“Wholly entertaining. . a novel that hooks you in from the first line. An original and dramatic love story set in an innovative context.”—Mario Vargas Llosa “With vivid imagery of desperate village life and keen insight into multicultural influences, Leante’s rich, often poetic novel of romance and international politics evokes a sensuous yet savage period in this region’s tumultuous history.”—Booklist A huge bestseller in Spain, See How Much I Love You won the 2007 Alfaguara Prize. An epic love story: Montse and Santiago meet as teenagers in 1970s Barcelona, a poor boy and a middle-class girl ready for seduction. After they break up, Santiago flees to the western Sahara. Years later, Montse braves war and personal danger to find him. Luis Leante is a professor of classics at the University of Murcia

This is Jane A little subdued. A little stubborn. A little tired of going out on blind dates with men who drive vans with sofas in the back, Jane Alcott is living the Single Girl existence in the big city. She is also leading a double life. By day, she's a reporter covering the raucous Seattle Chinooks hockey team – especially their notorious goalie Luc Martineau. By night, she's a writer, secretly creating the scandalous adventures of "Honey Pie"… the magazine series that has all the men talking. See Jane Spar Luc has made his feelings about parasite reporters – and Jane – perfectly clear. But if he thinks he's going to make her life miserable, he'd better think again. See Jane Attract For as long as he can remember, Luc has been single-minded about his career. The last thing he needs is a smart-mouthed, pain-in-the-backside reporter digging into his past and getting in his way. But once the little reporter sheds her black and gray clothes in favor of a sexy red dress, Luc sees that there is more to Jane than originally meets the eye. Maybe it's time to take a risk. Maybe it's time to live out fantasies. Maybe it's time to… see Jane score

 While most seventeen-year-old American girls would refuse to let their parents marry them off to a stranger, Robyn Mason dreams of the mysterious McKale in Ireland, wondering how he’ll look and imagining his cute Irish accent. Prearranged bindings are common for magical families like her own, however when she travels to the whimsical Emerald Isle she discovers there’s more to her betrothal and McKale’s clan than she was led to believe. What starts as an obligatory pairing between Robyn and McKale morphs over time into something they both need. But one giant obstacle stands in the way of their budding romance: a seductive and deadly Fae princess accustomed to getting what she wants—and what she wants is McKale as her plaything. Love, desire, and jealousies collide as Robyn’s family and McKale’s clan must work together to outsmart the powerful Faeries and preserve the only hope left for their people.(

When an old college friend pays Alex Calder an unexpected visit he is drawn once more into the shady dealings of the City — and in particular back to Bloomfield Weiss, the investment bank he’d hoped he’d left well behind. For Kim is married to Todd van Zyl, son of South African newspaper tycoon Cornelius van Zyl. Todd wants Alex’s help to investigate the murder of his mother, shot at a game reserve near Cape Town eighteen years ago. Todd had always believed his mother was killed by guerrillas — but the recent discovery of a letter written by her shortly before her death now suggests a crime far closer to home. And it seems Alex’s old enemy at Bloomfield Weiss holds the key to the mystery. Unfortunately Todd’s suspicions have stirred up a nest of vipers — with deadly repercussions

The first substantial collection of short fiction from “a writer with enough electricity to light up the country” (Ann Patchett) “I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal,” observes one narrator in this collection of effervescent and often uncanny stories. Drawing on fifteen years of work, See You in Paradise is the fullest expression yet of J. Robert Lennon’s distinctive and brilliantly comic take on the pathos and surreality at the heart of American life. In Lennon’s America, a portal to another universe can be discovered with surprising nonchalance in a suburban backyard, adoption almost reaches the level of blood sport, and old pals return from the dead to steal your girlfriend. Sexual dysfunction, suicide, tragic accidents, and career stagnation all create surprising opportunities for unexpected grace in this full-hearted and mischievous depiction of those days (weeks, months, years) we all have when things just don’t go quite right

Pal has a shameful secret that has dragged him into huge debt, and he is desperate that his teenage daughters and ex-wife don't find out. Sixteen-year-old Sandra also has a secret. She's in love with the delinquent Daniel William, a love so strong and pure that nothing can get in its way. Cecilie has the biggest secret of them all, a baby growing inside her. But she's trapped in her small-time, criminal existence, and dreams of an escape from it all. Over three fateful September days, these lives cross in a whirlwind of brutality, laughter, tragedy, and love that will change them forever. A fast-paced, moving, and darkly funny page-turner. "A dense literary novel that moves like a thriller. . Renberg gives us a novel, rooted in noir softened by comedy, that gets to the serious business of how our shortcomings are all linked."-Kirkus Reviews

