New & Notable (Fiction)

aIn the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. In a devastating split second, seven-year-old Xiaodeng is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realizes the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure.

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A little over a decade ago, Sheila Heti--the award-winning author of a string of modern classics including How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, and Pure Colour--began looking back at the diaries she'd kept over the previous ten years, searching for signs of deeper change inside herself. She loaded all 500,000 words of her journals into Microsoft Excel, to order the sentences alphabetically and seek out patterns and repetitions. How many times had she written, "I hate him," for example? With the sentences untethered from the narrative of her diaries, she started to see herself--and the Self--in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. Returning to the project over the years, something more universal and novelistic emerged. Alphabetical Diaries is the sublime and probing result--one that rises to the heights of artistry and insight for which Heti is rightfully acclaimed.

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Benny Catspaw's perpetually sunny disposition is tested when he loses his job, his reputation, his fiancée, and his favourite chair. Then Benny receives an inheritance from an uncle he's never heard of: a giant crate and a video message. Stranger yet is what's inside the crate. He's a seven-foot-tall self-described "bad weather friend" named Spike whose mission is to help people who are just too good for this world. In the company of Spike and a young PI-in-training named Harper, Benny plunges into a perilous high-speed adventure, the likes of which never would have crossed the mind of a decent guy like him.

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The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he's kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.

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Cassie Andrews works in a bookshop living an unassuming, ordinary life. When one of her favourite customers dies right in front of her, she is left with the last book he was reading. But this is no ordinary book. It's a book that promises Cassie that "any door is every door." You just need to know how to open them. The tome, now in Cassie's possession, is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them. There are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force - in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman - is at the very top of that list

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When Max, Haven's Rock's youngest resident - taught to track animals by Sheriff Eric Dalton - fears a bear is stalking a hiking party, alarms are raised. Even stranger, the ten-year-old swears the bear had human eyes. Detective Casey Duncan and Eric know the dangers a bear can present, so they're taking it seriously. But odd occurrences are happening all around them, and when a dead body turns up, they're not sure what they're up against.

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Misery Lark's days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold an historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres. Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what's hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory - alone with the wolf.

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At the northern edge of a land ruled by a merciless foreign tyrant lies a wild, forbidden forest ruled by powerful magic. Veris Thorn - the only one to ever enter the forest and survive is forced to go back inside to retrieve tyrant's missing children. Inside await traps and trickery, ancient monsters, and hauntings of the past. One day is all Veris is afforded. One misstep will cost everything.

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Hidden Hills is a private celebrity enclave of white picket fences and horse trails that seems to exist in a dreamworld. But when reality superstar Kitty Winslow is killed within their gates and corpses are found in the vast state park outside them, LASD detective Eve Ronin realizes there is a deadly, razor-thin line between what's real and what's imagined. Eve's grip on reality and the case is strained to the breaking point as the slayings continue, the media frenzy reaches a fever pitch, and the only inescapable truth she can see is death - and it's coming for her.

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Invited by a reclusive mystery novelist to help draft his life story, a longtime correspondent and detective fiction expert finds herself in a real whodunnit when she learns the writer's first wife and son mysteriously vanished.

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After discovering that she is a shield maiden who can repel any attack, a fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath to protect Skaland" -- Provided by publisher.

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When whip-smart criminal defense lawyer Joanna Chylka is tasked with defending the son of her law firm's biggest client, she is stumped for the first time in her career. Piotr Langer, Jr., alleged to have sat in his apartment for ten days with two corpses before calmly opening the door to the police as if nothing had happened. He has confessed to the murders, but the truth is far more complex. With the spotlight on Joanna and the firm's newest trainee, Kordian Orynski, a killer may have them both on his hit list.

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As a wildfire threatens Berkeley, the city's inhabitants are forced to reckon with the cracks in the lives they've built. Abigail, a wealthy white woman, decides to throw a lavish party to raise money for the city's newest affordable housing project. Sunny, a construction worker who sleeps in a van, is in the running for an apartment. As the heat and smoke from the approaching blaze descend upon the town, tensions rise and residents - young and old, haves and have nots - confront the inequities laid bare, and the fragility of building a life in a world on fire.

