You don't have to be thin to feel small. Donnie's life is unraveling. His parents' marriage is falling apart, and his sister is slowly slipping away in the grip of her illness. To top it all off, he accidentally starts a rumor at school that hurts someone he cares about and leaves him an outcast. So Donnie does the only thing he knows how to do: He tries to fix things, to make everything the way it was before. Before his parents stopped loving each other, before his sister disappeared, before he was alone. But some things are beyond repair, and it will take all Donnie's strength to stop looking back and start moving forward again.

Howard Hughes embodied the American dream: envied by powerful men, desired by beautiful women, Hughes lived his life larger than all who surrounded him and yet died an emaciated recluse. This makes him the perfect subject for red-hot biographer Alton Reece. Riding high on the wave of previous astonishing success, Reece sees Hughes as more than simply a name worth the seven-figure advance he's demanding from his publisher. He finds in Hughes a kindred spirit of greatness, a man misunderstood and beaten down by jealous inferiors. But even as Reece struggles to 'know' his subject, his own rapidly unravelling life keeps finding unexpected ways to intrude. With a deft comic touch and an astounding narrative style, Steven Carter's novel creates a picture of a Hughes who might have been, a biographer who can't separate his subject from his own visions of grandeur, and a public that demands its heroes be larger than life - if only so they can be more easily torn down.

FINALIST FOR THE BELLWETHER PRIZE Nelly Grace is starting over. With her two young sons, Nelly has fled to the simple stone house built by her great-grandfather in the moneyed horse country of Maryland in order to escape the grief of her husband’s death—and perhaps find a way back to her first love: photography. Easing her transition into this strange, mannered world is Emma Crofton, the grand matriarch of the foxhunting community, and Emma’s son, Dac, a handsome yet distant horse trainer. As Nelly slowly makes her way back to the camera, she must come to terms with her troubled relationship with her father, a photojournalist who chose fame over family. But when she finally sees him again, Nelly’s fragile new beginning is threatened by revelations of a secret past, and the fears that kept it hidden.

"IwithVY: I told Ms. Gold about how The Evil Three have been after me, feeding off me since fourth grade. MARCO: It isn't a very pretty story, so if you're looking for 'nice,' you better ask someone else. ANN: We just have to come up wiht some witnesses for our side. Think! Does anyone owe you any favors? BRYCE: I figure, Dude, why not make a little spare change on the side? A buck a bet. All's I has to do was explain that liable was civil for guilty, and they swarmed like flies." Eight first-person narrators give different versions of the same event. Lessons about the inner workings of the judicial system pale beside the insights into human nature. With pathos and a great deal of humor, Amy Goldman Koss keeps you turning pages.

The Perfumed Sleeve is the ninth book in Laura Joh Rowland's mystery series set in feudal Japan featuring Sano Ichiro. November 1694. The streets of Edo are erupting in violence as two factions struggle for control over the ruling Tokugawa regime. One is led by the shogun's cousin, Lord Matsudaira, and the other by the shogun's second-in-command, Chamberlain Yanagisawa. Each side pressures Sano Ichiro, the shogun's most honorable investigator, to join its ranks. When one of the shogun's most trusted advisers is found dead, Sano is forced to honor a posthumous request for a murder investigation. Senior Elder Makino believed that his death would be the result of assassination rather than natural causes. Although he and Sano were bitter enemies, Makino knew that the incorruptible Sano would be duty-bound to oblige his final wish. Under the watchful eyes and thinly veiled threats of both Lord Matsudaira and Chamberlain Yanagisawa, Sano moves with caution. Each is eager to implicate the other in Makino's death. Sano must discover whether the death was indeed murder, and if so, whether it was motivated by politics, love, or sex. The discovery of secret alliances, both romantic and military, further complicates matters. Sano's investigation has barely begun when violent death claims another of the shogun's favorites. With his wife, Reiko, working undercover, Sano and his chief retainer, Hirata, must not only investigate multiple deaths, but stem the tide of an impending civil war.

Kerry Spence is unfulfilled by her soulless career in advertising, disappointed by her dysfunctional relationship, and horrified by the ever-increasing size of her ass. Ever since her gorgeous, self-absorbed boyfriend Sam demoted her to late night hook-up status, she has fortified herself with prime-time TV and blissful binges on cream cheese frosting, awaiting an epiphany that will reveal her next move. Of course, everybody in her life is full of advice. Her free-spirited divorcee mother–when not necking furiously with her much younger boyfriend– sagely counsels her daughter to do whatever it takes to snag Sam back, since, quite frankly, he is the best she can do. Her friends ply her with fruity cocktails and dispense bits of ‘Cosmo’ wisdom like “Divide your age in half and add seven–that’s the youngest man you are allowed to date” and “Scotch tape can eliminate forehead wrinkles.” And then there is Kerry’s shrink, the calm, unflappable therapist who suggests she start “a diary of past encounters with men that may be contributing to her negative and dysfunctional quasi-relationship.” Or, as Kerry sees it, a journal of mortifying moments. Beginning with a kissing game gone bad in grade school, the journal jump-starts Kerry’s stroll down memory lane of man troubles. But just as Kerry decides her poorly dressed therapist is as crazy as everybody else in her orbit, she begins to realize the journal may actually make some sense–as she plumbs the depths of her most embarrassing experiences on a quest for personal awareness that will give her the strength to turn her life around–and just maybe find love again. The Journal of Mortifying Moments is a hysterically funny glimpse into the quirky, slightly obsessive, and completely lovable mind of Kerry Spence. But somewhere amidst the laugh-out-loud hilarity of Kerry’s exploits emerges the story of a woman who learns to stop trying to be someone she’s not, and start loving the wonderful, quirky person she is, once and for all.

An epic and hauntingly topical geopolitical thriller spanning six decades and three continents, The Human Pool confirms the journalist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Petit as the heir to John le Carré and Robert Harris. THE HUMAN POOL Rumors about Willi Schmidt's actions during the Second World War were enigmatic, to say the least. He worked for U.S. Intelligence out of Switzerland; he cut black-market deals on the side; he rescued scores of Jews from the Nazis. Saint or sinner? Either way, Schmidt was strictly murky waters -- and reports of his death in 1945 surprised no one. Sixty years later, Joe Hoover is convinced Schmidt is still alive, armed with a false name and a fortune in pharmaceuticals. For years, Hoover, former Intelligence courier for the American spymaster Allen Dulles, has been haunted by misgivings about his own wartime role in his boss's top-secret financial partnership with the Third Reich. Now, someone wants Hoover dead. Back in Europe, Hoover discovers that operations he thought had ended long ago are still being played out. Forming an uneasy alliance with Vaughan, an undercover journalist investigating neo-Nazi traffic of Kurdish refugees, he begins to unravel a conspiracy that leads deep into his past, to his days mixing with Nazi officers in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich, Istanbul, and Budapest, where enemies did deals over cocktails. At each step, Hoover finds the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the specter of World War II's most grotesque and enduring legacy -- a trade in people: the human pool. Set against a vivid historical backdrop, The Human Pool mixes fiction and fact to explosive effect. Chris Petit has crafted his finest novel yet -- a cosmopolitan, thinking-person's thriller that turns the world inside out and traces its veins: It spells nothing less than the rebirth of the great espionage novel.