Nutaaq and her older sister, Aaluk, are on a great journey, sailing from a small island off the coast of Alaska to the annual trade fair. There, a handsome young Siberian wearing a string of cobalt blue beads watches Aaluk "the way a wolf watches a caribou, never resting." Soon his actions—and other events more horrible than Nutaaq could ever imagine—threaten to shatter her I~nupiaq world. Seventy years later, Nutaaq's greatgranddaughter, Blessing, is on her own journey, running from the wreckage of her life in Anchorage to live in a remote Arctic village with a grandmother she barely remembers. In her new home, unfriendly girls whisper in a language she can't understand, and Blessing feels like an outsider among her own people. Until she finds a cobalt blue bead—Nutaaq's bead—in her grandmother's sewing tin. The events this discovery triggers reveal the power of family and heritage to heal, despite seemingly insurmountable odds. Two distinct teenage voices pull readers into the native world of northern Alaska in this beautifully crafted and compelling debut novel.

In Storyscapes we listen carefully to what South African writers reveal about themselves and their relations to South African space since the democratic transition of 1994. One main focus is the power of stories to uncover contradictory processes and investments of identity and to point readers toward a more meaningful life. Another main focus is the complexities of the post-colonial understanding of South African land, landscape, and space. Space in relation to race, class, and gender identity figures prominently in analyses and comparisons of diverse South African texts, such as Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart, André Brink's Imaginings of Sand, as well as the important South African subgenre of the farm novel. Questions of black or hybrid identity are highlighted by confronting older texts with new ones by black and women writers such as A.H.M. Scholtz and E.K.M. Dido. These texts - and a number of Afrikaans texts that are less well-known in the English-speaking world - are set in the wider frameworks of postcolonial criticism and global issues of cultural identity.

The Native American rescue artist goes back on the job in “another excellently engineered thriller” from the New York Times–bestselling mystery author (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review). After two decades protecting innocent victims on the run, and a year after getting shot on the job, Jane McKinnon, née Whitefield, has settled into the quiet life of a suburban housewife in Amherst, New York. But that all changes when she sees all eight female leaders of the Tonawanda Seneca clan parked in her driveway in two black cars. Jimmy, a childhood friend of Jane’s from the reservation, has been accused of murdering a local white man. But instead of turning himself in, he’s fled, and no one knows where he’s hiding. At the clan mothers’ request, Jane retraces a walking trip she and Jimmy took together when they were fourteen in hopes that he has gone the same way again. But it turns out the police are the least of Jimmy’s problems, and soon enough Jimmy and Jane are on the run together in this “first-rate suspense” novel from the Edgar Award–winning author (Booklist, starred review). “Whitefield is an indelible figure—whip-smart, resourceful, brave and big-hearted.” —The Seattle Times “Jane Whitefield is unique in the annals of detective fiction. She is a throwback to a tribal world, still loyal to the beliefs of the Seneca Indians and still adhering to the call of a lost era. Thomas Perry has once again resurrected a remarkable character who seems imbued with a strange immortality and an unusual morality, and he is to be congratulated.” —The Washington Times