Thorndike Press Large Print Bill's bookshelf

One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could have imagined--one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe. --

"From the author of the Man Booker Prize Finalist, His Bloody Project comes a haunting literary mystery and engrossing psychological thriller"--

Szalay (London and the South-East) delivers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of nine men at various stages in their lives, each in the throes of extraordinary change. Despite their diverse circumstances, they are all somehow connected, engaged in a search for relevance and-dare they even consider it-meaning. English teenagers Simon and Ferdinand arrive in Berlin with competing ideas of how best to enjoy their time abroad; Bérnard, working halfheartedly in his uncle's window shop outside Lille, France, experiences a life-altering holiday at a Cyprus beach resort; Kristian, a successful Danish tabloid editor, brings down the country's defense minister after an indiscretion; Aleksandr, a disgraced Russian oligarch, contemplates suicide; an aging diplomat considers his mortality while recuperating from a heart operation in an Italian villa and notes, in what could be the book's tagline, "How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window." Without exception, the stories-subtle, seductive, poignant, humorous-bear witness to the alienation, self-doubt, and fragmentation of contemporary life; each succeeds on its own while complementing the others.

The year is 1869. After a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae is arrested for the crime. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but the police and the courts must decide what drove him to murder the local village constable. And why did he kill his other two victims? Was he insane? Or was this the act of a man in possession of his senses? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between the killer and the gallows at Inverness. In this compelling and original novel, using the words of the accused, personal testimony, transcripts from the trial and newspaper reports, Graeme Macrae Burnet tells a moving story about the provisional nature of the truth, even when the facts are plain.

"New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him? Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is a story "taut with twists and turns" that "keeps you gripped until its tour-de-force conclusion" (The Times, London). Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love--and find a world of trouble"--