Come to America's Playground, the one and only Coney Island!

When eighty-two year old Max Flynn meets Walt Miller, he can't believe his eyes. Walt is not only seven and a half feet tall, he also looks exactly like the giant Max knew as a child during Coney Island's golden years. Max, a former cop who spent his life protecting the island and the people walking upon it, decides to solve the mystery of 'the impossible man'. As Max learns more and more about Walt Miller, he finds friendship, love, a dark secret and a world beyond his wildest dreams.

This is a novel about home, about the earth, about the land we walk on. This is also a novel about being mindful and doing the right thing. In Walt's words: "Max Flynn gives me hope. There must be others like him. People who care deeply, deeply enough to hear the heartbeat of the land they walk on. They are the future. They will be the balance."

** The USA Today Bestseller**
**The number one Kindle bestseller**

‘A cleverly crafted novel and an enthralling story… A triumph.’ DINAH JEFFERIES

A Russian grand duchess and an English journalist. Linked by one of the world’s greatest mysteries . . .

Love. Guilt. Heartbreak.

1914

Russia is on the brink of collapse, and the Romanov family faces a terrifyingly uncertain future. Grand Duchess Tatiana has fallen in love with cavalry officer Dmitri, but events take a catastrophic turn, placing their romance – and their lives – in danger . . .

2016

Kitty Fisher escapes to her great-grandfather’s remote cabin in America, after a devastating revelation makes her flee London. There, on the shores of Lake Akanabee, she discovers the spectacular jewelled pendant that will lead her to a long-buried family secret . . .

Haunting, moving and beautifully written, The Secret Wife effortlessly crosses centuries, as past merges with present in an unforgettable story of love, loss and resilience.

Perfect for fans of Kate Morton and Dinah Jefferies.

People Magazine’s Top 10 Books of 2017
Amazon’s Best Books of 2017: Top 20
Amazon’s Best Literature and Fiction of 2017
Bustle’s 17 Books Every Woman Should Read From 2017
PopSugar’s Our Favorite Books of the Year (So Far)
Refinery29's Best Books of the Year So Far
BookBrowse’s The 20 Best Books of 2017
Pacific Northwest Book Awards Finalist
The Globe and Mail's Top 100 Books of 2017

“It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies

This is how a family keeps a secret…and how that secret ends up keeping them.

This is how a family lives happily ever after…until happily ever after becomes complicated.

This is how children change…and then change the world.

This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.

When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.

Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes.

Laurie Frankel's This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

Four boys are bound together by friendship and loyalty…until a tragedy rips them apart. The unspeakable event, which erases their youthful innocence and changes the course of their lives, gradually comes to light as they battle their inner demons.

Coming of age in a small town, Curtis finds love, Buckley finds heartache, Danny finds trouble…and then there’s Josh, haunted by the past—receiving visits from his dead friend.

Curtis, now an adult still searching for redemption, urges the men to reunite at a remote hunting lodge. Trapped by a sudden snowstorm, tempers flare, and a trip meant to heal turns dangerous. A mysterious wounded stranger adds to the complicated situation, as the tension mounts to an inevitable climax.

Will they make it home alive? Will they find a way to vanquish the sins of their past? Facing consequences from years gone by, the four will be forced to make decisions that don’t come easy. Finally ready to free themselves from the past, some will return to where it all began—at the water hemlock.

First published in 1963, James A. Michener’s gripping chronicle of the social and political landscape of Afghanistan is more relevant now than ever. Combining fact with riveting adventure and intrigue, Michener follows a military man tasked, in the years after World War II, with a dangerous assignment: finding and returning a young American woman living in Afghanistan to her distraught family after she suddenly and mysteriously disappears. A timeless tale of love and emotional drama set against the backdrop of one of the most important countries in the world today, Caravans captures the tension of the postwar period, the sweep of Afghanistan’s remarkable history, and the inescapable allure of the past.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii.
 
Praise for Caravans
 
“Brilliant . . . an extraordinary novel . . . The old nomadic trails across the mountains spring into existence.”—The New York Times
 
“Romantic and adventurous . . . [Michener] has a wonderful empathy for the wild and free and an understanding of the reasons behind the kind of cruelty that goes with it.”—Newsday
 
“Michener has done for Afghanistan what . . . his first [book] did for the South Pacific.”—The New York Herald Tribune

An English teacher who speaks broken English. A wife who no longer loves him. But a student who does.

