stephen King-who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies-delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything's Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Esquire and other publications.

Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-a-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating-and then terrifying-journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, "The Gingerbread Girl" is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable-and resourceful-as Audrey Hepburn's character in Wait Until Dark. In "Ayana," a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, "N.," which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient's irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside . . . or keep the world from falling victim to it.

Just After Sunset-call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.

Michael Crichton MICHAEL CRICHTON NEXT FIRST EDITION 2006 HARDCOVER WITH DUST JACKET. BOOK = LIKE NEW DUST JACKET = VERY FINE - SLIGHT SIGNS OF WEAR.

Edward Peters This comprehensive, well-balanced historical survey of medieval Europe—from Roman imperial provinces to the Renaissance—covers all aspects of the history (political, literary, religious, intellectual, etc.) with a focus on social and political themes. It presents a complete picture of the complex process by which an ecumenical civilization that once ringed the basin of the Mediterranean Sea, evolved into three other distinctive civilizations—Latin Europe, Greek Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, and Islam. A six-part organization outlines late Mediterranean antiquity and early northern Europe; two heirs of the ancient world; the early Middle Ages; Christendom: authority and enterprise, 950-1100; culture and society in the high Middle Ages, 1100-1325; and Christendom and Europe, 1325-1519. For anyone interested in the history of Europe and the Middle Ages.

Joseph Campbell Originally written by Campbell in the '40s— in his pre-Bill Moyers days — and famous as George Lucas' inspiration for "Star Wars," this book will likewise inspire any writer or reader in its well considered assertion that while all stories have already been told, this is *not* a bad thing, since the *retelling* is still necessary. And while our own life's journey must always be ended alone, the travel is undertaken in the company not only of immediate loved ones and primal passion, but of the heroes and heroines — and myth-cycles — that have preceded us.