Someone brutally murdered Mary Mathison, daughter of a prominent and very conservative local pastor, and Avery, a transgender boy who loved Mary, is bent on finding her killer. He goes to the crime scene to do some investigating, but is quickly put in harm's way. Reluctantly, Avery must move to the sidelines to wait for the police to do their job. However, following Mary's funeral, Avery receives the first in a series of disturbing text messages that can only come from the killer, revealing that Avery is now a target. The killer claims that Mary's murder was revenge for her relationship with Avery. The killer's demands are simple and horrific: Avery must repent for changing his gender identity, or he will be the next one killed. Now Avery is torn between finding the murderer and protecting himself from a killer who is playing a disturbing cat-and-mouse game. Can Avery deny who he is to catch Mary's killer? Or will sacrificing himself be the ultimate betrayal?

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

When Jane Ryan discovers she's pregnant with twin girls, she faces a heart wrenching decision. On her own and unable to afford to care for both babies, she sees no choice but to keep one and give up the other for adoption. But fourteen years later, Jane's decision comes full circle. "Family is everything." It's one of the first things Isabel, the twin Jane gave up, says when they unexpectedly meet. Without warning, she and her adoptive mother have moved to the town where Jane and her daughter, Harper, live. But are they really family? In the throes of a willful adolescence, Harper is as sullen as Isabel is eager to please. Still, the sisters appear to bond quickly--until unsettling things begin to happen. Disturbing pranks, questionable accidents, strange ailments. Are the girls allies, or enemies? Is Harper acting out, or is Isabel not all she seems? Soon, Jane is convinced there is something darker at work than sibling rivalry. But who is to blame, and is this only the beginning? In a novel that is both suspenseful and deeply emotional, Rosalind Noonan explores the complex challenges of motherhood, and of truly knowing what lies in another's heart--even those we love best.

Recent studies in the Parkinson's disease literature have cited a tuberculosis-like germ called nocardia as being responsible for Parkinson's of unknown cause (Kohbata and Shimokawa, 1993) (Beaman, Beaman and Kjelstrom, 1994) (Kohbata and Beaman, 1991). Kohbata seemingly cemented a relationship between nocardia and Parkinson's by finding serologic evidence in 20 of 20 Parkinson's patients. With this finding, Kohbata acknowledged that blood tests for nocardia and the mycobacteria such as tuberculosis often cross-react, as they belong to the same order of bacteria, the Actinomycetales. Besides this difficulty in differentiation, a well used medical school textbook of microbiology points out that even among experts, different observers may classify the same strain of bacteria as nocardia or Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Atlas, 1988). To add to existing difficulties, both microorganisms can be "acid-fast," retaining a characteristic reddish color after being washed with acid alcohol, a common laboratory reagent. Such a staining characteristic has long been used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times