And a thousand terabytes of stolen data.

Cultures clash, egos collide, and ideas sparkle in this genre-melding tale of a Chinese literary genius who struggles to communicate with his Californian students while his plucky American wife battles a high-tech conspiracy.

Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni’s coming-of-age story is, according to Booklist, “a novel that, if it doesn’t cross entirely over into John Irving territory, certainly nestles in close to the border.”

Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends.

Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.

Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design—especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open—bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.

A post-Brexit, post-Trump romp through the world of what-if...

In a world where democracy has been declared no longer fit for purpose, a cohort of randomly selected British Republic citizens receive their call to serve in parliament. As the strangers gather to learn their tasks for the next three years, the Cabinet Support Team try to fit jobs to skills—but Queenie can’t do nuffin’. Naturally she becomes head of state. Together the new government muddles through, tackling unrest on the streets and a spot of global bioterrorism in addition to their own journeys of self-discovery.

A terrible car accident occurs. Richard and Sonia, a couple with a crumbling marriage, stop to help the critically injured victims. In the process, they find a 140-year-old journal by the side of the road. Six different people have written in the journal. Though the entries span three centuries, the writers share a quest: the search for meaning in their lives. These stories take Richard and Sonia on a personal and historic journey: across Canada to the jungles of India and back to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where a final mystery awaits.

Three best friends met every Tuesday for twenty-six years. And then they stopped.

From the author of the bestselling Sweeney Sisters Series comes a novel of friendship, family, and hope.

When new next-door neighbors Georgia, Midge, and Lula first assembled on Georgia’s porch in Charleston for sweet tea, they couldn’t have known their gathering was the beginning of a treasured tradition. For twenty-six years they have met on Tuesdays at four o’clock, watching the seasons change and their children grow up, supporting each other in good times and in bad. With their ambitions as different as their personalities, these best friends anticipate many more years of tea time. And then, one Tuesday, Georgia shares news that brings their long-standing social hour to an abrupt halt. And that’s only the beginning as unraveling secrets threaten to alter their friendship forever.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

“Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has shaken me like this.” —The Washington Post

From the author of the acclaimed Gould’s Book of Fish, a magisterial novel of love and war that traces the life of one man from World War II to the present.
 
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
 
A savagely beautiful novel about the many forms of good and evil, of truth and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

When Althea Leary abandons her nine-year-old son, Jasper, he’s left on his uncle’s farm with nothing but a change of clothes and a Bible.

It’s 1952, and Jasper isn’t allowed to ask questions or make a fuss. He’s lucky to even have a home and must keep his mouth shut and his ears open to stay in his uncle’s good graces. No one knows where his mother went or whether she’s coming back. Desperate to see her again, he must take matters into his own hands. From the farm, he embarks on a treacherous search that will take him to the squalid hideaways of Detroit and back again, through tawdry taverns, peep shows, and gambling houses.

As he’s drawn deeper into an adult world of corruption, scandal, and murder, Jasper uncovers the shocking past still chasing his mother—and now it’s chasing him too.

'A strong story [...] a dramatic close' - The Spectator

“For God’s sake, Hester, don’t have hysterics here!” he cried.
She shook as though blown by some tempest of wind. A kind of dumb paroxysm swept over her. He drew her on towards the house. Within sight of its walls he relaxed his hold and they walked on silently.
He opened the door for her and she went in, shutting it behind her and leaving him outside. He felt not unlike a man in a dream who has looked on some familiar thing and seen it turn under his gaze into something different — something horrible.

They may have been raised as brothers, but Aythan and Eustace couldn’t be more different.

Aythan is brooding and earnest, while Eustace is charming but fickle. When their guardian, Matthew Bridges, is found dead, the cracks in their friendship begin to show.

Eustace’s good looks and carefree charms win him the heart of Matthew’s widow, Hester. Aythan, disgusted by their relationship and distrustful of Hester, is quick to leave his childhood home. But fate, determination, and the love of a certain young lady, call him back...

Aythan is determined to make his own way in the world but it seems like all he can make are enemies. First he is an enemy of Hester and Eustace, then of his new employer, then of the villagers. Fatefully, and finally, he is an enemy of the law...

Published in 1908 and set on the Welsh border, The History of Aythan Waring is a classic and with good reason. Gripping and full of style, it will keep you reading late into the night.

