Abrams: 1969 books

Big money reshapes an unnamed city as a radical group causes havoc in this thriller that “portrays the realities of graft and moral compromise . . . perfectly” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). It’s the mid-1960s, and the City is a hulking shell of itself. Bohemians, crooks, and snarling...

An Ordinary Story describes the coming of age of Alexander Aduyev, a romantic young man from the provinces who moves to Petersburg in search of love and a career. Psychologically acute in its delineation of Aduyev’s relationship with his successful and unsentimental mentor uncle, this is a work...

By the author of A Quiet Belief in Angels, praised by Michael Connelly as “a beautiful and haunting book,? Saints of New York is a powerful new crime novel. NYPD Detective Frank Parrish barely notices the death of a young heroin dealer—just another casualty of the drug war. But when the...

Quinn Cutler is sixteen and the daughter of a high-profile Brooklyn politician. She’s also pregnant, a crisis made infinitely more shocking by the fact that she has no memory of ever having sex. Before Quinn can solve this deeply troubling mystery, her story becomes public. Rumors spread, jeopardizing...

Serrailler has just wrapped up a particularly exhausting and difficult case and is on sabbatical on a far-flung Scottish island when he is called back to Lafferton by the Chief Constable. Two local prostitutes have been found strangled. When the wife of the St. Michael's Cathedral Dean goes missing...

The testimonies of the sister, the cop and the killer will at last reveal the dreadful truth behind the brutal murder of a young girl in Chicago in 1956.

Murder, love, betrayal, and some of the world’s most beautiful objets d’art come together in Juan Manuel de Prada's tempestuous, prize-winning novel set in Europe’s quintessentially enigmatic city: Venice. Alejandro Ballesteros, a young Spanish art historian, arrives in wintry Venice to study...

In The Hug, internationally renowned author David Grossman tells the moving story of the moment when Ben realizes that no two living creatures are alike—not his mother and father, their beautiful dog Miracle or the ants who march side by side at his feet and appear identical—and the loneliness...

Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. His expedition reveals ugly truths about man’s disregard for nature and the disasters created by insatiable greed. Olga Slavnikova stuns with this witty,...

With her marriage to her first husband, Archie Christie, over, she decided to take a much needed holiday; the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party with a couple who had just returned from Iraq changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a completely...

The Goatibex Constellation is the story of a young newspaperman who returns to his native Abkhazia and is soon caught up in the publicity campaign for a newly produced farm animal—a cross between a goat and a West Caucasian tur. What follows is a vicious and hilarious satire of the Soviet Union’s...

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the Lane of Many Heads, an alley in modern-day Mecca, no one will claim it, as they are all ashamed of her nakedness. As Detective Nasser pursues his investigation of the case, seemingly all of Mecca chimes in—including the Lane of Many Heads itself—in...

Like the Arkady Renko novels of Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Littell’s masterful Mother Russia transports readers back in time and behind the Iron Curtain to experience the extremes of Soviet society. Robespierre Pravdin is a black marketeer who prowls Moscow’s streets and alleys hustling wristwatches....

The Mabinogion is to Welsh mythology what the tales of Zeus, Hera, and Apollo are to Greek myth. these tales constitute a powerful work of the imagination, ranking with Tokien's Lord of the Rings novels and T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Evangeline Walton's compelling rendition of these classic,...