Adult

In INFIDEL KINGS AND UNHOLY WARRIORS, award-winning scholar Brian Catlos puts us on the ground in the Mediterranean world of 1050-1200. We experience the sights and sounds of the region just as enlightened Islamic empires and primitive Christendom began to contest it. We learn about the siege tactics, theological disputes and poetry of this enthralling time. And we see that people of different faiths coexisted far more frequently than we are commonly told.

After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone are separated and lost in a vast uncharted desert. One by one they find their way into a deep forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures.

It isn’t Christmas without a Richard Paul Evans novel. Ever since he wrote the book that inspired the genre, THE CHRISTMAS BOX, his bestselling holiday stories have become a beloved literary tradition. As the New York Journal of Books wrote, “Richard Paul Evans has proven to be one of America’s most precious gifts…an inspirational writer who has the ability to read our very souls and heal broken hearts…His books are the ones you can’t wait to finish, but when you do, you wish you hadn’t.”

In JOAN OF ARC: A LIFE TRANSFIGURED, Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time --- a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

Mma Ramotswe has her hands full both at home and in the office. To add to her current challenges, her devoted partner, Grace Makutsi, has decided to branch out on her own and open The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café. But even “Miss 97 Per Cent” can't quite meet all the demands of running a business --- not to mention those that a lightning strike makes on her building. Eventually, she'll have to accept all the help she can get --- even if it comes from a completely unexpected source.

Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, Azar Nafisi energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels, Nafisi invites us to join her as citizens of her “Republic of Imagination,” a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Mega billionaire C. Linus Maxwell whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed-of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their room with them and stop coming out. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped. 

Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track --- until the recession hits and she gets downsized. However, she is offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic in Virginia for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back. Samantha’s new job takes her into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, and within weeks she finds herself engulfed in litigation that turns deadly.

On the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, an island consumed by the flames of revolution, a senseless attack leaves only one survivor --- an infant girl. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth’s life as shaped by her strong-willed mistress and other larger-than-life personalities she encounters in the South. Here is a remarkable story of fortitude, heartbreak and indomitable will --- and a tale that will forever illuminate your reading of GONE WITH THE WIND.