San Antonio College Library

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure...

A subtle and powerful work of contemporary fiction. Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called on to solve a sensitive...

"Robert Harris meets Gorky Park in Child 44, Tom Rob Smith's stunning thriller--sure to be one of the most talked about debut novels of the year"--Provided by the publisher. Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, Tom Rob Smith's debut novel is both a thriller and a harrowing portrayal of the terror inflicted upon people by their own governments. An officer of the Ministry of State Security risks everything -- even becoming an enemy of the state -- to find...

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills,...

His past marked by his father's embarrassing taunts and untimely death, Fat Charlie meets the brother he never knew and is introduced to new and exciting ways to spend his time.

"Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Vladimir Nabokov and Maxine Hong Kingston to the less-critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Diaz and Arundhati Roy. It examines the syntactic and grammatical innovations of these authors, who use English to convey their ambivalence toward or enthusiasm for English or their political motivations for altering its rules. Ch'ien...

A fictional re-creation of the life and times of Bert Williams, the first black entertainer in the United States to achieve success, a man who dons blackface to become a headliner in the Ziegfeld Follies.

"The State of the Novel offers a investigation into the present state of the contemporary novel - in Britain and beyond - and some speculation about its future. Against the backdrop of globalization, Dominic Head establishes the interests shared by contemporary theorists, cultural commentators, and consumers of novels. Key topics are re-evaluated, including: literary prize culture; the idea of a literary renaissance in the 1980s; provincial fiction;...

A satire of modern society and celebrity culture finds the seemingly simple pursuits of young Desmond Pepperdine hampered by his uncle Lionel's near-criminal habits, which become more prominent when Lionel wins the lottery.

In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important "Government Man," and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and...