A "luminous" story of love and sorrow spanning from London to Romania, from a prize-winning novelist (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Kitty Crozier first laid eyes on Virgil Florescu, a dissident poet who swam across the Danube to escape Ceausescu's Romania, in the hospital. She woke up after surgery to find a stranger sitting beside her bed gazing at her. He just smiled, then stood and left the room. She next sees him in London's Green Park picking up litter from the grass with a long spike. So begins the most important, most demanding, most exhilarating relationship of Kitty's life. As their love for each other deepens, their previous lives, and very different families, reveal themselves to be oddly connected, in this novel from a recipient of literary honors including a Somerset Maugham Award, an E. M. Forster Award, and a George Orwell Prize, as well as two Man Booker Prize nominations. "At once a wistful and tender...

Paige Decker has a fantastic career unraveling the mysteries of her patients' DNA-until a man named Carl Parker, who claims he has been falsely convicted of murder, asks her coworker Leo Cunningham to help investigate.Delving into the savage killings and burials of three women in a nearby state park, Leo requests new DNA analysis. When the results come back, they reveal startling discoveries that ultimately lead to his murder. Against the advice of her new boss, Paige teams up with Leo's son, Brandon, to find the killer.Soon, Paige and Brandon uncover several suspects as they discover old secrets the Parker family wants to remain hidden and new ones implicating the lover of Paige's best friend. Can they unravel the clues in time?

In the spring of 1985, the novelist Paul Bailey found himself becoming the unlikely owner of a dog. He saw the puppy in the window of a pet shop and was instantly (and lastingly) beguiled. She was given the name Circe by Bailey's dying partner, David, who was also overcome by her charms, though after a good deal of resistance. This memoir tells of the sixteen years Paul Bailey spent in Circe's company, while also offering portraits of friends and acquaintances, living and dead. There are sketches of the various eccentrics encountered during his walks with the dog, and descriptions of the author's trips abroad - to Romania, Poland, and Hungary, among other countries.

Stuck in a hospital and heavily medicated, Harry Chapman doesn’t just hear the doctors, nurses, and other patients. Is that the voice of his mother, acerbic and disappointed in him as ever? Perhaps her presence would be understandable enough, but what is Pip from Great Expectations doing in his hospital room? More and more voices join the chorus: friends from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry. His father, fighting in World War I. Babar and Céleste, who dances with Fred Astaire. Jane Austen’s Emma. Harry’s aunt Rose, "a stranger to moodiness." A man who wants to sell Harry T. S. Eliot’s teeth. And, of course, an old friend who turns up at Harry’s bedside principally to rehearse the litany of his own ailments.Slowly, endearingly, the life of Harry Chapman coalesces before our eyes, through voices real and imagined. Written with a gentle, effortless generosity, full of delicate observation, Chapman’s Odyssey is the work of a master; a superbly rendered act of storytelling and ventriloquism that is stinging, witty, deeply moving, and wise by turns, but always explores the nature of love.

In May 1927, nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, a skinny boy with literary ambitions, is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement – a prince's boy – whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man's teacher in the ways of the world.At a distance of forty years, and written in London,...

The haunting novel from Paul Bailey, whose work has been short-listed twice for the Booker Prize. At the age of seventy, Andrew Peters looks back across the years to remember life with his doting Uncle Rudolf, who rescued him from fascist Romania as a child. Vivid, often hilarious, stories of Rudolf's brilliant but blighted singing career are intertwined with the slow unfolding of secrets that have shadowed Andrew's otherwise happy life. Told in matchless prose, this deeply moving novel captures a vanished epoch with exquisite tact and restraint.