At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril's son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly...

Short story, Gunstorm Ghost, recounts a dramatic moment in the life of gunfighter Dan Barrister as he refuses the pressure of big rancher Lon Preebe to become one of his hired guns. In Outlaws of the Brasada, conditions are so harsh in Texas after the Civil War and with Reconstructionists imposing even harsher restrictions, Emery Bandine is desperate to protect his motherless children and gather a stake to get them out of poverty--no matter what he...

Cameron (Cam) Warner needs someone to help him deal with his life, and it is waiting around the corner. The stocky thirteen-year-old is on the hit-list of the school bully, his mom doesn't like his new friends, and his little sister is her usual giant pain. As if that weren't enough, he lives on poverty row, plus he must take turns visiting his separated father on the weekends. If it weren't for his childhood friends, Lawrence and Marcy, life would...

In a run-down neighbourhood, in an unnamed seaside city with barely any amenities, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, they are spurred to come up with increasingly outlandish plans for their survival. Even when a terrible, macabre event rocks the neighbourhoods bar district and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying...

When his father is passed over for village head, leaving their family as the lowest Igbo caste, fifteen-year-old Nigerian Dimkpa must make his own fate, learning that no money is easy money, superstition runs deep, knowledge is power and sometimes it's better to live in the present than chase a future out of reach. "Fifteen-year-old Dimkpa dreams of the day his father will be made village head. He will return to school and maybe even go on to university;...

"Haunted by her sister's mysterious disappearance, Lucy Wilson arrives in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the spring of 1911 to work for Cora Wilson Stewart, superintendent of education. When Cora sends Lucy into the hills to act as scribe for the mountain people, she is repelled by the primitive conditions and intellectual poverty she encounters. Few adults can read and write.Born in those hills, Cora knows the plague of illiteracy. So does Brother Wyatt,...

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence,...

"Tom Lowe's identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. He designed and built his family's dream home, working extra hours to pay off the adjustable rate mortgage he took on the property, convinced he is making every sacrifice for the happiness of his wife and son. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls. In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the...

Two intertwining stories of Bogotá. One, a family of five children, left to live on their own. The other, a girl in an orphanage who will do anything to befriend the mysterious Immortal Boy --