A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the hard-won relationship that elevates them above the Midwestern meth lab backdrop of their lives.

As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold.

By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy's family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. A powerful novel you won’t soon forget, Bryn Greenwood's All the Ugly and Wonderful Things challenges all we know and believe about love.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For readers of Orphan Train and The Nightingale comes a “thought-provoking [and] complex tale about two families, two generations apart . . . based on a notorious true-life scandal.”*

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.

Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.

Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

*Library Journal

Praise for Before We Were Yours

“A [story] of a family lost and found . . . a poignant, engrossing tale about sibling love and the toll of secrets.”—People

“Sure to be one of the most compelling books you pick up this year. . . . Wingate is a master-storyteller, and you’ll find yourself pulled along as she reveals the wake of terror and heartache that is Georgia Tann’s legacy.”—Parade

“One of the year’s best books . . . It is impossible not to get swept up in this near-perfect novel.”—The Huffington Post

“Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain, New York Times bestselling author of Circling the Sun

When her grandmother’s will wrenches Sara back home, she learns more about Margaret Van Buren in the wake of her death than she ever knew in life.

After her last remaining family member dies, Sara Jenkins goes home to The Hideaway, her grandmother Mags’s ramshackle B&B in Sweet Bay, Alabama. She intends to quickly tie up loose ends then return to her busy life and thriving antique shop in New Orleans. Instead, she learns Mags has willed The Hideaway to her and charged her with renovating it—no small task considering her grandmother’s best friends, a motley crew of senior citizens, still live there.

Rather than hurrying back to New Orleans, Sara stays in Sweet Bay and begins the biggest house-rehabbing project of her career. Amid drywall dust, old memories, and a charming contractor, she discovers that slipping back into life at The Hideaway is easier than she expected.

Then she discovers a box Mags left in the attic with clues to a life Sara never imagined for her grandmother. With help from Mags’s friends, Sara begins to piece together the mysterious life of bravery, passion, and choices that changed her grandmother’s destiny in both marvelous and devastating ways.

When an opportunistic land developer threatens to seize The Hideaway, Sara is forced to make a choice—stay in Sweet Bay and fight for the house and the people she’s grown to love or leave again and return to her successful but solitary life in New Orleans.

“Two endearing heroines and their poignant storylines of love lost and found make this the perfect book for an afternoon on the back porch with a glass of sweet tea.” —Karen White, New York Times bestselling author

"A monthly magazine costing sixpence but worth a shilling."

For 60 years The Strand Magazine showcased the best writers in England and America.

The magazine did not just reflect the age, it shaped it.

It was a popular publication for the best in fiction, featuring works by some of the greatest authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Rudyard Kipling, Leo Tolstoy, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as European writers such as Victor Hugo and Lermontov.

Conan Doyle was to prove one of the Strand’s most prolific authors -- his Sherlock Holmes stories propelled him to fame.

But The Strand was not just Holmes.

It published many brilliant stories and essays, some by authors that are still famous, others by writers waiting to be re-discovered by a new generation of readers.

'The Best of The Strand' is a carefully edited selection of some of the finest work to appear in the magazine.

The first collection of includes 13 fiction and non-fiction pieces:

The Story of the Strand
The Adventure of the Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Queer Side of Life: The Story of the King’s Idea
Illustrated Interviews: William Howard Russel
A Night in an Opium Den
Athletes of the Year: Their Performances and Methods of Training
“Author! Author!” by E.W. Hornung
Celebrities At Play
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Private James Lamb
Crime and Criminals
Some Curious Public School Customs
Stories from the Diary of a Doctor
The Lost Legion by Rudyard Kipling

The aim, like that if the original magazine, is to inform and entertain.

The collection is introduced by historian Andrew Roberts, explaining The Strand's significance and its enduring legacy.

“They saw him flung clear of the waves almost upon the rocks and twice the sea snatched him back. It seemed to play with him like an angler with a fish on the line; and, like a hooked fish, Fergus was tiring…”

When Fergus saved his sister, Stella, from drowning in Tangie Bay, it should have been a triumph.

But now that Stella is head of her own company, Fergus seems to have festered in his retirement, growing more and more resentful, caring only for his fish.

His wife, Flora, can feel him slipping away. Flora views her husband’s inadequacies with wry tolerance and occasional despair and it and doesn’t help that their ghastly neighbours, Eleanor and Letty, keep calling at all hours and indulging Fergus’s drinking habit.

