Bright Shiny Things

'This series has brilliantly established itself and this latest is another masterpiece from Barbara Nadel' CRIMESQUADA friend from the past asks for private investigator Lee Arnold's help in tracing his son: Fayyad al'Barri was last thought to be in Syria having embraced radical Islam. But a cryptic message has prompted his family to believe Fayyad has had a change of heart and is searching for a way back home. With fellow investigator Mumtaz Hakim's help, they might be able to establish contact.From the bright lights of the Western world, to shady boxing clubs and murky online jihadist recruitment, and while violence erupts close to home, Mumtaz and Lee are on an unknown path into the mind of a terrorist, journeying closer to danger than they ever imagined.

Sage Czinski is trying really hard to be perfect. If she manages it, people won't peer beyond the surface, or ask hard questions about her past. She's learned to substitute causes for relationships, and it's working just fine . . . until Shane Cavendish strolls into her math class. He's a little antisocial, a lot beautiful, and everything she never knew she always wanted. Shane Cavendish just wants to be left alone to play guitar and work on his music. He's got heartbreak and loneliness in his rearview mirror, and this new school represents his last chance. He doesn't expect to be happy; he only wants to graduate and move on. He never counted on a girl like Sage. But love doesn't mend all broken things, and sometimes life has to fall apart before it can be put back together again. . . .

#1 National Bestseller “A sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams. . . . Compelling, cinematic. . . . It achieves the very essence of Los Angeles’s fractured, unpredictable, loopy nature.” — Vanity Fair “A captivating urban kaleidoscope. . . . James Frey got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. . . . He became a furiously good storyteller.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers an extraordinary novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original. Dozens of characters pass through the reader's sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION "In this extraordinary novel, Castleberry brilliantly hopscotches from person to person, from era to era, while somehow making all this fancy footwork look effortless and essential." - Jenny Offill, author of Department of Speculation and Weather A luminous debut novel in the tradition of DeLillo and Egan, chronicling the eerily intersecting lives of a series of American dreamers whose unforeseen links reveal the divided heart of a haunted nation—and the battered grace that might lead to its salvation June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report the sighting of nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft. In Chicago, inspired by the news, Oliver Danville, a failed actor now reduced to a mediocre pool hustler, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream quest for a possible sign from above that might illuminate his true calling. A chance encounter with Saul Penrod, an Idaho farmer, and his family sets in motion the birth of “the Seekers”—a collective of outcasts, interlopers, and idealists devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past. When Claudette Donen, a waitress on the lam from her suffocating family, encounters the group, she is compulsively drawn to Oliver’s sister Eileen, but before she is able to join the enigmatic community, it has vanished. Reunited across the country, the Seekers attempt to settle in the suburbs of Long Island. One night, their purpose suddenly revealed, a stranger emerges, and a horrific crime ensues. In the decades that follow, the perpetrators, survivors, and their children will be forced to face the consequences of what happened—a reckoning that will involve Charlie Ranagan, a traveling salesman; Max Felt, a dissolute late-1960s rock star; Alice Linwood, an increasingly paranoid radio host; Stanley West, a struggling African American poet; Marly Feldberg, a Greenwich Village painter; and Debbie Vasquez, a Connecticut teenager trapped by an avalanche of midnight legacies. Each will prove to be a piece of a puzzle that, when assembled, reveals a shocking truth about the clash between the optimism of those who seek inspiration from spacious skies, and the venom of others who relish the underworld—not only via conspiratorial maneuverings, but the literal unearthing of the dead. The result is one of the most exciting, and unforgettable, debut novels in recent memory, and the launch of a major career in American letters.

Isabel Huggan’s acclaimed Belonging is pure pleasure to read—richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.

One of the most acclaimed books of our time—the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. He died believing that the war had been won. In this magisterial book, a monument of history and biography that was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, a renowned journalist tells the story of John Vann—"the one irreplaceable American in Vietnam"—and of the tragedy that destroyed a country and squandered so much of America's young manhood and resources.

The year is 1929. New York is ruled by the Bright Young Things: flappers and socialites seeking thrills and chasing dreams in the anything-goes era of the Roaring Twenties. Letty Larkspur and Cordelia Grey escaped their small Midwestern town for New York's glittering metropolis. All Letty wants is to see her name in lights, but she quickly discovers Manhattan is filled with pretty girls who will do anything to be a star. . . . Cordelia is searching for the father she's never known, a man as infamous for his wild parties as he is for his shadowy schemes. Overnight, she enters a world more thrilling and glamorous than she ever could have imagined—and more dangerous. It's a life anyone would kill for . . . and someone will. The only person Cordelia can trust is ­Astrid Donal, a flapper who seems to have it all: money, looks, and the love of Cordelia's brother, Charlie. But Astrid's perfect veneer hides a score of family secrets. Across the vast lawns of Long Island, in the ­illicit speakeasies of Manhattan, and on the blindingly lit stages of Broadway, the three girls' fortunes will rise and fall—together and apart. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Luxe comes an epic new series set in the dizzying last summer of the Jazz Age.

A little monkey mesmerized by the twinkling, sits atop a tree across the street from a jewelry store. After he intently watches a man propose and give his fiancé a beautiful ring, the mastermind monkey goes on a spree, stealing sparkling jewelry from unsuspecting victims. With a cunning policeman in pursuit, the monkey accomplishes one final act that no one sees coming. Graham Gillam shares creepy tales that highlight an eclectic group of characters that include a band of circus animals on a rampage, a train passenger seemingly trapped in an unthinkable nightmare, two detectives investigating a rash of missing children, and a boy who purchases a rope one day without any idea of its power. Included in this diverse collection is an excerpt from Gillam’s Edgar Allan Poe inspired memoir and two screenplays that will instigate chills and thrills as a young couple enters a graveyard and experiences what soon becomes their worst nightmare and an artist contemplates the disappearance of his dark shadow. VIVID Unleashed is a unique collection of horror tales, a true story, and two screenplays that lead the curious through terrifying scenarios that prompt the question: What if?