The life of a street gang member turned student. He is William Swanson of New York who between amours with various women is taking night courses to become a lawyer. By the author of Florry of Washington Heights.

With a reputation as a hard player who lived a hard life, Swan's football days were littered with bizarre twists and turns. Before the Autoglass Trophy final at Wembley in 1993, he partied until dawn, staggered out onto the pitch, and was named Man of the Match. Nine days later, he followed the rules and went to bed early in preparation for the Division Two play-off final--and ended up getting sent off as his side was defeated by West Bromwich Albion. While at Plymouth, Swan suffered a terrible time--shunned by fellow players, despised by supporters, and living alone in a haunted house. And during his time at Port Vale, he met a young local lad by the name of Robbie Williams. The two soon became firm friends and incorrigible drink partners--with often hilarious results. But no matter how he partied off the field, he still set himself the highest of standards in his professional life. Falling foul of several managers along the way, he was often in trouble with referees, too, picking up 10 red cards and countless bookings. But on the other side of the coin is a caring man who always took time out at his various clubs to visit children in hospital. After retiring in 2000, Swan initially struggled to come to terms with his life outside football, but he has since become a cult figure in Hull, where he now commentates on Hull City's matches. A larger than life character with no regrets, Peter Swan tells the remarkable story of the highs and lows of his 16-year career--from Wembley joy to the chronic knee condition that forced him out of the game and could see him confined to a wheelchair.

Seven years after a brutal encounter with the Hells Angels, two ex-lovers, Jonah Seeger and Ruby Samarodin, return to their Doukhobor religious community in the mountains of British Columbia to heal and start new lives. Jonah is a twenty-five-year-old from a disgraced family, and now injured and battling PTSD from his time as a Marine. Ruby, practically Doukhobor royalty, is a rock star with a substance use disorder. Jonah finds his mother, Sharon, still struggling with an eating disorder stemming from her terrorist upbringing in the Doukhobor splinter sect known as the Sons of Freedom. Ruby returns to Sasha, the young son she abandoned, and to her overbearing mother, Virginia, a pious pillar of the community raised to loathe the Sons of Freedom. After a heartfelt reunion between Jonah, Ruby, and Sasha, they learn that a murderous Hells Angel, Clinton Pritchard, is still obsessed with revenge for the damage Jonah caused years earlier. But when Ruby confronts Clinton about their terrible past, Clinton’s brother Swanny Pritchard must choose whether to side with his brother or turn against him. Jonah and Ruby unwittingly draw their family into a final confrontation with the Hells Angels that will test longheld, pacifist Doukhobor beliefs.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • NPR • New York Public Library • LitHub • Mental Floss “Influenced by the likes of Jane Austen and Rick and Morty, Smith tackles timely issues while leaving room for some delicious reality TV references.”—Entertainment Weekly In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis’ last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash, are forced to flee everything they've ever known. As they wander toward the scalded heart of the city, they face fire, conspiracy, mayhem, unholy drugs, dragon-worshippers, and the monsters lurking inside themselves. In this bombshell of a novel, Chandler Klang Smith has imagined an unimaginable world: scathingly clever and gorgeously strange, The Sky Is Yours is at once faraway and disturbingly familiar, its singular chaos grounded in the universal realities of love, family, and the deeply human desire to survive at all costs. Praise for The Sky is Yours “It’s a mesmeric world, comic in the way teenage voyages of self-discovery inevitably are, but with an undertone of menace, horror, even hints of allegory. Satire, too . . . Smith’s imagination is inexhaustible. The Sky Is Yours is a great and disturbing debut, which colonizes a new realm of the magic city.”—The Wall Street Journal “Smith’s gifts of imagination are staggering. . . . Much like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky before it, The Sky is Yours filters youth through a warped yet poignantly canny speculative fiction lens. At the same time, it’s funny as hell, full of madcap detail, firecracker dialogue, and a healthy dose of absurdism in the face of darkness.”—NPR “Readers who love ambitious literary genre fiction should be on the lookout for Smith’s first novel, a vibrantly uncanny dystopia set on an island metropolis, in the shadow of dragons that swoop overhead, where income inequality and mass incarceration have spun out of control.”—HuffPost “An unmissable masterpiece.”—PopSugar

It is 1963. South Africa is in crisis and the white state is under siege. On 19 August the dreaded Security Police swoop on Griggs bookstore in downtown Durban and arrest Eleanor, the daughter of the manageress.

An “obsessively readable” mystery from the New York Times–bestselling author of Dark Corners about a century-old diary that holds clues to a murder (The Sunday Telegraph). Asta Westerby is lonely. In 1905, shortly after coming to East London from Denmark with her husband and their two little boys, she feels like a stranger in a strange land. And it doesn’t help that her husband is constantly away on business. Fortunately, she finds solace in her diary—and she continues to do so until 1967. Decades later, her granddaughter, Ann, finds the journal, and it becomes a literary sensation, offering an intimate view of Edwardian life. But it also appears to hold the key to an unsolved murder and the disappearance of a child. A modern masterpiece by the Edgar Award–winning author of the Inspector Wexford Mysteries, and an excellent choice for readers of P. D. James, Ian Rankin, or Scott Turow, Asta’s Book is at once a crime story, a historical novel, and a psychological portrait told through the diary itself and through Ann, who is bent on unlocking the journal’s excised mystery.

Includes summarized reports of many bee-keeper associations.