Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

Passionate, riveting and deeply moving, NEW MOON, the compelling sequel to TWILIGHT, irresistibly combines romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. “I knew we were both in mortal danger. Still, in that instant, I felt well. Whole. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, the blood pulsing hot and fast through my veins again. My lungs filled deep with the sweet scent that came off his skin. It was like there had never been any hole in my chest. I was perfect – not healed, but as if there had never been a wound in the first place.”

Control was the word Dr Toby Harper lived by. She strove to keep her life in order, her ER in order. But no one could have been prepared for the man she admits one quiet night to the Springer Hospital. Delirious and in critical condition, he barely responds to treatment. And then he disappears without trace. The subsequent search leads Toby to a second patient with the same infection. And it reveals an unsettling twist – the infection can only be spread through direct tissue exchange. Soon Toby’s on a trail that winds from a pregnant sixteen-year-old prostitute to an unexpected tragedy in her own home. Only then does she discover the unthinkable: a terrifying and deadly epidemic is about to be unleashed …

Sometimes life is like a bad waiter – it serves you exactly what you don’t want. The women of Freesia Court have come together at life’s table, fully convinced that there is nothing that good coffee, delectable desserts and a strong shoulder can’t fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together – the foundation of a book group they call AHEB (Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons) – an unofficial club that becomes a lifeline. The five women each have a story to tell. There’s Faith, the newcomer, a housewife and mother who harbors a terrible secret; big, beautiful Audrey, the resident sex queen who knows that with good posture and attitude you can get away with anything; Merit, the shy doctor’s wife with the face of an angel and the private hell of an abusive husband; Kari, a wise woman with a wonderful laugh who knows that the greatest gifts appear after life’s fiercest storms; and finally, Slip, activist and adventurer, a tiny spitfire who looks trouble straight in the eye and challenges it to arm wrestle. Holding on through forty eventful years – through the swinging Sixties, the turbulent Seventies, the anything-goes Eighties, the nothing’s-impossible Nineties, to the present day – they take the plunge into the chaos that inevitably comes to those with the temerity to stay alive and kicking.

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.