Girls Out Late (Girls #3)

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Rumer Godden

The dark horse of this touching and exciting novel is Dark Invader, a magnificent thoroughbred sold cheaply and exiled from England to race in Calcutta in the early 1930s. Almost all of the people around him—Levantine, his new millionaire owner; his trainer, John Quillan, an ex-cavalry officer with a beautiful but ostracized Eurasian wife; their children, known as the Bandar Log after Kipling's monkey tribe; and above all Ted Mullins, the doting middle-aged stable lad who brought him out of England—are, like himself, "outsiders" in one way or another. Overlooking the racecourse is a convent of courageous nuns led by Mother Morag, who works day and night to help the city's poorest of the poor, but who also has a sharp eye for both racehorses and miracles. The dark horse becomes a favorite to win the prestigious Viceroy's Cup, but then, three days before the race, disaster strikes in the form of a whip-heavy and mean-spirited jockey. A mystery ensues, and it is Mother Morag who holds the key and knows how to turn it. With its remarkable cast of characters, its vivid evocation of India in the last days of the Raj, and its simple but powerful story, *The Dark Horse* is a wonderful short novel—and more: the story is true. It happened in Calcutta some fifty years ago.

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Julie Buxbaum

The complexities of a friendship. The unexplored doubts of a marriage. And the redemptive power of literature...Julie Buxbaum, the acclaimed author of The Opposite of Love, delivers a haunting, gloriously written novel about love, family, and the secrets we hide from each other--and ourselves.It happened on a tree-lined street in Notting Hill to a woman who seemed to have the perfect life. Ellie Lerner's best friend, Lucy, was murdered in front of her young daughter. And, as best friends do, Ellie dropped everything--her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs--to travel to London and pick up the pieces of Lucy's life. While Lucy's husband, Greg, copes with his grief by retreating into himself, eight-year-old Sophie has simply stopped speaking.Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As the two spend hours exploring the novel's winding passageways, its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them. But so, too, do Lucy's secrets--some big, some small--secrets Lucy kept hidden, even from her best friend. Over a summer in London, as Ellie peels back the layers of her friend's life, she's forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she'd hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie's carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life--and those around her-- forever. A novel that will resonate in the heart of anyone who's had a best friend, a love lost, or a past full of regrets, After You proves once again the unique and compelling talent of Julie Buxbaum.From the Hardcover edition.

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Matt Haig

Terence Cave, intellectual, music-lover and owner of Cave Antiques, has experienced more than his share of tragedies. His mother's suicide and his young wife's death at the hands of burglars left him to bring up his young twins alone. And now one of them has died in a grotesque accident as a result of bullying. Bryony, the remaining twin, has always been the family's great hope: a golden teenager, in love with her cello and her pony, clever, sweet and eager to please. Now that she is all Terence has left, he realises that his one duty in life is to keep her safe from the world's malign forces, whatever that may take. As he starts to follow his grieving daughter's movements, and enforces a draconian set of rules purely for her own safety, the voices in his head convince him to protect her innocence at any cost. The Possession on Mr Cave is both a nightmare of Gothic proportions and a story of distorted love, with chilling resonance for anyone who has been a parent or a frustrated teenager. In this compulsive novel, the characteristic black humour of The Last Family in England and The Dead Fathers Club moves even further onto the dark side. Matt Haig lays bare the process by which Terence's love for Bryony becomes a possessive force that will lead to destruction and, ultimately, murder.

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Charles P. Graves

A biography of the New England grandmother who began painting seriously at age seventy and kept it up until she was over a hundred years old.