Banana Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

Gatling was a master armorer, a dead shot and an expert in his field—which was death. Armed with the latest automatic weapons from all over the world and paid in gold to test them on living bodies, he was probably the single most dangerous man in the Old West. At his command he had more firepower than a cavalry regiment, and more guts than a Cheyenne war party. He would need all of his skill to take on...THE MISSIONThe Copper Trust was arming the savage Jicarilla Apaches to drive the peaceful Zunis off their land. A mountain of ore was at stake and the Zunis had only one weapon—Gatling. The odds were a hundred to one against him, but Gatling figured it was the Apaches who had better start praying.

Thad Beaumont would like to say he is innocent. He'd like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home. But how can Thad disown the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it-and signs its crimes with Thad's bloody fingerprints? * * * Alternate cover editions: [New English Library, 1990](https://www./book/show/13603217-the-dark-half) [New English Library Early Export Edition, 1990](https://www./book/show/39315780-the-dark-half)

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out–with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes–to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious–and dangerous–asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry,* *Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on her cello...CANAL DREAMS is a novel of deceptive simplicity and dark, original power: stark psychological insights mesh with vividly realised scenarios in an ominous projection of global realpolitik. The result is yet another major landmark in the quite remarkable career of an outstanding modern novelist.From Publishers WeeklyBecause she is afraid to fly during a time of international tensions, famous Japanese cellist Hisako Onoda boards a tanker en route to her concert in Rotterdam. When a conflict erupts and the Panama Canal is closed, the ship is forced to drop anchor in Gatun Lake. A guerrilla faction takes the passengers and crew captive, Hisako is raped, and we watch as the sensitive musician metamorphoses into a grenade-toting avenging warrior. This stunning, hallucinatory, semi-surreal fable pits an artistic, precariously balanced sensibility against a world of brutal political forces. Among the ship's passengers, all taken hostage by the People's Liberation Front, are a South African engineer, an erudite Egyptian and Hisako's wimpy young French boyfriend. Banks ( The Wasp Factory ) doesn't do much with these characters. His wrenching story, which can be read as a parable of the feminine principle reasserting itself and taking revenge on earth-destroying males, derives its power from the exploration of Hisako's mental states, her violent nightmares and her flashbacks to Japan, where she became a prodigy, strove to please her mother and missed a father she never knew, dead from radiation sickness in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalStranded in Panama during an international crisis, cellist Hisako Onodo witnesses the death of her French lover at the hands of terrorists and brings her hitherto untested powers of will and desperation to bear in a one-woman vendetta. Set in the near future, the latest novel by the author of The Bridge ( LJ 4/15/89) grows in intensity as its heroine divests herself of everything except for her desire for revenge. Not quite sf but more than realism, this tale of obsession should be considered by libraries that can afford to go beyond their priority lists.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.The Doomed City is set in an experimental city bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth's history and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though he's now a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect."

A New York Times bestselling author appears for the first time ever in an omnibus edition! Old fans and new friends will welcome this collection of Sue Grafton's first three alphabet crime novels: A Is for Alibi, B Is for Burglar, and C is for Corpse. The award-winning mysteries all feature former cop turned detective, Kinsey Milhone, one of the most loved heroines of modern mystery fiction.

Dane Prescott was charming, gallant, a man of mystery and shadows whose smile could make a woman forget her name! Jennifer Chantry was terrified when he caught her with a pilfered diamond bracelet, stunned when he kissed her breathless, and delighted when he helped her escape with her prize! But when her dashing hero turned out to be a professional gambler, she had to resist him. Her father had lost Belle Retour, their beautiful old home, in a poker game-how could she risk loving another man who might cost her everything? Until now she'd never been tempted to stray from say byways...but the promises in Dane's eyes filled her with wild yearning for passion and danger. Dane knew the odds were against Jenny loving him, but he'd dare hell to risk heaven in his lady's arms. He'd never bet everything before, but the stakes were so high. Could he make her believe that a man of honor would never gamble with her heart?

From the battlefields of a Vietnam veteran's memory to an old-time movie hero's search for a serial killer, from Halloween in a special town--where the rules of trick-or-treat are written in blood--to a Texas road where a wrong turn leads to a nest of evil, horror master McCammon is at his terrifying best in this collection of stories.

In the Bronx of the 1930s, 15-year-old Billy Bathgate hooks up with a legendary mobster, Dutch Schultz. Schultz becomes an unlikely surrogate parent to the boy, introducing him to the ways of the world and training Billy to follow in his footsteps. After Billy falls for Schulz's latest girlfriend, he begins to question the actions of the mob he was so eager to join. As he seeks to protect the young woman, he gains strength in following his own heart and makes a courageous passage from boyhood to adulthood. E.L Doctorow won the 1990 PEN/Faulkner Award for this novel.

Only a few nuclear weapons fell in America-the weapons that destroyed our nation were biological and, ultimately, cultural. But in the chaos, the famine, the plague, there exited a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret, formed from the vestiges of Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The climate has changed. The Great Salt Lake has filled up to prehistoric levels. But there, on the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again.A civilization cannot be reclaimed by powerful organizations, or even by great men alone. It must be renewed by individual men and women, one by one, working together to make a community, a nation, a new America.

Scott and his friends are simply staying alive in year 5 until their surprising new teacher, Mr Murlin, comes along. Boring textbooks go into the bin, eating chocolate in class becomes compulsory and suddenly it's OK to be weird. But Mr Murlin is not popular with everyone...

He was Ramses the Damned in ancient Egypt, but awoke in opulent Edwardian London as Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He mixes with the aristocrats and samples their voluptuous lifestyle, but it is for his beloved, Cleopatra, that he longs, and will do anything to be with.... *From the Trade Paperback edition.*