ddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers....

Bestselling author Ann B. Ross is back with another lively adventure set in Miss Julia's Abbotsville. For the first time, though, she writes from the perspective of another resident: the hardscrabble, heart-of-gold Etta Mae Wiggins. Etta Mae is frustrated with her trailer-park life and her no-good family, and she has big dreams for something better. And working as the home nurse for the elderly but wealthy Howard Connard, Senior, she finally sees...

Talkative stranger Arthur Varney gains the trust of Poke Rafferty's friends in Bangkok in an attempt to obtain money that Poke does not have, and locate someone whom Poke is unwilling to hand over.

A famous writer with cancer tries to commit suicide while on holiday in Florida, but each time fate intervenes to save him. Meanwhile his wife Jenny, who is some thirty years younger, discovers lesbian love. A look at old age.

Albert Honig's most constant companions have always been his bees. A never-married octogenarian, he makes a modest living as a beekeeper, as his father and his father's father did before him. Deeply acquainted with the workings of the hives, Albert is less versed in the ways of people, especially his friend Claire, whose presence and absence in his life have never been reconciled. When Claire is killed in a seemingly senseless accident during a burglary...

In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"-the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink-offer him both escape and...

"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals...

Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road....

"A new heartfelt novel about the power of loneliness and the strength of love that overcomes it by critically acclaimed author Roselle Lim. Newly minted professional matchmaker Sophie Go has returned to Toronto, her hometown, after spending three years in Shanghai. Her job is made difficult when she is revealed as a fraud: she never actually graduated from matchmaking school. In a competitive market like Toronto, no one wants to take a chance on an...