SEED ON THE WIND is a revealing dramatization of Lora Winter, who has had many lovers but only one beloved. The story opens when the father of Lora’s youngest child first betrays that he is disturbed by an incident from her past that has arisen to cloud the present; the author then proceeds, in a series of vivid scenes, to unfold the past before our eyes. To the reader this is not a novel — rather the living, breathing substance of reality. Not even in the magic pages of How Like a God did Mr. Stout reveal himself so completely a master of feminine psychology. As in his first work, the author has provided both an engrossing story and a deep, moving study of human motivation. When How Like a God was issued, critics and the public alike realized that a new and powerful novelist had arisen. SEED ON THE WIND generously fulfills the promise of Mr. Stout’s first book and goes far to sustain the contention of those critics who compared him to D. H. Lawrence

George Brookes is a brilliant but reclusive plant biologist living on a remote Canadian island. After his mysterious death, the heirs to his estate arrive on the island, including his daughter Isabelle, her teenage children, and Jules Beecher, a friend and pioneer in plant neurobiology. They will be isolated on the frigid island for two weeks, until the next supply boat arrives. As Jules begins investigating the laboratory and scientific papers left by George, he comes to realize that his mentor may have achieved a monumental scientific breakthrough: communication between plants and humans. Within days, the island begins to have strange and violent effects on the group, especially Jules who becomes obsessed with George’s journal, the strange fungus growing on every plant and tree, and horrible secrets that lay buried in the woods. It doesn’t take long for Isabelle to realize that her father may have unleashed something sinister on the island, a malignant force that’s far more deadly than any human. As a fierce storm hits and the power goes out, she knows they’ll be lucky to make it out alive. A.J. Colucci masterfully weaves real science with horror to create a truly terrifying thriller, drawing from astonishing new discoveries about plants and exploring their eerie implications. Seeders is a feast of horror and suspense

In these stories seers and vagabonds, addicts, and gardeners succeed and sometimes fail at creating new kinds of community against apocalyptic backdrops. They build gardens in the ruins, transport seeds and songs from one world to another and from dreams to waking life. Where do you plant a seed someone gave you in a dream? How do you build a world more free of trauma when it’s all you’ve ever known? Sometimes the seed you wake up holding in your hand is the seed of a new world

Plant yourself under the covers and get ready for Seeds of Fear, fifth in the ground- breaking Hot Blood erotic horror anthology series. Pinup queen Brinke Stevens delivers the Introduction, and 19 original stories cultivated by editors Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett follow. Terror and titillation reach full, florid bloom as Bentley Little invites you to “See Marilyn Monroe’s Panties!” Ronald Kelly introduces a “Scream Queen” you won’t soon forget, Edward Lee follows his Stoker-nominated “Mr. Torso” (HB4) with “Grub-Girl” and award-winning author P. D. Cacek (Stoker, World Fantasy) welcomes her “Devil With a Blue Dress.” These top-name horror writers bring you the freshest works guaranteed to raise goosebumps and scald the blood

On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. What's going on? Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o'clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear. But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. The president proposes that a wall be built around the city to contain the revolution. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that had hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? Is she the organizer of a conspiracy against the state? A police superintendent is put on the case. What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister. A singular novel from the author of Blindness

