A pregnant young woman leaves her small Irish town to search for her boyfriend in the English Midlands.

When James Leer, a troubled young writer, becomes obsessed with Hollywood suicides, he begins a series of madcap, startling adventures.

At age eighteen, Benedict Juliard pledged never to do anything that would destroy or hinder his father's political career, but years later, with George Juliard headed for the office of prime minister, Benedict is attacked by an allegation of drug abuse and must scramble to find out who is publishing the false reports and why.

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....

PI Sunny Randall of Boston searches for a rich man's daughter who ran away to be a prostitute. After finding her Sunny must guard her because the girl is on a hit list. She witnessed a conspiracy involving state government.

The final entry in a trilogy of memoirs in which Dave Pelzer, brutally abused as a child, discusses the struggles he faced as an adult, and his determination to have a meaningful life.

Ambitious, but never seeming so, Kent Haruf reveals a whole community as he interweaves the stories of a pregnant high school girl, a lonely teacher, a pair of boys abandoned by their mother, and a couple of crusty bachelor farmers. From simple elements, Haruf achieves a novel of wisdom and grace--a narrative that builds in strength and feeling until, as in a choral chant, the voices in the book surround, transport, and lift the reader off the ground....

Ave Maria Mulligan, a thirty-five-year-old spinster in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is jolted out of her rut when her mother reveals a shocking secret, and things become even more exciting when Elizabeth Taylor announces plans to visit the sleepy town.

In January 1958, the midst of the Cold War, Luke Lucas wakes alone on the ground in a railway station with no idea how he got there--and finds that he must recover lost memories that others are glad he has forgotten if he is to save the launch of Explorer I, America's attempt to top the Soviet Union's Sputnik.