Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist,
mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a
reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’
achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan
Shahids—her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a
fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who
has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an
effortlessly alluring Italian artist.
When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into
the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in
love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her
boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one
that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.
Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant
novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity,
thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.
On board the moletrain
Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe
as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from
the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in
one’s death & the other’s glory. Spectacular as it is, Sham can’t
shake the sense that there is more to life than the endless rails of the
railsea—even if his captain thinks only of hunting the ivory-colored
mole that took her arm years ago. But when they come across a wrecked
train, Sham finds something—a series of pictures hinting at something,
somewhere, that should be impossible—that leads to considerably more
than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates,
trainsfolk, monsters & salvage-scrabblers. & it might not be
just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the
railsea.
Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an
alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at
his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling)
extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly
hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us),
resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and
bankrupting the whole universe. Nick has just been tapped to clean up
this mess before things get ugly. Thankfully, this unlikely
galaxy-hopping hero
does know a thing or two about copyright law.
Now, with Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick has forty-eight hours
to save humanity—while hoping to wow the hot girl who lives down the
hall from him.
By the author of the New York Times bestselling Everest: Mountain Without Mercy, this chronicle of the iconic first American expedition to Mt. Everest in May 1963 – published to coincide with the climb's 50th anniversary – combines riveting adventure, a perceptive analysis of its dark and terrifying historical context, and revelations about a secret mission that followed. In
the midst of the Cold War, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs
fiasco, the space race with the Soviet Union, and the quagmire of the
Vietnam War, a band of iconoclastic, independent-minded American
mountaineers set off for Mt. Everest, aiming to restore America's
confidence and optimism. Their objective is to reach the summit while
conducting scientific research, but which route will they take? Might
the Chinese, in a public relations coup, have reached the top ahead of
them? And what about another American team, led by the grandson of a
President, that nearly bagged the peak in a bootleg attempt a year
earlier?
The Vast Unknown is, on one level, a harrowing,
character-driven account of the climb itself and its legendary team of
alternately inspiring, troubled, and tragic climbers who suffered
injuries, a near mutiny, and death on the mountain. It is also an
examination of the profound sway the expedition had over the American
consciousness and sense of identity during a time when the country was
floundering. And it is an investigation of the expedition's
little-known outcome: the selection of a team to plant a CIA
surveillance device on the Himalayan peak of Nanda Devi, to spy into
China where Defense Intelligence learned that nuclear missile testing
was underway.