Some years ago a reliable friend told me I should read José Saramago's Blindness. Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations. Later I tried again, went further, and quit because I was scared. Blindness is a frightening book. Before I'd let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he'd have to earn my trust. So I went back to the earlier novels and put myself through a course of Saramago. It's hard not to gallop through prose that uses commas instead of full stops, but once I learned to slow down, the rewards piled up: his sound, sweet humour, his startling imagination, his admirable dogs and lovers, the subtle, honest workings of his mind. Here indeed was a novelist worthy of a reader's trust. So at last I could read his great book – or his greatest until its sequel. Accepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself "the apprentice", said: "The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures." This, on the face of it, is an odd description of Blindness, for in that book it is powerless people who insult human dignity – ordinary people, terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind, everything out of control. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut. The group of men who seize power in an asylum and use and abuse the weaker inmates have indeed abandoned self-respect and human decency: they are a microcosm of the corruption of power. But the truly powerful of our world don't even appear in Blindness. Seeing is all about them: the perverters of reason, the universal liars. It is about government gone wrong. Very evidently Saramago's novels are not simple parables. It would be rash to "explain" what all the people (but one) in the first book were blind to, or what it is that the citizens of Seeing see. What's clear is that they're the same people, it's the same city, a few years later: one book illuminates the other in ways I can only begin to glimpse. The story begins with those ordinary citizens, who not so long ago regained their sight and their tranquil day-to-day lives, doing something that seems quite unconnected with vision or lack of it. It is voting day, and 83% of them, after not going to the polls at all in the morning, go in the late afternoon and cast a blank ballot. We see the dismay of bureaucrats, the excitement of journalists, the hysteria of the government, and the mild non-response of the citizens, who, when asked how they voted, refuse to say, reminding the questioner that the question is illegal. The satire is at first quite funny, and I thought it was going to be a light, Voltairean tale. Turning in a blank ballot is a signal unfamiliar to most Britons and Americans, who aren't yet used to living under a government that has made voting meaningless. In a functioning democracy, one can consider not voting a lazy protest liable to play into the hands of the party in power (as when low Labour turn-out allowed Margaret Thatcher's re-elections, and Democratic apathy secured both elections of George W Bush). It comes hard to me to admit that a vote is not in itself an act of power, and I was at first blind to the point Saramago's non-voting voters are making. I began to see it at last, when the minister of defence announces that what the country is facing is terrorism. Other ministers oppose him but he gets what he wants – a state of emergency, then the exodus of the government, by night, from the capital city, which is declared to be under siege. A bomb is exploded (by terrorists, of course, as the media report), killing quite a few people. An attempted evacuation of the 17% of voters who marked their ballots ends in failure, as the government forgets to tell the troops blocking all the roads to let the refugees through. The so-called terrorists in the city, still mild and peaceable, help the refugees carry back upstairs all they tried to take with them – the tea service, the silver platter, the painting, grandpa… The humour is still tender but the tone darkens, tension rises. Characters, individuals, begin to come to the fore – all nameless except a dog, Constant, the dog of tears from Blindness. The ministers jockey horribly for power. A superintendent of police is sent into the city to find the woman who did not go blind when everyone else did four years ago, sought as the link between the "plague of white blindness and the plague of blank ballots". The superintendent becomes our viewpoint and mediator; we begin to see as he begins to see. He brings us to the woman, the gentle light-bearer of the first book. But where that story began with an awful darkness that slowly opened into light, this one goes right down into the dark. José Saramago will be 84 this year. He has written a novel that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read. He writes with wit, with heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom. Ursula K Le Guin 's Gifts is published by Orion

A collection of short stories, most of them set in Indiana, focuses on the meddling of fact and fiction and includes a dozen satiric-but also sympathetic-tales written in the persona of Indiana's famous son, Dan Quayle

"Meruane's prose has great literary force: it emerges from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the ungraspable, and from pain." — Roberto Bolaño This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships. Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Legion of the Damned® novels and the Mutant Files series comes the second novel in a postapocalyptic military science fiction series about America struggling to overcome a natural disaster but starting a second civil war… As people fight to survive the aftereffects of more than a dozen meteor strikes, a group of wealthy individuals conspires to rebuild the United States as a corporate entity called the New Confederacy, where the bottom line is law. As a second civil war rages, with families fighting against families on opposite sides, Union president Samuel T. Sloan battles to keep the country whole. To help in the fight for unity, Union Army captain Robin “Mac” Macintyre and her crew of Stryker vehicles are sent after the ruthless “warlord of warlords,” an ex–Green Beret who rules a large swath of the West. But defeating him will be even more difficult than she thought. The warlord is receiving military assistance from Mac’s sister—and rival—Confederate major Victoria Macintyre. And when the siblings come together in the war-torn streets of New Orleans, only one of them will walk away

It's a time of joy for Hunter as he is reunited with his father, who vanished mysteriously years before. Only Morgan senses that something is wrong, that Hunter's father is hiding a dark secret that could threaten them all

A short post-apocalyptic story about one woman’s separation and search for her loved ones after awakening from cryogenic sleep

Losing It - 3.5 A few months after being honorably discharged from the military, Jackson Hunt is still struggling to adjust back to the real world. He needs to get a job and find a sense of normalcy if he’s going to keep his own demons at bay. The job that falls into his lap, though, is anything but normal. Bodyguard (and baby-sitter) to spoiled-rich-girl Kelsey Summers isn’t exactly what he’d been looking for, but it’s a chance to travel, to get away from the home that has felt stifling ever since his return. It would be a pretty sweet gig if it weren’t for the fact that Kelsey’s father doesn’t want Kelsey to know she’s being followed. Hunt feels guilty (and a little bit creepy) as he watches her from afar. She’s vibrant and infuriating, exciting and reckless, mysterious and familiar. When he sees her falling into the same patterns that he suffered years ago, he decides it’s time to stop watching and help her instead. But getting to know her is more difficult than he thought, especially because the more he knows her, the more he wants her