Drawing on author John Cullen’s years of experience as both a stand-up comic and an elite curler, Curling Rocks! offers a lighthearted, expertly detailed look at a unique sport and its history, from the most absurd curling fashions to the most sublime matches ever played.The sport of curling continues to expand its global reach, attracting new players and fans far beyond traditional strongholds. Yet, even in Canada—a country with a long curling history and...

**A New York Times Notable Book of 2015“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker**He was the brother of “the Arab” killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and ...

Soon to be a major motion picture from the award-winning director Julian Schnabel, starring Freida Pinto.WRITTEN BY the much-admired Italo-Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, Miral is a novel that focuses on remarkable women whose lives unfold in the turbulent political climate along the borders of Israel and Palestine. The story begins with Hind, a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem. Year...

This novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano is one of the most seductive and accessible in his oeuvre: the story of a man’s memories of fleeing responsibility, finding love, and searching for meaning in an uncertain worldThe narrator of Villa Triste, an anxious, roving, stateless young man of eighteen, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the...

The Stations of the Cross unfold for us a story of the passion and pain – where all sources of evil are connected: jealousy, betrayal, cowardice, injustice, cruelty and weakness. Jesus takes everything on himself and assumes all human suffering.The Stations of the Cross are in the present tense: Jesus is condemned, Jesus takes his Cross, Jesus meets, Simon carries, Veronica wipes and Jesus is stripped. It is our tears that flow down his cheek, our pain that is felt in his bruised, ...

Set in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul, this extraordinary novel "puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban" (San Francisco Chronicle), taking readers into the seemingly divergent lives of two couples—and depicting with compassion and exquisite details the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world.Mohsen comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, hi...

We often find it hard to believe that we have a unique voice. Advent begins with a voice crying in the wilderness. Every voice matters – especially voices in the wilderness that are stifled and silenced by alienation and apathy. This book dares you to take the time to listen to Advent voices in the wilderness that persist with calls to be heard and respected.December is a month when we fill the winter days and nights with a new busyness. This book is a chance to p...

Two young princesses navigate the court intrigues of 18th-century France and Spain in this stunning historical fiction novel based on a true story.“Vivid, engrossing . . . one of the most fascinating historical narratives I’ve ever read.” —Diana Gabaldon, author of OutlanderPhilippe d’Orléans, the regent of France, has a gangrenous heart—the result of a life of debauchery, alcohol, power, and flattery. One morning in 1721, he decid...

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain themHappy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis BorgesSchnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect w...

The year is 1947, ten years after the famous zeppelin Hindenburg burst spectacularly into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The cause of the disaster is still a mystery. The airship was a symbol of world peace and German technological prowess and was carrying important American industrialists and high-ranking Nazi officers. The reasons to think the crash was something other than a horrible accident are manifold and contradictory. Birger Lund, a survivor, suspects sabo...

From the internationally bestselling author of The Attack and The Swallows of Kabul, a gripping first-person narrative about one young man's involvement in France's worst terrorist attack.Khalil, a twenty-three-year-old Belgian of Moroccan descent, plans to detonate a suicide vest in a crowd outside the Stade de France on November 13, 2015. Explosions are rocking Paris, at cafés and the Bataclan theater, and when other bombs drive the stadium crow...

A prescient political and psychological thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines, by one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary novelistsA few short years from now, the world is an even more uncertain place than it is today, and politics everywhere is marching rightward: Trump is gone, but Brexit is complete, as is Frexit. There's a global financial crisis, armed conflict, and mass migration, and an ultrapopulist movement governs in Germany. With their democrac...