Joseph O'Neill

Fourteen years ago Mary Breeze was killed by lightning. It should have been all the bad luck that the Breeze family was due but, as John Breeze is about to find out, this couldn't be further from the truth. The Breezes is John Breeze's account of his family's most hellish fortnight, when insurance policies, security systems and lucky underpants are pitted against redundancy, burglery and relegation.

As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes , a historical novel from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tatjana Soli. Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the West, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie's husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family's homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated--living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer. They move to the territories with the U.S.Army, where Libbie is challenged daily and her worldview expanded: the pampered daughter of a small-town judge, she transforms into a daring camp follower. But when what Anne and Libbie have come to know--self-reliance, freedom, danger--is suddenly altered through tragedy and loss, they realize how indelibly shaped they are by life on the treacherous, extraordinary American plains. With taut, suspenseful writing, Tatjana Soli tells the exhilarating stories of Libbie and Anne, who have grown like weeds into women unwilling to be restrained by the strictures governing nineteenth-century society. The Removes is a powerful, transporting novel about the addictive intensity and freedom of the American frontier.

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London.