Miranda Sherry instantly became “a writer to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) with her extraordinary debut novel reminiscent of The Lovely Bones and Little Bee, about a murdered woman who observes from the afterlife as her teenage daughter, the sole survivor of a farm massacre, recovers from the trauma amidst a family’s startling dysfunction. Yesterday, Sally and her teenage daughter Gigi were living a charmed bohemian life in the African bush. Now Sally is dead, and Gigi is alone in the world. But Sally cannot move on. She lingers unseen in her daughter’s shadow. When Gigi moves in with her aunt’s family in Johannesburg, Sally comes too. When Gigi’s trauma stirs up long-buried secrets, Sally watches helplessly from the beyond as the family unravels. When her young niece develops an obsession with African magic, Sally calls upon their neighbor Lesedi, the beautiful, modern-day witch doctor, who can communicate with the dead and plies her trade in secret behind the closed gates and high walls of their affluent suburb. Gigi’s fragile healing process is derailed when she receives some shattering news, and in an effort to protect her cousin instead puts the girl in imminent danger. Now Sally must find a way to prevent her daughter from making a mistake that could destroy the lives of all who are left behind. A suspenseful drama focusing on marriage and fidelity, sisterhood, and the fractious bond between mothers and daughters—and set in a contemporary, urban world that belies a simmering wildness—Black Dog Summer is a gorgeously written debut, with a pace that will leave you breathless.

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of Bernard and June Tremaine’s marriage, as witnessed by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who seeks to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences that seem irreconcilable. In writing June’s memoirs, Jeremy is led back to a moment, that was, for June, as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy’s own time. Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilization’s darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

The first cookbook from The Black Dog Tavern contains a collection of recipes from the summertime menu of this Martha's Vineyard restaurant, which has been deemed a true American institution. 75 color photos, 25 line drawings.

"Originally published in 2014 in Great Britain by Head of Zeus"--Title page verso.

"His visions are burning -- his poetry heartbreaking," wrote Elie Wiesel of American poet Peter Balakian. Now, in elegant prose, the prize-winning poet who James Dickey called "an extraordinary talent" has written a compelling memoir about growing up American in a family that was haunted by a past too fraught with terror to be spoken of openly. Black Dog of Fate is set in the affluent New Jersey suburbs where Balakian -- the firstborn son of his generation -- grew up in a close, extended family. At the center of what was a quintessential American baby boom childhood lay the dark specter of a trauma his forebears had experienced -- the Ottoman Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, the century's first genocide. In a story that climaxes to powerful personal and moral revelations, Balakian traces the complex process of discovering the facts of his people's history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government's campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian's grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. The book is infused with the intense and often comic collision between this family's ancient Near Eastern traditions and the American pop culture of the '50s and '60s.Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory, to history, to his ancestors' lives, to the story of a poet's coming of age. Written with power and grace, Black Dog of Fate unfolds like a tapestry its tale of survival against enormous odds. Through the eyes of a poet, here is the arresting story of a family's journey from its haunted past to a new life in a new world.

“Henry Smith’s father told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” But Trouble comes careening down the road one night in the form of a pickup truck that strikes Henry’s older brother, Franklin. In the truck is Chay Chouan, a young Cambodian from Franklin’s preparatory school, and the accident sparks racial tensions in the school—and in the well-established town where Henry’s family has lived for generations. Caught between anger and grief, Henry sets out to do the only thing he can think of: climb Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, which he and Franklin were going to climb together. Along with Black Dog, whom Henry has rescued from drowning, and a friend, Henry leaves without his parents’ knowledge. The journey, both exhilarating and dangerous, turns into an odyssey of discovery about himself, his older sister, Louisa, his ancestry, and why one can never escape from Trouble.

In a land where gods walk on the hills and goddesses rise from river, lake, and spring, the caravan-guard Holla-Sayan, escaping the bloody conquest of a lakeside town, stops to help an abandoned child and a dying dog. The girl, though, is the incarnation of Attalissa, goddess of Lissavakail, and the dog a shape-changing guardian spirit whose origins have been forgotten. Possessed and nearly driven mad by the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan flees to the desert road, taking the powerless avatar with him. Necromancy, treachery, massacres, rebellions, and gods dead or lost or mad, follow hard on the their heels. But it is Attalissa herself who may be the Blackdog’s—and Holla-Sayan’s—doom.