Allan Armadale makes a startling deathbed confession to be shared with his young son once he reaches adulthood-he murdered another man named Allan Armadale. It's a dark secret that inevitably looms over the child of the perpetrator and his victim. Before dying, Allan Armadale reveals that he previously killed a man also named Allan Armadale. It's a revelation meant for his young son who discovers the information as an adult. At this point, he's...

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee. Crossing the Sabine River, Mordecai's party encounters...

Cub reporter Joe Talbert, Jr. investigates the murder of a man with the same name as him in a small town in Minnesota and discovers the deceased was a loathsome lowlife who may be his father.

On Christmas Eve, a family has gathered around the table for the obligatory dinner. The father, once an imposing figure who terrorized his children, has suddenly fallen prey to Parkinson's. Yesterday's tyrant is now trapped inside a disintegrating body. André, the eldest child, is nearing 60. He has never loved the father who lied too much, abused too much, manipulated too much. But still, this holiday week, André cannot help but be moved. How should...

Graceland is a dazzling debut by a singular new talent. The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend...

Jazz Dent, who has been shot and left to die in New York City, his girlfriend, Connie, who is in the clutches of Jazz's serial killer father, Billy, and his best friend, Howie, who is bleeding to death on the floor of Jazz's own home in tiny Lobo's Nod, must all rise above the horrors their lives have become and find a way to come together in pursuit of Billy.

In this mesmerizing first novel, a young American graduate student abandons her research deep in the Australian rain forest to investigate her professor's mysterious disappearance. Annabel Mendelssohn has an unusual but oddly satisfying life - studying spectacled fruit bats in the rain forest of Australia. She spends her free time discovering waterfalls and e-mailing her sister, Alice, who has settled for the more domesticated science of grant administration....

The violent lives of three sons are exposed when their father is murdered and each one attempts to come to terms with his guilt.