Yannick Murphy

After making several unsuccessful attempts to mimic the sounds of other animals, Little Wolf goes to his grandfather and learns how to howl.

In her first novel, Yannick Murphy surveys the landscape of imperialism through the unflinching gaze of an adolescent girl named Tian. Her name - short for Christiane - is a mark of her divided loyalties. Half French and half Chinese, Tian is detained in an isolated jungle camp when the Japanese invade Indochina at the outset of World War II. With spellbinding candor, Tian details her life in the camp while she waits for liberation with her mother, her baby sister, and her Chinese amah. Tian takes a remarkably clear-eyed view of her circumstances. The camp is a perilous place, where brutality can slip without warning into nightmarish comedy. Tian's mother escapes into memory, filling the tropical nights with tales of France and lost romance. Her amah proffers enigmatic bits of ancient wisdom. But with all the stark frankness of youth, Tian maintains an unnerving pragmatism and an unbending will to survive. These prove to be her salvation when at last she and her family cross the sea of trees that separates them from freedom, and they journey from Shanghai to Saigon to Marseilles, making their way to America. The Sea of Trees is both raw and beautiful. From one girl's small corner of one moment in history, it encompasses a universal indictment of war's psychic toll on family and country. Based on stories from the author's own family and laced with Chinese folklore, it adds a distinctly feminine contour to the map of empire.

"In a quiet New England community members of swim team and their dedicated parents are preparing for a home meet. The most that Annie, a swim-mom of two girls, has to worry about is whether or not she fed her daughters enough carbs the night before; why her husband, Thomas, hasn't kissed her in ages; and why she can't get over the loss of her brother who shot himself a few years ago. But Annie's world is about to change. From the bleachers, looking down at the swimmers, a dark haired man watches a girl. No one notices him. Annie is busy getting to know Paul, who flirts with Annie despite the fact that he's married to her friend Chris, and despite Annie's greying hair and crow's feet. Chris is busy trying to discover whether or not Paul is really having an affair, and the swimmers are trying to shave milliseconds off their race times by squeezing themselves into skin-tight bathing suits and visualizing themselves winning their races. When a girl on the team is murdered at a nearby highway rest stop--the same rest stop where Paul made a gruesome discovery years ago--the parents suddenly find themselves adrift. Paul turns to Annie for comfort. Annie finds herself falling in love. Chris becomes obsessed with unmasking the killer. With a serial killer now too close for comfort, Annie and her fellow swim-parents must make choices about where their loyalties lie. As a series of startling events unfold, Annie discovers what it means to follow your intuition, even if love, as well as lives, could be lost" -- When a girl on her daughters' swim team is found murdered at a nearby highway rest stop, Annie, while falling in love with her friend's husband, discovers what it means to follow your intuition, even if love, as well as lives, could be lost as a series of startling events unfold.

In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell in Paris awaiting trial on charges of espionage. The penalty is death by firing squad. As she waits, burdened by a secret guilt, Mata Hari tells stories, Scheherazade-like, to buy back her life from her interrogators. From a bleak childhood in the Netherlands, through a loveless marriage to a Dutch naval officer, Margaretha is transported to the forbidden sensual pleasures of Indonesia . In the chill of her prison cell she spins tales of rosewater baths, native lovers, and Javanese jungles, evoking the magical world that sustained her even as her family crumbled. And then, in flight from her husband, Margaretha reinvents herself: she becomes an artist's model, circus rider, and finally the temple dancer Mata Hari, dressed in veils, admired by Diaghilev, performing for the crowned heads of Europe . Through all her transformations, her life's fatal questions---was she a traitor, and if so, why?---burns ever brighter.

"Splitting time between a ramshackle apartment and a lonely hot dog vendor, the observant thirteen-year-old who stands steadily at the center of Here They Come gives lyrical voice to an unforgettable instant--1970s New York, stifling, violent and full of life. Balanced between her enigmatic siblings, detached parents, and a quiet sense of the surreal, she recounts a year of startling moments with dark humor and deadpan resilience."--Publisher's website. Tells the story of a poor family's coming-of-age in 1970s New York. The unnamed 13-year-old narrator describes a world that is populated by idiosyncratic characters like her precocious sisters, suicidal brother, depressed mother, confusedly nostalgic grandmother, and a local hot dog vendor.

Even though his mother warms him of a coming storm, Baby Polar goes outside to play, but when he cannot see his own paw he realizes that he now faces danger.