"Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Severely dyslexic and wanting to know more, he took it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle, and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford's...

"In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident--which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster--a 60-year-old human rights scholar--hits the car of Evelyn Ortega--a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala--in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen and...

"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel uses to tell that tale is a series of ... letters...

In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions-personal, moral, artistic, and practical-as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes...

First, someone steals several valuable toy soldiers from the collection of the dean of a small liberal arts school. The dean asks Carl Burns, Chair of the English Department, to look into things. Then a college board member is killed, and one of the stolen soldiers is found at the scene. After another attempted murder, another soldier is found, making a clear link between the stolen toys and the shooting. Burns begins asking questions and finds himself...

It is October 1940 and Gervase Fen, Oxford don and part-time sleuth--is preparing for the new term. Trouble is in store when Robert Warner, up and coming playwright, chooses Oxford for the premiere of his latest play, Metromania. Together with his cast he comes to Oxford to rehearse a week before the opening, but Warner's motley troupe includes the beautiful but dangerous Yseut Haskell. When she is found shot dead in the college room of a young man...

A satire on academia set in a California college where teaching takes second place to empire building and writing of novels. The chief protagonist is Olga Kominska, a professor of theory, and the novel describes how colleagues exploit her and she exploits them.

"From the #1 international bestselling author of The Lost Wife and The Velvet Hours comes an emotionally charged story about a mothers love, a teachers promise, and a child's heart. Katya, a rising ballerina, and Sasha, a graduate student, are young and in love when an unexpected tragedy befalls their native Kiev. Years later, after the couple has safely emigrated to America the consequences of this incident cause their son, Yuri, to be born with...

"How long must we pay for the crimes of our youth? A prestigious boys' boarding school. A best friend's betrayal. A decades-old mystery of a missing student. In this sharp literary thriller, Matthias Glass gets drawn into his past as he attempts to come to terms with the long-ago disappearance of his prep-school roommate--and to become the man he is meant to be In the middle of his senior year at the Blackburne School in Virginia, Matthias Glass's...

A satirical comedy of manners featuring the morbidly obese Norman Laney, an unorthodox, inspirational English teacher and college counselor for an elite private school in Mountain Brook, a privileged community outside of Birmingham. A natural wonder from blue-collar Alabama, Laney has barged into the exclusive world of Mountain Brook on the strength of his sensational figure and its several-hundred-pound commitment to art and culture. His mission...