Now that Stella is visiting again, Flora is hoping for brother and sister to reconcile, for another miracle.

But it doesn’t look like she will get it.

If anything, Fergus and Stella seem to be dragging each other down.

Hoping to escape, Fergus and Flora take their fateful trip to Tangie Bay...

A delicately crafted tragicomedy, The Daisy Rock is a book that refuses to let you go.
 

Praise for Eva Hanagan

‘Eva Hanagan tells a story of supernatural evil with such quiet conviction and sets it in such pleasing rural domesticity that its full force only slowly pervades the reader’s consciousness. When it does it is absolute …’ - Shirley Toulson, British Book News

‘Eva Hanagan writes with an easy and natural grace which gives to the life of her recluse an evocative, unforced descriptiveness of an impressive order.’ - Derek Stanford, Scotsman

‘Mrs Hanagan is good at uneasy states of mind and feelings, and very good at the temptations of suicide … an accomplished beginning.’ - Robert Nye, - Guardian

‘Between the covers of this book is a really thrilling story … It should restore to many a reader his faith in the pleasure of reading for reading’s sake.’ - West Sussex County Times

‘ … so beautifully and precisely visualised that I too was enthralled … a delicious piece of water-colour Gothic.’ - Michael Maxwell-Scott, Daily Telegraph

Eva Hanagan was a Scottish author, who died at the age of 85, in 2009. During a Foreign Office posting to Vienna after the Second World War, Hanagan met her husband, with whom she had two sons. She published her first novel, In Thrall, in 1977. Following which, there was a fairly rapid succession of novels: Playmates (1978), and A Knock at the Door (1982). She settled in Sussex, from where she authored her novels.

'If you read one historical novel this year, make it THE QUEEN'S MARY by Sarah Gristwood. It's a superb fictional rendering of a difficult subject. I could not put it down.' - bestselling author Alison Weir

Mary Seton is lady-in-waiting to the legendary Mary Queen of Scots.

Torn between her own desires and her duty to serve her mistress, she is ultimately drawn into her Queen's web of passion and royal treachery - and must play her part in the game of thrones between Mary and Elizabeth I.

Must she choose between survival, and sharing the same fate as the woman she has served, loyally and lovingly, since a child?

The Queen's Mary is an engaging and insightful novel, which allows the reader to peek behind the curtain of history - and see into the heart and mind of a forgotten woman who helped shape the Tudor era.

Fans of Phillipa Gregory, Alison Weir and The Tudors will love The Queen’s Mary.

Praise for The Queen’s Mary

'Sarah Gristwood breathes new life into the deeply tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots by telling it through the perspective of the invisible woman who sacrificed her life to serve her.' Elizabeth Freemantle, bestselling author of The Girl in the Glass Tower

Adapted for a magnificent George Roy Hill film three years later (perhaps the only film adaptation of a masterpiece which exceeds its source), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW, who has in the later stage of his life become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralmafadorians who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

The "unstuck" nature of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; then again, Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him. Struggling to find some purpose, order or meaning to his existence and humanity's, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her and drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralmafadorians, Montana Wildhack and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence.

Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a bestseller and remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most beloved American writers of the twentieth century. Vonnegut's audience increased steadily since his first five pieces in the 1950s and grew from there. His 1968 novel Slaughterhouse-Five has become a canonic war novel with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to form the truest and darkest of what came from World War II.

Vonnegut began his career as a science fiction writer, and his early novels--Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan--were categorized as such even as they appealed to an audience far beyond the reach of the category. In the 1960s, Vonnegut became closely associated with the Baby Boomer generation, a writer on that side, so to speak.

Now that Vonnegut's work has been studied as a large body of work, it has been more deeply understood and unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humor and anger which makes his work so synergistic. It seems clear that the more of Vonnegut's work you read, the more it resonates and the more you wish to read. Scholars believe that Vonnegut's reputation (like Mark Twain's) will grow steadily through the decades as his work continues to increase in relevance and new connections are formed, new insights made.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Author Kurt Vonnegut is considered by most to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His books Slaughterhouse-Five (named after Vonnegut's World War II POW experience) and Cat's Cradle are considered among his top works. RosettaBooks offers here a complete range of Vonnegut's work, including his first novel (Player Piano, 1952) for readers familiar with Vonnegut's work as well as newcomers.