From the author of the million-copy bestselling The Art of Racing in the Raincomes the breathtaking and long-awaited new novel. This novel centres on four generations of a once terribly wealthy and influential timber family who have fallen from grace; a mysterious yet majestic mansion, crumbling slowy into the bluff overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle; a love affair so powerful it reaches across the planes of existence; and a young man who simply wants his parents to once again experience the moment they fell in love, hoping that if can feel that emotion again, maybe they won't get divorced after all.

Our hope is not that God will answer next week, next month or even next year but suddenly! This book takes a glimpse inside the lives of biblical characters who needed God to answer, heal, deliver, and bring increase to their lives and received exactly what they were expecting. As you read through the pages of the book you will be inspired, enco

“Magical, witty and stunning, João Melo’s stories bring to mind the work of Borges and Ishiguro and some ineffable otherness that is his alone. Discovering his work could be the highlight of a literary career”. Elizabeth McKenzie Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review’s editor “Melo’s stories make the banal and everyday dramas of the folk of Luanda extraordinary, and the extraordinary occurrences mundane. Suffused with irony and wit, the messages of these stories contain serious, sometimes tragic underlying truths with which we can all identify. What the Brazilian Machado de Assis did for Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century, João Melo does for his native Luanda in the early twenty-first”. David Brookshaw Emeritus Professor in Luso-Brazilian Studies University of Bristol “Western readers who still assume that African societies haven’t reached modernity would be advised to follow Angolan writer João Melo as he forges his distinctive African postmodernism. These droll, cosmopolitan, self-aware stories, whose narrators are never innocent of the ills of the society they inhabit, shuffle local and universal cultural references in the certain confidence that they are interchangeable”. Stephen Henighan University of Guelph, Ontario Author of The World of After João Melo, born in 1955 in Luanda, Angola, is an author, journalist, and communication consultant. He is a founder of the Angolan Writers Association, and of the Angolan Academy of Literature and Social Sciences. He was professor, advertiser, member of the parliament (1992-2017) and minister (2017-2019). Currently, he lives exclusively from writing, and splits his time between Luanda, Lisbon and Washington, D.C. His works include poetry, novels, articles and essays and have been published in Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Cuba, Spain and US. A number of his writings had also been translated into French, German, Arabic, and Chinese. Some of his stories and poems translated into English appeared in Words Without Borders, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Olongo Africa, The Shallows Tales Review, Lolwe, A Gathering Together, Iskanchi, Gávea-Brown and Brittle Paper. He was awarded the 2009 Angola Arts and Culture National Prize in literature category.

A mid-level U.S. diplomat is sent on a mission to Egypt the day before a military coup that nobody expected. Suddenly, the streets aren’t safe for anyone, especially an American, especially one who mysteriously begins to show fantastic healing powers. Set alternately in Washington DC, Cairo and Alexandria, “Sudden Rivers” takes us into the richly imagined world of a modern Egypt and spins a tale of a complex society in flux told through the eyes of a man in crisis, a man who has given up on nearly everything some time ago. He is Parrish McKenzie, a mid-level diplomat based at the embassy in Cairo whose future is buried in a stultifying bureaucracy where he just can’t fit in. His only joy is following his passion—hunting for black market antiquities on the back streets of the old city, Al-Qāhirah. In Arabic it means “The Victorious.” Though he denies it even to himself, he suddenly begins to exhibit mysterious powers and first heals a young girl shot by Jihadists in a bus hijacking. But when the police question him, he dismisses it and tells them she was never really hurt, they were mistaken. Nevertheless, the story spreads and he attracts a Muslim following. This drives the fundamentalists and the State Department up the wall, it’s the last thing anyone needed in a volatile Egypt. Who knew the General would grab power overnight, a man as famous for his gourmet cooking as he was for his fundamentalism—though soon his feminist daughter, Azhara, would test that faith. It didn’t help that Parrish had rescued her from near death and now they were both on the run caught up in a web of politics and violence. When philandering oil minister al’ Rashid hires a detective to investigate Azhara before risking a proposal of marriage, he sets all his powers after them too. Then a young Russian journalist latches onto the story and realizes it’s her ticket to fame and riches with a worldwide exclusive Now everybody wants Parrish. The junta for murder; Islamists for blasphemy; The State Department just wants him gone, but some Egyptian people desperately want to believe in him. Unexpectedly something bigger is happening, something profound. Parrish is evolving into an enigmatic new person and it sweeps him into dangerous events he never before could have imagined.

On vacation with her husband in an idyllic Italian valley, Police Inspector Simona Tavianello stops at the local beekeeper’s shop to buy some honey, where she finds a body lying in the entrance. Simona tries to avoid involvement—she is, after all, off-duty. But when she realizes that the murder weapon is her own gun, what can she do but take charge? The victim was an engineer at the controversial agricultural research center for Sacropiano, a biotechnology company accused of developing pesticides that are making the bees in the region disappear. At the same time Simona found the body, the local beekeepers were nearby organizing a militant sit-in to protest the company’s practices. And found on the floor near the corpse was a tract entitled, “The Bee Revolution.” Simona Tavianello’s investigation gets her caught between the radical environmentalists and the powerful industrialists who are allied with the police. That would be complication enough, but she also needs to deal with the wounded ego of Cacabonda, the local police officer, who is officially in charge of the investigation. With her sharp humor and spot-on observations of current events in Italy, can Tavianello not only solve the murder, but also discover the intriguing reason behind the disappearance of the bees?

In the Buddhist terminology 'Buddha' is equivalent to 'truth'. They don't talk much about truth; they talk much more about Buddha. That too is significant, because when you become a Buddha -- 'Buddha' means when you become Awakened -- truth is, so why talk about truth? Just ask what awakening is. Just ask what awareness is -- because when you are aware, truth is there; when you are not aware, truth is not there.