SUMMARY: In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis. In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon.Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev’s plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev—rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion—agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro—never swayed by conventional political considerations—demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission. As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator’s overthrow.Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a riveting account of history’s most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.

Emily's dad is accused of killing a teenage girl. She's sure he's innocent and is determined to discover the truth of what happened that night. But her journey leads her to uncover some disturbing secrets...

A charismatic South American Diplomat recruits three Washington women to engage in a bombing plot to kill a political rival. Hungry for the man's sexual favor, the women allow themselves to be manipulated and unwittingly enter into the diplomat’s bizarre, destructive and lethal plot. When the women discover each other and learn how they have been duped, they become enraged. Overcoming their jealousy toward each other, they band together to destroy their ruthless lover. This highly praised erotic thriller is explicit and explores the raw power of sexuality and desire.

Alexis Wright is one of Australia's finest Aboriginal writers. Carpentaria is her second novel, a soaring epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come. Carpentaria's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight's tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.

Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love.Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s most compelling novel to date. Rich in its understanding of America’s history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit.

Renowned bone detective Bill Brockton and his intrepid assistant, Miranda, are about to get immersed in murder and intrigue in Avignon, France, home of the popes for most of the fourteenth century. But first, in this artful prequel to The Inquisitor's Key, other mischief is afoot in the ancient walled city. Inspector RenÉ Descartes of the French National Police is roused from a deep sleep to investigate a break-in at the Petit Palais, Avignon's museum of medieval masterpieces. Descartes's discovery plunges him into an elaborate, art-lined labyrinth: a labyrinth that leads him to a master forger's studio . . . and to a charred corpse. Just as he's finally closing the case, Descartes gets called to an even more bizarre death scene, where his path—and his fate—will collide with those of Brockton and Miranda.

James Bond abandons his 007 status, resigns from the Service, and heads south for Monte Carlo in his new Bentley Mulsanne Turbo in search of a new life in Role of Honor . The choice is exercised partly by renewal of Bond’s passion for that prince of cars, the Bentley. His departure from the Service requires rather more explanation. Questions in the House all revolved round a possible security leak, with Her Majesty’s Opposition declaring a cover-up. Bond’s grievance is less that he should come under suspicion than that his honor is impeached by the manner in which the truth is exposed. John Gardner’s fiendish plot embroils his hero with a computer wizard absconding from his duties at the Pentagon, a sinister mercenary army training in secret for an audacious terrorist operation, and a white-knuckle flight over Geneva while Summit Peace Talks are in progress there, before Bond’s honor is fully restored. Review “John Gardner keeps you turning the pages far into the night.” ( Daily Express  )

Sparky Christina and her saintly adopted sister Pam couldn't be more different. And when they meet similarly mismatched friends Jago and Peter, the four embark on a dazzling series of pairings and partings, outrageous coincidences and eleventh-hour entrances interrupted one disastrous Halloween when schoolboy revelry turns horribly wrong. Three years on, as Christina analyses the wit, cruelty and crossed genders of Shakespearean comedy, the cast of her own life reunites and the curtain falls on some gloriously unexpected partnerships.

Bonus Material: "An Ode To Brains", a short story by the author.In the latter half of the second year after The Fall, mankind is beginning to grow once again. The survivors in Frankfort, Kentucky have battled the undead, thrown off attacks from human oppressors, and finally managed to achieve something like peace. Keeping the tenuous alliances and friendships with other distant settlements strong has become vitally important. Though many colonies of living people have been created from the ashes of civilization, the land between is deadly. In this volume, travel along dangerous roads to new locations, meet others who have made their stand against the end of the world. See an America destroyed by chaos, but populated with a people defiant in the face of the end of all they knew.

Everything Claire Raphael has she's earned. On her own. The hard way. She built her part-time business up from nothing and made it successful through her imagination, creativity, and hard work. She has two great children and Dennis, a husband she loves completely.Then, one evening, when Claire returns from a difficult business trip, Dennis hands her divorce papers along with a court order to vacate their house. Claire is devastated. She had no idea her marriage was on the brink of disaster, that Dennis had been planning this ambush for weeks, if not months, or that her hectic but happy life was about to come crashing down around her.Claire doesn't know where to turn or whom to trust. But in a few short weeks she learns what so many women have had to discover--that when the going gets tough, a woman's as tough as she needs to be.

Sound is the stand-alone companion to Alexandra Duncan's acclaimed debut novel Salvage, which was praised by internationally bestselling author Stephanie Perkins as "brilliant, feminist science fiction." For fans of Beth Revis, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica.As a child, Ava's adopted sister, Miyole, watched her mother take to the stars, piloting her own ship from Earth to space making deliveries. Now a teen herself, Miyole is finally living her dream as a research assistant on her very first space voyage. If she plays her cards right, she could even be given permission to conduct her own research and experiments in her own habitat lab on the flight home. But when her ship saves a rover that has been viciously attacked by looters and kidnappers, Miyole, along with a rescued rover girl named Cassia, embarks on a mission to rescue Cassia's abducted brother, and that changes the course of Miyole's life forever. Harrowing, provocative, and stunning, Sound begins...

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers--an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicalsAt the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose's suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son,...

An existential saga of working-class life in a British factory town and military service in the torrid jungles of the Far East from award-winning, bestselling author Alan SillitoeKey to the Door turns away from the boisterous pursuits of Arthur Seaton made infamous in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and focuses instead on the quieter rebellions of his older brother, Brian. Brian's childhood and adolescence in the grimy streets of Nottingham are shaped by the Depression-era struggles of his family, the life and culture of the factory town, and the love and bullying of his iron-willed grandfather and erratic father. When Brian reaches adulthood, he frequents the local pubs, works hard at a cardboard factory, and runs into a sticky situation with a woman named Pauline that obliges him to marry her. Soon though, he is conscripted for the postwar occupation of Malaya, and his true colors begin to show. Brian declares that he only wears his...