Like James Ellroy's, My Dark Places, Down City is a gripping narrative built of memory and reportage, and Leah Carroll's portrait of Rhode Island is sure to take a place next Mary Karr's portrayal of her childhood in East Texas and David Simon's gritty Baltimore. Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was eighteen. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future and, now in her memoir, she explores the mystery of her parents' lives, through interviews, photos, and police records. Down City is a raw, wrenching memoir of a broken family and an indelible portrait of Rhode Island- a tiny state where the ghosts of mafia kingpins live alongside the feisty, stubborn people working hard just to get by. Heartbreaking, and mesmerizing, it's the story of a resilient young woman's determination to discover the truth about a mother she never knew and the deeply troubled father who raised her-a man who was, Leah writes, "both my greatest champion and biggest obstacle."

Esther Prescott has seen little of life outside her wealthy family's Rose Bay mansion—until flashy Stan Peterson comes roaring up the drive in his huge American car and barges into her life. Within a fortnight they are living in his Kings Cross flat. Moody and erratic, proud of his well-bred wife yet bitterly resentful of her privilege, Stan is involved with his former girlfriend and a series of shady business deals. Esther, innocent and desperate to please him, must endure his controlling ways. This story of a troubled and obsessive marriage, set against the backdrop of postwar Sydney, is devastating. First published in 1957, Down in the City announced Elizabeth Harrower as a major Australian writer.

Sothern, a death penalty lawyer who with his wife, photographer Nikki Page, arrived in New Orleans four years ahead of Katrina, delivers a haunting, personal, and quintessentially American story.

MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion, and art, and a magnet for thrill-seeking expats from around the world. In 2002, Daniel Hernandez traveled to Mexico City, searching for his cultural roots. He encountered a city both chaotic and intoxicating, both underdeveloped and hypermodern. In 2007, after quitting a job, he moved back. With vivid, intimate storytelling, Hernandez visits slums populated by ex-punks; glittering, drug-fueled fashion parties; and pseudo-native rituals catering to new-age Mexicans. He takes readers into the world of youth subcultures, in a city where punk and emo stand for a whole way of life—and sometimes lead to rumbles on the streets. Surrounded by volcanoes, earthquake-prone, and shrouded in smog, the city that Hernandez lovingly chronicles is a place of astounding manifestations of danger, desire, humor, and beauty, a surreal landscape of “cosmic violence.” For those who care about one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, “Down & Delirious in Mexico City is essential reading” (David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World).

A moving portrait of the lives of six poor city-dwellers, set in early twentieth century colonial Saigon Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals--a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a destitute Frenchman--and how they navigated the ups and downs of the regional rice trade and the institutions of French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. "Down and Out in Saigon is marked by three qualities that endow it with unusual value: the originality of its subject matter, as the first and only history of colonial Saigon's poor population, the excellence of its research, and Cherry's elegant prose."--Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley "This is more than a corrective of revolutionary historiography--it is a tour de force that brings marginal and forgotten lives into the story of modern Vietnamese history."--Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

A member of seminal new-wave band Magazine, the original bassist in the legendary Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a Mercury-Prize-nominated solo artist, and pioneer of the imaginary soundtrack album--no matter where Barry Adamson's career has taken him, the result has been consistently impressive. Covering his early life up to the 1990s, 'The Barry Adamson Story' addresses Adamson's Mancunian and mixed-race roots, beginning in the late 1950s, through to the highs of his momentous musical achievements and the lows of psychiatric hospitals and drug rehabs. Using a 'noir' style of self examination, he also investigates the acute loss of his parents and sister in his early twenties, multiple failed relationships and arrives at the beginnings of a successful Hollywood soundtrack career.

It is March of 1997, and Roland Axam lost, out of his element, and in a new world. As his plane begins its final approach to Kimp'o International Airport in Seoul, South Korea, Roland realizes his life is about to change forever-again. Roland has already survived a devastating, life-altering tragedy back home in Ottawa, Canada; he knows that what he needs most now is a clean slate. As he arrives in Chŏnju, South Korea, where he plans to teach English and leave his past behind, Roland abandons all that is familiar for the unknown. He immerses himself in a vastly different culture, where communication is difficult and his need to belong brings challenges. But despite the distractions of a bustling city thousands of miles from everything he knows, Roland is still haunted by anger, guilt, and demons that he attempts to drown in alcohol. In this compelling tale, one man travels across an ocean to begin an unforgettable journey of self-discovery that eventually leads him to realize love, forgiveness, healing, and another new beginning.