Having run away with her younger brother to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twelve-year-old Claudia strives to keep things in order in their new home and to become a changed person and a heroine to herself.

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastated.

"In his many years as a commissario, Guido Brunetti has seen all manner of crime and known intuitively how to navigate the various pathways in his native city, Venice, to discover the person responsible. Now, in Transient Desires, the thirtieth novel in Donna Leon's masterful series, he faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough: two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident,...

Teenaged soldier Noemi and an enemy robot, Abel, who is programmed to obey her commands, set out on an interstellar quest to save her home planet, Earth colony Genesis.

Their love affair happened long ago by whatever measurement Claire Randall took. Two decades before, she had traveled back in time and into the arms of a gallant eighteenth-century Scot named Jamie Fraser. Then she returned to her own century to bear his child, believing him dead in the tragic Battle of Culloden. Yet his memory has never lessened its hold on her ... and her body still cries out for him in her dreams. When she discovers that Jamie...

"'Some years ago, in Dodge, I was a sporting woman. I didn't mind whoring-it can be good work in the right house-but it demands a great deal of keeping still, and I'm one of those itchy, fidgety sorts who's always looking out the window or glancing toward the door, so it was only a matter of time until I had to move on.' In the Spring of 1877, Bridget-sixteen years old and already disillusioned after caring for her alcoholic father-is orphaned while...

"What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It's a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer. Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti's mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately, and not as official police business. Foscarini's son-in-law, Enrico Fenzo, has alarmed his wife (her daughter)...

Is there ever a deal-breaker when it comes to true love? What happens to the perfect couple when they suddenly want different things? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes--a baby carriage. Isn't that what all women want? Not so for Claudia Parr. And just as she gives up on finding a man who feels the same way, she meets warm, wonderful Ben. Things seem too good to be true when they fall in love and agree to buck tradition with a satisfying,...

"A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life. Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia's mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different; they can't even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely...

"Sophisticated robot Abel must save teenaged soldier Noemi from capture on a hidden planet, while outwitting armies of deranged service robots and securing medical aid for a plague on Noemi's home world"--