The mystery of Edwin Drood

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Kamila Shamsie

"Crib mates, raised together from birth, narrator Raheen and her best friend Karim dream each other's dreams, finish each other's sentences, speak in a language of anagrams. They share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi with parents who are also best friends. The two couples were even once engaged to the opposite partner until they rematched in what they jokingly call "the fiancee swap." The night Karim's family migrates from Karachi to London, Raheen knows that "some of my tears were his tears and some of his tears were mine."" "But as distance and adolescence split them apart, Karim takes refuge in the rationality of maps while Raheen tries to hide from the secret behind her parents' exchange. When she finally does face the truth it takes us back two decades to reveal a story not just of a family's turbulent history but that of a country - and brings us forward to a grown-up Raheen and Karim poised between strained friendship and fated love."--BOOK JACKET.

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Roxann Wheeler

Wheeler (English, Ohio State U.) compares Enlightenment science's speculations on human variety in natural history with accounts in civil histories, travel literature, and fiction, finding that black skin was not the most damning characteristic used by Brits to elevate themselves above the colonized. While Brits did prize paleness, Wheeler shows th.

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Anita Brookner

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.' Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

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Jodi Picoult

Jenna Metcalf was with her mother the night she disappeared, but she remembers nothing. In the wake of those tragic events, she has lost not one parent, but two: her father is in an asylum, and now she lives with her grandmother - who finds it too painful to talk about what happened. Ten years on, Jenna is the only one who still seems to care. And she is determined to seek the truth, no matter how shocking and life-changing it might be ... -- page 4 of cover.