A Fine Balance displays a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens. This magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers -- a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have...

"Atlanta, 1974. It's Kate Murphy's first day on the job and the Atlanta Police Department is seething after the murder of an officer. Before the day has barely begun, she already suspects she's not cut out for the job as a cop. Her male uniform is too big, she can't handle a gun, and she's rapidly learning that the APD is hardly a place that welcomes women. Worse still, in the ensuing manhunt, she'll be partnered with Maggie Lawson, a cop with her...

Two centuries after the building of the elaborate Gothic cathedral in Kingsbridge, its prior finds himself at the center of a web of ambition and revenge that places the city at a crossroad of commerce, medicine, and architecture.

Noted for its picturesque historic districts and venerable homes, the village of Montgomery is nestled into northern Orange County, bounded by the Wallkill River in the shadow of the Comfort Hills. Filled with rare photographs dating from the 1870s to the present, Village of Montgomery focuses on the history of the hamlet and its churches, roads, businesses, schools, and cemeteries, providing insight into how village residents lived, worked, and

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Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking,...

"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...