NCW Libraries

"Walking and writing have always gone together. Think of the poets who walk on a rhythm for their lines and the novelists who put their characters on a path. [This volume] rounds up the most memorable walker-writers from the 1300s to the modern day, from country hikers to urban strollers, from the rationalists to the truly outlandish. All of them analyse our need to put one foot in front of the other."--Back cover.

"This is how a family keeps a secret...and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after...until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change...and then change the world. When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his...

"Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a searing, poetic masterwork of memory. A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants--including a failed priest; a naturalist; a neurosurgeon; an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood; and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations...

"Pie & Whiskey is the tent revival of literary events where writers such as Anthony Doerr, Steve Almond, and Elissa Washuta present original works based on prompts that include the words pie and whiskey. This anthology collects the best of that writing along with new pieces to bring this spirited gathering to the printed page. Pie & Whiskey, the book, is a literary collection of readings presented over the past six years in Spokane, WA, and Missoula,...

Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the most influential living scientists and a New York Times best-selling author, selects the year's top science and nature writing from writers who balance research with humanity and, in the process, uncover riveting stories of discovery across the disciplines.

"[A] writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original, and probing mind."--Amitav Ghosh In one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor's Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity--for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a...

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters. Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion...

"The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker's new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity and belonging A Place for Us unfolds the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family, gathered together in their Californian hometown to celebrate the eldest daughter, Hadia's, wedding - a match of love rather than tradition. It is here, on this momentous day, that Amar, the youngest of the siblings, reunites...

"On All Souls Day, the late Marcus Conway returns home. Solar Bones captures in a single relentless sentence the life and death of this rural Irish engineer, and his place in the globally interconnected 21st century. The book takes in local municipal failures and global financial collapse, the quotidian pleasures of family, ancient history and the latest headlines, the living and the dead. A vital, tender, acerbic, warm, and death-haunted work one...

"A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life-immersive and comic, yet unsparing-that marks the arrival of an indisputable new talent in American fiction"--