Elowen Sterling and Valerian Voss find themselves thrust into a world of mystery and intrigue when their mutual friend, Lumina, is found dead under mysterious circumstances. As the investigation unfolds, old wounds and bitter rivalries resurface, casting suspicion on everyone in their small town of Hollowbrook. Despite their mutual animosity, Elowen and Valerian are forced to work together to uncover the truth behind Luminas demise. As they delve deeper into the shadows of their past, they soon realize that Luminas death is just the beginning of a tangled web of secrets and betrayal that threatens to unravel everything they thought they knew. With danger around every corner and their own lives on the line, Elowen and Valerian must navigate a landscape of lies and deceit to uncover the truth before its too late. But as they draw closer to the heart of the mystery, they find themselves confronting their own demons and facing the ultimate question: can they trust each other?

From one of contemporary literature’s bestselling, critically acclaimed, and beloved authors: a “luminous” novel (Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review) about a fiercely compelling young widow navigating grief, fear, and longing, and finding her own voice—“heartrendingly transcendant” (The New York Times, Janet Maslin). Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s magnificent seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable, and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be sucked back into it. Wounded, selfish, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning insight and empathy, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven—herself. Nora Webster “may actually be a perfect work of fiction” (Los Angeles Times), by a “beautiful and daring” writer (The New York Times Book Review) at the zenith of his career, able to “sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations” (USA TODAY). “Miraculous...Tóibín portrays Nora with tremendous sympathy and understanding” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post).

Stuck in a state of purgatory in the Washington State house in which he lived and died, Evan Molloy, who had shot himself to death for a reason he cannot recall, now must deal with the home's new inhabitant, Maureen Keniston.

The award-winning author’s “gorgeously-crafted second collection of stories” explores moments of profound loss, discovery, and transition (Charlotte Observer). The stories in this volume explore the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters—science, religion, family, self—the powerful act of storytelling keeps their broken lives together. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all. The title story—chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology—follows two generations of a family driven by the “patient and brutal need that people called hope.” In “The Jap Room,” winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her WWII veteran husband finally come home. “Rowing to Darien” introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband’s rice plantation. In “Hush” a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. These and other stories deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and the redemptive power of storytelling. Foreword by the Flannery O’Connor Prize–winning author Mary Hood

"Luminous Mind" is the definitive mental fitness manual, offering unique and uncomplicated ways to engage fully in life. Included in the book are techniques for meditation, focus, and relaxation that have helped Olympic athletes, members of the armed forces, and many others.

Review essays feature analysis and elaboration—what scholars call “criticism”—largely missing from ordinary book and movie reviews. The present book contains review essays that have appeared in a variety of publications and remain relevant for contemporary “thinking Christians.” The essays include critiques of written works by popular thinkers such as N. T. Wright, Bart Ehrman, Reza Aslan, Christian Smith, and Frederic Raphael, films by directors Mel Gibson and Ingmar Bergman, a recent biography of F. F. Bruce, and more. The hyphen in “Re-Views” links the newness of republication with the analytical character of the essays. They start with those dealing with the biblical text and its translation, proceed to some higher critical issues, graduate to literary portraits of Jesus, discuss the relation between the Bible and tradition, and conclude with some biographical portrayals of people associated with Scripture and its interpretation.

The collision of COVID-19 and Christmas 2020 provoked Paul Dinter to try and make sense of Christianity's ancient narrative of "good news." Seeing the virus as a surrogate for many unseen perils confronting our world, he determined to revisit not only December's strange yet familiar story, but also the stranger beliefs built upon it. Examining the larger Christian narrative of salvation, as captured in the Apostles' Creed, makes up the body of the book in which Dinter delves into its symbolic and mythic character as the surest place to find what Christianity still has to offer a hurting world. For, beginning with Jesus' birth narratives through the book of Revelation, a through line runs along an axis that sees dilemmas about Christian faith resolved in doing justice. Brief sketches of racial, economic, ecological/environmental, gender, sexual, and reproductive justice spell out Dinter's case. When the Creed ends with the expectation of the "world-to-come," it captures the message of the prophets, Jesus' and Paul's expectations of the coming kingdom, and Revelation's culminating vision. It commits believers to contribute to a future human community where the justice of God will reside more fully.

Rambo draws on contemporary studies in trauma to rethink a central claim of the Christian faith: that new life arises from death. Reexamining the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus from the middle day-liturgically named as Holy Saturday-she seeks a theology that addresses the experience of living in the aftermath of trauma. Through a reinterpretation of "remaining" in the Johannine Gospel, she proposes a new theology of the Spirit that challenges traditional conceptions of redemption. Offered, in its place, is a vision of the Spirit's witness from within the depths of human suffering to the persistence of divine love.

In Joseph Conrad’s tales, representations of women and of "feminine" generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad’s use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of "masculine" tales of adventure and intrigue and "feminine" dramas of love or domesticity are among the subjects of this literary study. Many of Conrad’s critics have argued that Conrad’s fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser has questioned why Conrad did not "cut them out altogether." Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad’s narrative strategies. Even in tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad introduces elusive feminine presences, in relationships between men, as well as in men’s relationships to their ship, the sea, a shore breeze, or even in the gendered embrace of death. This book investigates an identifiably feminine "point of view" which is present in fugitive ways throughout Conrad’s canon. Conrad’s narrative strategies are articulated through a language of sexual difference that provides the vocabulary and grammar for tales examining European class, racial, and gender paradigms to provide acute and, at times, equivocal investigations of femininity and difference.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.