Robert Clark

A selection of deliciously spooky short stories from the Japanese master of suspense, the acclaimed author of RING. The film DARK WATER is based on the first story in the collection.Suzuki demonstrates the power of his psychological insight into the mechanics of fear in this highly atmospheric collection of stories unified by the theme of water.Following her divorce, Yoshimi Matsubara lives with her five-year-old daughter Ikuko in a depressing and damp apartment block on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. But when a child's red bag keeps turning up in unexpected places, Yoshino's sanity seems to be threatened, and she soon begins to fear that her daughter's life is at risk.Kensuke Suehiro jumps at the chance to visit a restricted island in Tokyo Bay, about which he once heard a rather strange story. But when he arrives, he finds far more than he bargained for.Fisherman Hiroyuki is embittered and unhappy in his marriage. But getting rid of his wife turns out to be anything but easy, especially when his own boat seems to be against him.Family man Sugiyama finds himself trapped in an underwater cave. Can he find a way to communicate with his beloved son one last time?Just four examples from this beautifully crafted collection of stories filled with suspense, tension and drama. A perfect introduction to one of Japan's top literary stars.

"In My Grandfather's House, Robert Clark traces the spiritual quests and struggles of his ancestors, from England's split with the Church of Rome at the end of the Middle Ages to his own return to the faith five hundred years later. Clark reconstructs their lives as medieval Catholics, heretics, and inquisitors in the England of Henry VIII; as Puritan settlers, participants in Indian wars, and accusers in witch trials in New England in the 1600s; and as preachers, artists, writers, and agnostics during the theological and intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century that left them exploring creeds ranging from evangelical Protestantism to Unitarianism to Buddhism to atheism. In the context of King Henry's divorces, his quarrels with both the Pope and Martin Luther, and the religious and personal struggles of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Margaret Fuller. Clark weaves a rich history that culminates in his own quest through doubt toward faith."--BOOK JACKET.

In November of 1949, Richard MacEwan, a well-established lawyer in St. Paul, Minnesota, loses his brother James in what seems to have been a hunting accident. As he seeks to understand the events of the day his brother died, Richard finds the calm surface of his life disturbed when secrets kept by the women in his family begin to emerge. Among his bachelor brother's papers, Richard discovers a letter from his wife, Sarah, that hints at an infidelity. Shaken and confused, he finds himself tempted by an attractive woman who had known his brother. And when Richard's daughter, Anna, vulnerable after her recent divorce, becomes involved with a married man, Charles Norden, her affair changes her life and shakes the very foundation of the MacEwan family. The lives of these four characters - and the troubling legacy of James - are rendered in luminous detail and quietly breathtaking prose. A first novel that is "old-fashioned" in the most satisfying ways, In the Deep Midwinter presents a family and a world in crisis, a transformation as mysterious as winter becoming spring.

v. 2: The Oregon Years: Here Joe Meek continues his collaboration with Frances Fuller Victor, telling the story of his own colorful life and the tale of his times in The River of the West, a memoir that proved immediately and enduringly popular upon its publication more than a century ago. In the first half of their book, published as Volume One of this new edition, Meek and Mrs. Victor presented the young Joe in his role as a dashing and gallant trapper. In this volume they show him as a pioneer, sheriff, U.S. Marshall, even legislator -- Citizen Joe. Through Meek's pungent recollections, his engaging memoir also becomes an important history of Oregon's turbulent formative years -- the struggles of the missionaries, the other early settlers, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Indians that shaped a territory and finally a state. - Jacket flap.

"Amid the crises of the summer of 1968, two teenagers become lovers. Emily is a good Catholic girl, for whom an incarnate God means joy and contentment in the life of the body. William is preoccupied, in a vague sort of way, with politics and the evils of the System. Together, impelled by physical passion and the idealistic notion that "all our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief," they run away to create a new life in the wilderness. In their absence, their parents' predictable lives take an entirely different course, and America itself seems to lose its innocence, never to be quite the same again."--BOOK JACKET.