In the latest from Dufresne (Love Warps the Mind a Little) novelist John's newest manuscript doesn't impress his girlfriend, Annick, who thinks it doesn't breathe. So he goes back and rewrites it as a memoir: a book within a book. In it, Johnny and Audrey grow up in Requiem, Mass., with their unraveling mother, Frances, who believes her children were replaced by aliens and who bathes in gasoline. Their secretive truck driver father, Rainey, almost certainly has something odd going on down South. The book unfolds like a series of nesting dolls: John meanders around his coastal Florida home, writing his novel, visiting with friends and going on appointments for teaching jobs, while Johnny lives with his mother's worsening condition, his father's absences, his mother's hospitalization and a momentous trip South. Then there are stories within the memoir within the story, including the one a woman tells about her friend, Ginger Rae, who talks of writing a neighbor's suicide note, then claims it's part of a story she herself is writing. John is a very amusing unreliable narrator, and Dufresne's witty, sardonic take on life's fictions leaps off the page. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the tragicomic mode of his best-selling Louisiana Power & Light, a hilarious and tenderhearted novel about a son's attempts to save his family. John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny's mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she's sure of it, and she's pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn't need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Naté Après Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she's not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself. In his "truly original voice" (Miami Herald) and with the "miraculous beauty of his tale-telling" (New York Times Book Review), Dufresne brings his unparalleled eye for the tragic and the absurd to the dysfunctions and joys of family in this powerful new novel.

Here's the long-awaited solo novel--the first of an imaginative interstellar trilogy--from the co-author of the "New York Times" bestselling "Death Gate" saga, Tracy Hickman.With more than ten million copies of the "Death Gate" novels in print, Tracy Hickman's talent is widely recognized. Now this popular fantasist begins an epic trilogy set in future space. The war-like Arachta, aliens from the past, invade the Earth searching for a cure to the plague that will spell their own demise if they're unsuccessful.

When Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, he became much more than the shy, introverted high school student he had always been. Now possessed of the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of a spider, he sought to use his newfound abilities to achieve wealth and fame. But after his beloved Uncle Ben was murdered, the grief-stricken youth soon realized that with great power comes great responsibility. Now Peter wages a one-man crusade against crime...in the costumed identity of the amazing Spider-Man!

What begins in the Warsaw Ghetto...will find the music of your heart. There are secrets in one's life that when revealed change the lives of all around. A REQUIEM FOR HANIA is a story of secrets and a story of who we are, who we were once meant to be. Inspired by a true story, based purposely on musical form, the novel follows three primary characters' journeys: In 1942, Hania Stern, a young Jewish girl, and her family are caught up in the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hania survives when so many others do not survive, escaping when others do not escape. But escape is not release. Hers is the story of a soul lost, and a soul found.In 1968, Pawel Weisz, an avant-garde composer and teacher in Warsaw, knows little of his own past; what he does know he denies. At a time of great protest, anti-Semitism and attempted change in a Communist state at a crossroads, Pawel falls in a forbidden love with a radical young Jewish violinist. But the repressive State and the times in which the two men find one another prevent any real possibility of such. Theirs is a love discovered too late, leading to loss, to great pain, to exile...while in the shadows State Security watches and waits.And in 2006, Agniezka Janiec, an actor in Warsaw, seeking herself through her art, discovers at the death of her grandmother, Hannah Kielar, secrets that push her into a journey of self-discovery: about her Grandmother, about Warsaw in the Ghetto years, about where she comes from and who she is. About those lost, and those found.A REQUIEM FOR HANIA is a story of identity, of loss, of rediscovery. It is a story about friendship, about music that illuminates our common humanity, about the pain of the past and the potential for the present and for the future. It is finally a story of where we all come from, who we are...and where we ultimately are going as we find ourselves, as we grieve and as we celebrate.

A Washington Post Notable Book: A Japanese Canadian man is haunted by childhood memories of WWII internment camps in this “evocative and cinematic tale” (Maclean’s). In 1942, in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government removes young Bin Okuma and his family from their home at a British Columbia coastal fishing village and forces them into internment camps. Allowed to take only the possessions they can carry, Bin watches looters raid his home before the transport boats even undock. One hundred miles from the “Protected Zone,” abandoned by his father, Bin spends the next five years struggling to adapt in the makeshift shacks of the brutal mountain community. For Bin, it was never forgotten, nor forgiven. Fifty years later, after his wife’s death, Bin embarks on a road trip across Canada. Accompanied by his dog, his classical music tapes, and his memories, he intends to find his biological father whose fateful decision destroyed his family all those years ago. But Bin must ask himself: does he really want to confront the ghosts of the past, or is it time to finally let them go? A novel of grief, coming-of-age, and coming to terms with our own personal histories, “Requiem is a great work of literature from a determined author at the peak of her powers” (Ottawa Citizen).

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones. Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.