Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

Jessica is beside herself when Mr. O’Brien chooses her to be Daphne’s partner in the seventh grade Write-a-Book contest. All the kids at school think Daphne is strange. She dresses bizarre, mismatched clothes and she never speaks to anyone. Jessica is in for a pleasant surprise, though, when she spends magical afternoons working on the book with Daphne and her little sister, Hope. As their friendship deepens and Jessica begins to see beyond Daphne’s surface, she also comes to discover a tragic secret that Daphne must keep hidden from the world. Jessica promises never to tell anyone. But when the secret becomes a serious threat to Daphne and Hope, Jessica is torn between protecting her friendship with Daphne, and doing what she knows she must do. With warmth, humor, and finely wrought characterizations, Mary Downing Hahn weaves a poignant story that explores the limits of caring and responsibility.

Those memorable days of push lawn mowers, corner grocery stores, big-band music, burning leaves and filling stations that check the oil and wash the windshield. On this nostalgic canvas, Stanley West has set his riveting and heartwarming novel, the devastating story of young Sandy Meyer. Bright and outgoing, having grown up through the Great Depression and the World War II year, she is suddenly give one perplexing clue to her past that sets her on an incredible and harrowing journey in search of her lost family. A pilgrimage that brings her face to face with nerve-shattering suspense, unbearable terror and the magnificent capacity of the human heart. Surrounded by juicy and wacky characters, and without the knowledge of her adoptive parents, her devil-may-care friends or the boy she desperately loves, she summons the courage to doggedly follow where the faint trail leads. When she stumbles upon the buried past and long-hidden treachery, she is confronted by and evil that knows her by name and drawn into a darkness she never knew existed. Tenaciously refusing to quit, she discovers a heart-breaking heroism and an extraordinary triumph that changes her life forever.

In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family’s dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice. Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.

Highly topical and absolutely compelling, the new thriller from bestselling author Kyle Mills features an intriguing protagonist caught up in a fight where there are no rights or wrongs. Trevor Barnett is the scion of an old tobacco family. Trevor is 31 and will come into a USD 10 million trust fund when he turns 60 so long as he has been in continuous employment from graduation until his 60th birthday with the cigarette company his ancestor founded. Trevor is consequently not the most motivated person in the world – at least when the novel opens. At the beginning of SMOKE SCREEN, the tobacco industry is facing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit which could bankrupt the industry. But the industry decides to fight back, and decides to use Trevor to do it. And Trevor may or may not have his own agenda, which may or may not include the woman he loves from afar, who is a lawyer for one of the anti-smoking campaigner groups.