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Renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of loss. Nature provided solace for these losses, but the world was changing around him. Haunting in its quiet spaces, this novel portrays this tension of nature and progress and its effect on a singular man. It is a novel uncommon in its combination of scope and brevity, in its communion with its human subject, and its reflections on an astonishing yet changing world.

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"A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from "America's best novelist" (Denver Post), the New York Times-bestselling James Lee Burke. Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the South, weaving together love, friendship, violence, survival, and revenge. A boy and his father watch a German submarine sink an oil tanker as evil forces in the disguise of federal agents try to ruin their family. A girl is beaten up outside a bar as her university-professor father navigates new love and threats from a group of neo-Nazis. A pair of undercover union organizers are hired to break colts for a Hollywood actor, whose "Western hero" facade hides darkness. An oil rig worker witnesses a horrific attack on a local village while on a job in South America and seeks justice through one final act of bravery. With his nuanced characters, lyrical prose, and ability to write shocking violence in the most evocative settings, James Lee Burke's singular skills are on display in this superb anthology. Harbor Lights unfolds in stories that crackle and reverberate as unexpected heroes emerge" -- Provided by publisher.

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Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that's no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust. Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything he ever wanted, he's in the Asteri's dungeons again, stripped of his freedom and without a clue as to Bryce's fate. He's desperate to help her, but until he can escape the Asteri's leash, his hands are quite literally tied.

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Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes look forward to spending time with Holmes' son, Damian Adler, and his family. But when they arrive, they discover the Adlers have fled from a mysterious threat. In Damian's studio, Russell discovers four crates packed with memorabilia related to Holmes' grand-uncle. In one of the crates is an old journal written in a nearly impenetrable code. The secrets of the past appear to be reaching into the present. And it seems increasingly urgent that Russell figure out how the journal and lantern are related to Damian - and possibly to Sherlock Holmes himself.

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In a land ruled by ruthless Fae, twenty-one-year-old Lore Alemeyu's village is trapped in a forested prison. But when her village is threatened, Lore makes a desperate deal with a Fae lord. She will leave her home to catalog/organize an enchanted library that hasn't been touched in a thousand years. As Lore navigates the hostile world outside, she's forced to rely on two Fae males to survive. Two very different, very dangerous, very attractive Fae males. When undeniable chemistry ignites, she's not just in danger of losing her life, but her heart to the very creatures she can never trust.

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Thirteen-year-old Corky Corcoran's family hires a Haitian housekeeper who brings her daughter, America, along with her. Corky is quick to befriend America and eager to share her favourite new grown-up novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." When Corky asks America to play with her girls' softball team for the annual church rivals game, it's a move that crosses the colour line and sets off a firestorm. As tensions escalate, it fast becomes a season of big changes in High Cotton. For Corky, those changes will last a lifetime.

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When her daughter Eden came home from the hospital, Lucy was profoundly relieved. Eden had survived a drowning incident and had no apparent brain damage, no serious injuries, not even a scratch on her. Until Eden tells her that Eden isn't her name. Until she starts calling herself Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden's unborn twin. Lucy knows something's very wrong with Eden. She's not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore - this straight-backed, even tempered, steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared.

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Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother hears a noise. This sound is disturbingly familiar. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. Then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she'd feared, because she knows exactly who he is - and what he wants.

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After murdering the young woman he couldn't have, a sorcerer sends projections of himself out into the world to seek out and seduce women who will return the love she denied-or suffer a fate worse than death.

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The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. Their plan works - almost. Twenty years later, they are called back to Wesley Falls as one of the six has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.

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A rogue grizzly bear has gone on a rampage. At the same time, Dallas Cates, who Joe helped lock up years ago, is released from prison. He wants revenge on the people who sent him away: the people he blames for the deaths of his entire family and the loss of his reputation and property. Targeted are a judge, the county prosecutor, his lawyer, a prison guard - and both Nate Romanowski and Joe Pickett. Using the grizzly attacks as cover, Cates devises a method of violence identical to the bear killings and sets out to methodically check off his list.

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"Women can be heroes." When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.

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