Brian Doyle might just be the most passionate storyteller in America. In this eclectic and compelling collection of stories Doyle writes about his discovery of the incarnated Spirit of God every time he turns around, often in the most unlikely of people, places, and things. In 37 short snapshots, he captures the spiritual essence of everyday life from the perspective of a committed Catholic who loves his faith, his family, his community, and his church, even with all their warts and failin...

The #1 international bestselling crime thriller that introduces Belgian detective Pieter Van In, "a brusque cop with every bad habit you can think of" ( The New York Times Book Review).The beautiful medieval architecture of Bruges belies the dark longings of her residents. When the wealthy and powerful Ludovic Degroof's jewelry store is robbed, nothing is stolen, but the jewels have been dissolved in jars of aqua regia, an acid so strong that it can melt ev...

Brian Doyle was a one-of-a-kind author who wrote one-of-a-kind prayers about everyday subjects that help readers change the way they see the world.Prayers for cashiers and good shoes; for shorter sermons and better senators; prayers for the bruised, foolish, glorious, stumbling, brilliant Church; for chaplains and mathematicians; for idiot authors and muddy dogs: These are the most heartfelt and headlong prayers you will ever read and share—the grinning, snarling prayers we mouth q...

When Ryan's dad runs away from home because of the change of life, Ryan is sent to spend the summer with his aunt in Peggy's Cove.He goes fishing, almost gets into big trouble and learns a lot about tourist behavior, but most of all he misses his dad and hopes he'll come back soon.

This lyrical tale of a young man's first foray into adulthood offers "a moving ode to the city of Chicago and the singular nature of its people" ( Booklist, starred review)On the last day of summer, a young college grad moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there in the late 1970s, during which he meets gangsters, gamblers, policemen, a brave and garrulous bus ...

It’s 1960. In a small logging town called Calamus that’s about as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get, Wade Curren, star of the high school baseball and football teams, is content living out his role of local hero, holding court in the corner booth of the town diner where his girlfriend Lorna waits tables.Lorna, working to support her family, is plotting her escape from their small town. Fiercely independent and an avid reader of the kinds of books that aren’t taught in sch...

A must-read for anyone who grew up in America during the 50s and 60s.Revenge on a teacher. Saturday nights at the Drive-In. Fast cars, midnight shopping, and teenage sex. You’ll recognize the characters. They might have had different names in your town, but the escapades are universal. Relive your teen years with Brian, Marsha, Fusco, and the gang from Norwalk.

Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.

"An affectionate homage," this novel of Stevenson's evolution into an adventure writer is "a loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost" ( New York Times).The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco in the nineteenth century while waiting for his beloved's divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady's adventurous and globe-trotting husband, John Carson—but he never ...

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man. . . .But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plo...

In this award-winning paean to country life we find Hubbo O'Driscoll, whom we first met in Easy Avenue, now living in the lower Gatineau with his guardian aunt and uncle. When the local covered bridge -- home to a wayward ghost and her lovelorn postman -- is threatened by development, Hubbo must devise a strategy to save it.

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stori...