When two boys--John William Barry and Neil Countryman--meet in 1972 at age sixteen, they're brought together by what they have in common: a fierce intensity and a love of the outdoors that takes them, together and often, into Washington's remote backcountry, where they must rely on their wits--and each other--to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted schoolteacher and family...

"Ron Carlson's first novel in thirty years is the tale of three men gathered high in the Rock Mountains for a construction project that is to last the summer. Having participated in a spectacular betrayal in Los Angeles, the giant, silent Arthur Key drifts into work as a carpenter in southern Idaho. Here he is hired, along with the shiftless and charming Ronnie Panelli, to build a stunt ramp beside a cavernous void. The two will be led by Darwin Gallegos,...

Opening in the settlement of Long Grass, Texas — not quite in Kansas, and nearly New Mexico — we encounter the taciturn Wyatt, whiling away his time in between bottles, and the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc, more adept at poker than extracting teeth. Now hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge — more often with a mean look than a pistol — Wyatt and Doc are living out the last days of a way of life that is passing...

"An unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and a desperate young woman delivers a funny and uplifting message about the power of human connection and how it's never too late to be the person you wanted to be. Eighty-eight-year-old Duffy Sinclair wants the last leg of his bachelor life to be strictly predictable, so Centennial Assisted Living is perfect: low-sodium meals, off-key sing-alongs, and the company of his best pal and roommate,...

"It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to...

Four in the morning, mid-December, and snow is smothering St Andrews. Student Alex Gilbey and his three best friends are staggering home from a party when they stumble upon the body of a young woman. Rosie Duff has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in the ancient Pictish cemetery. And the only suspects are the four young students stained with her blood. Twenty-five years later, Fife police mount a cold case review. Among the unsolved murders they're...

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland, on the quintessential East Bay avenue that gives the book its title. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse midwives...

"Alexis Carlisle and her cat caf�e, ToeBeans, have shot to fame after she came forward as a victim of a celebrity chef's sexual harassment. When a new customer approaches to confide in her, the last thing Alexis expects is for the woman to claim they're sisters. Unsure what to do, Alexis turns to the only man she trusts-her best friend, Noah Logan. Computer genius Noah left his rebellious teenage hacker past behind to become a computer security...

The protagonist of the novel, known only as The Kid, finds himself in a strange state of limbo after being released from prison where he was serving time for a liaison with an underaged girl. Now on probation and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of any place where children could gather, he joins a makeshift encampment made up mostly of other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an...