Swell

Wave watchers around the world know that no two waves are the same. Yet each and every wave that rises, peaks, and crashes onto the beach is generated by a much larger force originating thousands of miles away. Surf journalist team Evan Slater and Peter Taras capture the essence of waves and the swells that produce them in this breathtaking collection of wave photography. Slater characterizes four distinct swells from different corners of the globe and traces their journeys throughout the year from storm to seashore. His reflective, informative essays amplify these powerful images of hundreds of waves frozen in time, beautiful, simple, universal, yet wholly unique—and the best thing to watch on the planet.

"Fast-paced, nail-bitingly tense and packed full of twists and turns. I found it unputdownable – loved it!"--Sarah Pearse, author of The Sanatorium Point Break meets And Then There Were None in a pulse-pounding beach read that explores the dangerous ties between a group of elite surfers who are determined to find the perfect waves at any cost…even murder. The waves are to die for. Three years ago, passionate surfer Kenna Ward lost her two great loves—after her boyfriend drowned, she hung up her surfboard and swore off the water for good. But she is drawn back to the beach when her best friend, Mikki, announces her sudden engagement to a man Kenna has never met—a member of a tight-knit group of surfers. Kenna travels to a remote Australian beach, entering a dangerous world far from civilization where the waves, weather, and tides are all that matter. Kenna is tempted back into the surf, and drawn into the dazzling group and the beach they call their own. But this coastal paradise has a dark side, and members of the group begin to go missing. Kenna realizes that in order to protect Mikki and learn more about the surfers, she must become one of them…without becoming one of their victims. What follows is an adrenaline-fueled thriller packed with twists and turns, exploring the dangerous edge between passion and obsession.

In this darkly hilarious satire by the inimitable Will Aitken, class war erupts aboard a luxury cruise ship. A boatload of white privilege, The Emerald Tranquility is the most luxurious cruise liner afloat, its passengers some of the richest people in the world. Meanwhile the ship’s crew, overworked and underpaid, live packed tightly together in airless below-deck cabins. The passengers encounter a great number of cataclysms at sea, but no matter the catastrophe, the great ship always sails on. Briony, a globetrotting luxury travel writer, emulates the rich — though homeless and penniless herself — as she hops from gig to all-expenses-paid gig. On her own personal voyage, she encounters Mrs. Moore, an enigmatic woman of advanced age clandestinely fomenting a mutiny on this bountiful ship. With the captain overthrown, roles quickly reverse: the crew become the ship’s new leisure class and the aged passengers learn how to mop floors and scrub toilets. Confused and terrified by the resultant chaos, Briony must decide which lot to cast her fate with in this savage satire of the way we live now.

Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel", Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable. When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family -- Sue, Dan, and their two daughters -- a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted. On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim -- formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic -- who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans. The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.

Stanley Dawson is a young Jamaican who volunteers for military service in the Royal Air Force then goes off to Great Britain to fight in World War II. After his arrival in England he becomes a casualty, not from action in combat, but from injuries he sustains during a training exercise. His experience in his weeks of hospitalization, left him determined to overcome the debilitating effects of frost bite he suffered. He recovers enough to justify to himself and his Commanding Officer that he was in Britain to fight in World War II as a Royal Air Force man. The long term effect of his injury catches up with him, however, soon after his return to Jamaica four years later, where he struggles to maintain himself as the old campaigner of organized combat—the war veteran—against casual, but a sharp-edged lifestyle of his boyhood friends. It is a way of life that makes him search for a clue to his apparent, irreparable existence. He senses that he is, not only partially incapacitated but spiritually dazed. His illness is made worse by the confusing political trend and the rising tide of emerging differing political opinions and the immediacy of social consciousness then sweeping the island.