Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection wildly diverse and wholly fascinating characters, like the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each complicit in his or her downfall.

Adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple who remind him that he is not a real member of their family, Cyril embarks on a journey to find himself and where he came from, discovering his identity, a home, a country, and much more throughout a long lifetime.

"A life-affirming anthem to kindness and self-sacrifice, The Travelling Cat Chronicles shows how the smallest things can provide the greatest joy. We take journeys to explore exotic new places and to return to the comforts of home, to visit old acquaintances and to make new friends. But the most important journey is the one that shows us how to follow our hearts... An instant international bestseller, The Travelling Cat Chronicles has charmed readers...

In the summer of 1889, a mysterious man rides into a small Wyoming valley, where he joins homesteaders who take a stand against a bullying cattle rancher, and where he changes the lives of a young boy and his parents.

A lovable loser tries to get his life in order. He is Barnaby Gaitlin, 30, the black sheep of a rich Baltimore family, ex-juvenile delinquent who specialized in housebreaking for kicks. He works for Rent-a-Back, moving furniture for old people, and dreams of having a future.

When Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway on the jubilant London streets of VE Day, they begin a competitive and passionate friendship that carries them through the war-haunted halls of Oxford, the Nuremberg trials, and the exciting cultural revolution of the 1960s. As they explore the nuances of sexual, emotional and professional rivalries, they are not immune to the sting of betrayal and the tenderness of reconciliation.

'Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.' In mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March continue to encounter both joys and sorrows along life's path, as they journey into womanhood both close to home and further away. The highs and lows of the four young women's lives are shared with each other, and supported by the bond of their sisterhood. This second part of 'Little Women'...

"An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in...

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco,...