A Fistful Of Rain

Greg Rucka has earned the kind of reputation that all thriller writers envy: his crime fiction grabs readers by the throat and compels them to read as if their own lives were at stake. Now, in an electrifying departure, Rucka creates a new kind of hero: a damaged young woman in free fall who’s not only in danger—but dangerous. A Fistful of Rain Mim Bracca is riding the fast lane straight off the end of the world. Now she’s coming home without a job, without a future, and without a prayer—and only one last chance to get her feet under her, or go down forever. But home has its own terrors, including a past Mim has done everything possible to leave behind. Now that past is coming back with the shocking speed and deadly intent of a sniper’s bullet, aimed to destroy her once and for all. When Mim suffers her first blackout, waking up dazed and bloodied, she’s certain she’s hit rock bottom. She’s wrong. She’s only just begun to fall. The photos are invasive, obscene, and all over the Internet for anyone to see. How they got there, where and when they were shot, and by whom, Mim has no idea. And before the investigation into the matter even begins, a brutal murder makes it clear that whatever Mim thinks her life has been up to now, she’s about to learn it’s all a lie. The kind of lie that will kill. Written with stunning originality, A Fistful of Rain crosses the line separating the guilty from the innocent as it takes us on a breakneck ride of deceit and double cross and—quite possibly—the last twenty-four hours in Mim Bracca’s stormy life.

Part 2 of Baran-e-Rahmat (Rain of Mercy) Seerat (Biography) of the Prophet of Islam by Khawaja Shammsuddin Azeemi. It discusses the role of man in the Cosmic Administration, the miracles performed by Seyedna Hazoor alaihis-salat was-sall

A host of vividly caught characters are here: Mirabel's extrovert, free-spirited mother Phyllis; Aylmer Vallance, who with extraordinary love letters would rescue her mother from a twilight life; Stella Bowen, Phyllis's lifelong friend and fellow student under Ezra Pound, their introduction to the London literati, notably Ford Madox Ford. Throughout Mirabel's childhood, it was Stella who would be the one fast colour amid her mercurial mother's love affairs. And turning closer to the present - to new friendships, the paring away of previous assumptions and conventions and the serendipities of chance acquaintance - we encounter Michael, Mirabel's late husband, who's barbaric public-school childhood contrasted so dramatically with Mirabel's own, affectionate and carefree; whose repressed father so adored roses; their childhood meeting; their delight in their children and beloved Shropshire garden, a character in its own right, full of the joy of the unexpected. Celebrated author of A Gentle Plea for Chaos, Mirabel Osler's meditation on the profound pleasures of writing, gardens, travel and food is both graceful and deeply affecting.

A memoir of spiritualism and self-discovery from the acclaimed, award-winning author At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again. In this luminous, spirited book, she charts her subsequent path as she learned not simply the joys of meditative solitude, but to integrate her new awareness into a busy, committed, even hectic mainland life. “A ten-year voyage of discovery . . . Shulman's honesty and sense of inquiry carry us with her all the way--could even, if we were willing, change our lives.” —San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

Devastated after the drowning death of his wife, Suzanne, fifty-year-old Howard Munro resigns his tenure as head of the English department at St. Martins College in Toledo, Ohio. Hoping to make a fresh start in his life and with a new job waiting for him in southern California, he strikes out for San Diego in his motor home. En route, he picks up a rain-soaked hitchhiker, Miriam Kovacs, a down-on-her-luck unemployed waitress thumbing her way west. Culturally and socially the two travelers are a study in opposites: the successful, well-educated, and pro-life Munro; and Kovacs, a marginalized high school dropout with a long history of menial jobs and failed relationshipsa woman intent on terminating her unwanted pregnancy. Yet despite the differences that divide them, their journey across America will unite them in an unexpected meeting of hearts and minds. The woman provides Munro with the first female companionship since the passing of his wife. The professor gives Kovacsan unsophisticated woman who has rarely ventured beyond her Philadelphia homeher first glimpse of new horizons and new values. In the process, both people will be changed forever.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story... Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to grandfather Abraham, to her father, Virgil – via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight books piled high beneath the two skylights in her room, beneath the rain. The stories – of her golden twin brother Aeney, their closeness even as he slips away; of their dogged pursuit of the Swains' Impossible Standard and forever falling just short; of the wild, rain-sodden history of fourteen acres of the worst farming land in Ireland – pour forth in Ruthie's still, small, strong, hopeful voice. A celebration of books, love and the healing power of the imagination, this is an exquisite, funny, moving novel in which every sentence sings.

In this urban fantasy, rock and roll musicians with supernatural powers gets trapped in an alternate universe—inside one of their band member’s minds. A trap set for the band goes from bad to worse as organist and resident sorcerer Adrian badly bungles his escape spell. Trapped inside Adrian’s shadow, the band struggles to orient themselves and escape not only from their pursuing enemies, but from the darker manifestations of Adrian’s soul. And once they do get out from inside their own wizard’s tortured mind, they'll still have to deal with the fallen angels that trapped them in the first place.

From the Tony Hillerman Prize-winning author of Pay Dirt Road comes Hard Rain, Samantha Jayne Allen's mesmerizing next novel set in a hardscrabble Texas town dealing with disaster. In shock and found clinging to a tree branch, Bethany Richter is pulled from thrashing floodwaters that have decimated the town of Garnett, Texas and killed a dozen others. Six months after solving the murder of a local waitress, Annie McIntyre is working as an apprentice P.I. when she's handed her first solo case: uncover the identity of the man who rescued Bethany before he was swept downriver. When Annie's search turns up a different victim—shot dead, not drowned—Annie questions if the hero they seek is actually a killer. Flexing her new skills while relying on the wisdom of her eccentric, ex-cop grandfather, the case leads Annie into a web of drug dealers, preachers, and wayward drifters trying to make sense of life after a disaster. Annie's own convictions are put to the ultimate test as long-held secrets, corruption, and violence are exposed like the ruin that lies beneath receding waters.