NCW Libraries

In the spring of 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano López came to the house of Eliza Lynch to improve his French, or so he said. Eliza was nineteen, already with an ex-husband, and he was the young son of Paraguay's dictator in Europe recruiting engineers for South America's first railroad. By the time he returned to Asunción in 1855, Eliza was pregnant with his child. In less than a decade, López plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over...

Gilgamesh is a rich, spare, and evocative novel of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance, a debut that marks the emergence of a world-class talent. It is 1937, and the modern world is waiting to erupt. On a farm in rural Australia, seventeen-year-old Edith lives with her mother and her sister, Frances. One afternoon two men, her English cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram, arrive-taking the long way home from...

Ismet Prcic's brilliant, provocative, and propulsory energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must "write everything." The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions:...

In Lost Paradise, Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys. A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents' Sao Paolo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her car engine dies in one of the city's most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds...

Set on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation-one that proves impossible to resist. In the opening pages of Shacochis's first novel, Mitchell Wilson, an American who works for the Ministry of Agriculture on the Caribbean...

"A wrenching love story" about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and a woman who was orphaned when Saigon fell, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Chicago Tribune). This is an incandescent tale of modern love between a Vietnamese woman, orphaned in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists, and a Vietnam War veteran, returning from America to seek closure for decades-old emotional wounds. The more they nurture the love between them, the...

Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues is Murdoch's philosophical masterpiece featuring fictionalized discussions between the intellectual giants of the classical world, including Socrates and Plato. Described by Acastos, a friend of Plato's, the riveting debates center on the nature of goodness and faith, told through the voices of history's most celebrated thinkers.   Witty and profound, these debates apply the timeless wisdom of history's renowned philosophers...

Some called him a Texas hero. Some called him the Devil himself. But on one point, they all agreed. While he was alive, John Wesley Hardin was the deadliest man in Texas. A novel of uncompromising depth and power from western master James Carlos Blake, called one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life" by Entertainment Weekly, The Pistoleer narrates the life of John Wesley Hardin, exposing the many different sides of a man...

Marik Youngblood left her Oklahoma hometown-;and the child she gave up for adoption-;intent on becoming an artist instead of a rancher. Her father's death brings her back to a failing cattle operation, a pile of debt and a haunting need to find the child she left behind. But when the bones of an infant are unearthed on her family's ranch, Marik fears she's learned her daughter's fate. Burt and Lena Gurdman own the property that neighbors Killdeer...

Damon Galgut is one of South Africa's most exciting new literary voices. In The Impostor, his first novel since The Good Doctor, Galgut leads his readers into the developing heart of post-apartheid South Africa, a landscape being reshaped by new waves of money and power. Adam Napier leaves Johannesburg looking for a fresh start. Jobless and directionless, but with a head full of literary ambitions, he moves into his brother's dilapidated house on...