"Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in Tinseltown. He operates with two simple rules--he'll do anything but murder, and he'll never work with commies. Freddy is a corrupt L.A. cop on the skids. He executed a cop killer named Horvath and it gores him. So Captain "Whiskey" Bill Parker cans him. Now, Freddy dons an array of new hats--sleazoid private eye, shakedown artist, matchmaker for Rock Hudson, pimp for President John F. Kennedy--and,...

Revere, Mississippi, with its population of "20,000 and sinking" is not unlike most Southern towns in the sixties. Black people live on one side of town and whites live on the other. The two rarely mix, or so everyone believes. But the truth is brought to the forefront when Billy Ray Puckett, a white man wounded while hunting, shows up at the segregated Doctors Hospital. No one thinks much of his death—just a typical hunting accident—until

...

"Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship. Grace's weekly attic-room dinner parties become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking...

"Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her--a canyon "as deep as the devil's own appetites." Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar--the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there's...

On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm... Sarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of Frome, Washington, are forced to hire a dragon to work their farm, something only the poorest of the poor ever have to resort to. The dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye, though. Sarah can't help but...

Johnnie Wise was just fifteen years old when her mother sold her virginity to an unscrupulous white insurance man named Earl Shamus. Stunningly beautiful, with long naturally wavy black hair, she possessed the voluptuous body of a thirty-year-old woman. Her skin was the color of brown sugar. Johnnie had heard about Earl Shamus and his escapades among the poor black women in New Orleans. But what she didn't know was that Shamus had quietly made several...

"A stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters' ambitions for their own lives. Set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco"--

"Hirshberg's debut novel packs both emotional punch and a vivid portrait of Jewish American life in post-WWII Boston. . . . Readers will find connections here to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and to Saul Bellow's classic The Adventures of Augie March (1953)." Booklist (American Library Association), starred review "This amazing mosaic of fact and fiction will hold readers in its grip from the first to last page."...

"A rare and exquisite story . . . Transports you out of time, out of place, into a world you can feel on your very skin." —Elizabeth Gilbert
The New York Times bestseller 
Janice Y.K. Lee's latest novel, The Expatriates, is now available from Penguin

In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in...