A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
Now a major motion picture directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Kyle Catlett and Helena Bonham Carter.

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists— including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picasso—contributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.

Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences - whether eating, gardening, or building - and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own - a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams" - built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

A revelatory look at what happens when political Islam collides with the secular West
Ian Buruma 's Murder in Amsterdam is a masterpiece of investigative journalism, a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a crime novel and the analytical brilliance for which Buruma is renowned. On a cold November day in Amsterdam in 2004, the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by an Islamic extremist for making a movie that "insulted the prophet Mohammed." The murder sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native land to investigate the event and its larger meaning as part of the great dilemma of our time.

The second of Leys's trilogy on China's Cultural Revolution, describing the cultural and political upheaval under Mao's regime and expressing criticism of its Western supporters.

First serialized in 1887 in London magazines, Sherlock Holmes remains the greatest detective of all time. He was an instant hit with the public with his incisive mind and fearless approach to the truth. At a time when forensic science was just beginning to emerge, Holmes became the master of arcane knowledge and the criminal mind. His stunning leaps of deduction were the bane of England's evildoers and the envy of Scotland Yard. Arthur Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in 1891 when he tired of writing the stories, but public demand forced him to revive his hero shortly thereafter, and he continued with further adventures until 1927. Doyle wrote four Sherlock Holmes novels, and his short stories have been collected into five anthologies. Published over an astounding forty years, from A Study in Scarlet in 1887, to his final short stories published between 1921 and 1927, Holmes continues to thrill today. His name still evokes a vision of the smoking pipe and deerstalker hat, and remains synonymous with clever deduction and the ability to ferret out the truth from a maze of conflicting evidence. Enjoy all of Sherlock Holme's exploits in WingSpan Classic books. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes The Return of Sherlock Holmes A Study in Scarlet The Sign of The Four The Hound of the Baskervilles The Valley of Fear His Last Bow The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

A tour de force of investigative journalism-this is the story of the violent rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Colombian Medellin cocaine cartel. Escobar's criminal empire held a nation of thirty million hostage in a reign of terror that would only end with his death. In an intense, up-close account, award-winning journalist Mark Bowden exposes details never before revealed about the U.S.-led covert sixteen-month manhunt. With unprecedented access to important players-including Colombian president C&eacutesar Gaviria and the incorruptible head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, Colonel Hugo Martinez-as well as top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations, Bowden has produced a gripping narrative that is a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.
"The story of how the U.S. Army Intelligence and Delta Force commandos helped Colombian police track down and kill Pablo Escobar is a compelling, almost Shakespearean tale." ( Los Angeles Times )
"Absolutely riveting. . . . Mark Bowden has a way of making modern nonfiction read like the best of novels." ( The Denver Post )

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

An ACE can be found
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Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in the fictional county of Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

Traces the history of sugar production and consumption, examines its relationship with slavery, class ambitions, and industrialization, and describes sugar's impact on modern diet and eating habits.

Winning fans in Europe and America for their dark sophistication and dry humor, Andrea Camilleri?s crime novels are classics of the genre. Set once again in Sicily,
pits Inspector Montalbano against his greatest foe yet: the weight of his own years. Still recovering from the gunshot wound he suffered in
, he must overcome self-imposed seclusion and waxing self-doubt to penetrate a web of hatred and secrets in pursuit of the strangest culprit he?s ever hunted. A mystery unlike any other, this emotionally taut story brings the Montalbano saga to a captivating crossroads.

The earthy and urbane Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano casts his spell on more and more fans with each new mystery from Andrea Camilleri.Two seemingly unrelated deaths form the central mystery of Rounding the Mark. They will take Montalbano deep into a secret world of illicit trafficking in human lives, and the investigation will test the limits of his physical, psychological, and moral endurance. Disillusioned and no longer believing in the institution he serves, will he withdraw or delve deeper into his work?

Following the long-running success he has enjoyed on bestseller lists in Europe, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is now winning over American readers and critics alike as “one of the most engaging protagonists in detective fiction” (
). Now, in
, Andrea Camilleri’s savvy and darkly comic take on Sicilian life leads Montalbano into his most bone-chilling case yet.In two seemingly unrelated crimes, a young Don Juan is found murdered and an elderly couple is reported missing after an excursion to the ancient site of Tindari. As Montalbano works to solve both cases, he stumbles onto Sicily’s ghastly “new age” of brutal and anonymous criminality.

opens with a mysterious tete-a-tete with a mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountainous cave where two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terra cotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.

Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigta, is found dead in his car in a rough part of town frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano. With his mix of humor, cynicism, compassion, and love of good food, Montalbano goes into battle against the powerful and the corrupt who block his path to the real killer.

"Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk's life of Wittgenstein is such a one."--"The Christian Science Monitor."