Sumner Locke Elliott

In this, his latest novel, he has achieved a spectacular tour de force, the story of a man who goes backward through his life to find, only at the beginning of it, what the ending was all about. Piling suspense on suspense, Mr. Elliott unravels the past of a television producer who has, ostensibly, vanished. With ever-increasing shock at the revelations, the reader learns why George's wife seem so resigned to his disappearance, why his mother gave him the obscene poetry on her deathbed; why his belief in love had been so shattered by the failing movie actor; why George was summoned after the drunken playwright attempted suicide: how the men and women whom he knew- as a child in Connecticut, as a young man and as a professional success in New York City-touched him, molded him, made him "the man who got away." This is the most brilliant performance yet from a writer whose each new book adds to his prestige.

The "he" in the admonitory title of Mr. Elliott's absorbing Australian family novel is six years old, and the warning to speak in whispers is issued iteratively by his childless aunts, the sisters of his dead mother. The boy is whimsically called "'P.S." to indicate that, among the bereft, he is the epilogue to his mother's short, exuberant life as a luminary of Sydney's literary Bohemia and the only souvenir of her short, halcyon marriage to a diamond in the rough who, long before his son was born, decamped for the hinterlands and to hunt for gold. P.S. has been reared so far by his good, mawkish, genteel Aunt Lila, the only matron of the four remaining sisters, and her laborer husband, George, in their working-class house in a working-class suburb. Now, eavesdropping on a hot night in December, he learns, that a disturbance of this status quo is threatened and that the author of it is to be Vanessa, the aunt he has never seen... Jean Stafford

Unable to grieve after the death of her twin sister, seventeen-year-old Hannah accompanies her parents to Lascaux, France, where she visits the caves and discovers an astonishing connection between herself and her prehistoric ancestors.

In a near-future Europe, gene-hacker Alex Sharkey has created a new life form: fairies - genetically-altered dolls with human intelligence. As the fairies develop their own societies, it become apparent that one group has sinister intentions, and Sharkey must try and put an end to their plans.