A collection of short fiction presents ten stories that capture important moments in the course of a life and in the lives intertwined with it, in a volume that ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief.

A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.

Presents a novel based upon the life of the author about Lin, an escaped convict who disappears into the dark side of Bombay's streets and enters into a life of murder and betrayal, prison and torture, and war.

"A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr."-- Provided by publisher.

"From one of the most highly acclaimed writers at work today: his most intimate and epic work yet--an autobiographical novel of sex and love, family and friendship. Inside Story had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that the novel unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and...

The wonderful story of a talented and passionate young pianist on the verge of adolescence who learns the devastating news of her mother''s critical illness. Heartbreak and joy are intertwined in this powerful gift book.

"A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life returns to the small mountain town where he was born and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is a dizzying, audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life's trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away"-- Provided by publisher.

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, four of the master’s most wickedly scathing comedies are here brought together in one volume. Black Mischief is Waugh at his most mischievous - inventing a politically loopy African state as a means of pulverizing politics at home. In Scoop, it is journalism's turn to be drawn and quartered. The Lover One (which became a famously hilarious film) sends up the California mortuary business....