Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother --- a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang --- and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate.

Inspired by a lifelong passion for Jane Austen, mystery writer P. D. James draws the characters of Austen’s beloved novel PRIDE AND PREJUDICE into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.

LONDON UNDER is a short and comprehensive study of everything that goes on underground in London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheaters to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts and modern tube stations. Spanning throughout history, Peter Ackroyd reveals stories and secrets of this hidden world.

WHITE TRUFFLES IN WINTER imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz.

By her early 20s, Sira Quiroga has learned the ropes of her mother’s seamstress business and is engaged to a government clerk. But everything changes when two charismatic men burst into her neatly mapped-out life: an attractive salesman and the father she never knew. Sira leaves her mother and fiancé, following her handsome lover to Morocco, but soon finds herself abandoned, penniless and heartbroken in an exotic land.

When a free AOL CD reveals their futures to them via Facebook --- which hasn’t been invented yet --- estranged childhood friends Josh and Emma learn that making different decisions now will affect the outcome of their lives later.

After a pandemic devastates the planet, humanity is mostly divided between the living and the living dead. As survivors attempt to restore Manhattan, Mark Spitz and his civilian squad must confront “malfunctioning” stragglers --- those caught in between the living and the undead.