Every Secret Thing

NOW A MOTION PICTURE STARRING DAKOTA FANNING AND ELIZABETH BANKS FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SUNBURN AND DREAM GIRL A riveting story of love and murder, guilt and innocence, adult sins and childhood secrets. Two little girls banished from a neighbourhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street-and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside. What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irreparably destroyed. Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from "kid prison" to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police-all the adults in Alice and Ronnie's lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances. . . 'Perfect. . . on a par with some of our finest authors of psychological suspense, including Ruth Rendell, Denise Mina, and Patricia Highsmith.' 5* reader review 'Quick and exciting read. . . full of suspense!' 5* reader review 'Enigmatic, unpredictable. . . don't plan on getting anything done until you turn the last page of this book. 5* reader review'

Moving between fast-paced modern-day London and Canada to the dangerous, double-crossing streets of wartime Lisbon, comes this thrilling mystery and intriguing love story from a brilliant new voice.

A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, a daughter who always had to come second to political commitment. Whilst recalling the extraordinary events which surrounded her family's persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents' relationship and her own turbulent childhood, Gillian Slovo has also created an astonishing portrait of a courageous, beautiful mother and a father of integrity and stoicism.

When culture and faith collide . . . nothing is sacred In the Aboriginal missions of far northern Australia, it was a battle between saving souls and saving traditional culture. Every Secret Thing is a rough, tough, hilarious portrayal of the Bush Mob and the Mission Mob, and the hapless clergy trying to convert them. In these tales, everyone is fair game. At once playful and sharp, Marie Munkara's wonderfully original stories cast a taunting new light on the mission era in Australia. 'told with biting wit and riotous humour' Judges' comments, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards (2008)

A powerful collection of poems about family and grief—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle). Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger—public and private—illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds’s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power. The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room. On the ancient boarding-school radio, in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend’s name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell banisters, at their lathing, the necks and knobs like joints and bones, the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said Which one of them died, and now the world was an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each second thrown, somehow, up onto my back, and the young, tired voice said my fresh love’s name. from “Easter 1960”

A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Goldfinch. Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality. “A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment.... Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —The New York Times

“One of the best novelists around, period.” —Washington Post “Lippman has enriched literature as a whole. —Chicago Sun-Times One of the most acclaimed novelists in America today, Laura Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of mystery fiction and psychological suspense with her Tess Monaghan p.i. series and her New York Times bestselling standalone novels (What the Dead Know, Life Sentences, I’d Know You Anywhere, etc.). With The Most Dangerous Thing, the multiple award winning author—recipient of the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, and Agatha Awards, to name but a few—once again demonstrates how storytelling is done to perfection. Set once again in the well-wrought environs of Lippman’s beloved Baltimore, it is the shadowy tale of a group of onetime friends forced to confront a dark past they’ve each tried to bury following the death of one of their number. Rich in the compassion and insight into flawed human nature that has become a Lippman trademark while telling an absolutely gripping story, The Most Dangerous Thing will not be confined by genre restrictions, reaching out instead to captive a wide, diverse audience, from Harlan Coben and Kate Atkinson fans to readers of Jodi Picoult and Kathryn Stockett.