Eight stories by one of Japan's most important women authors concern the struggles of women in a repressive society. An unwed mother introduces her children to their father . . . A woman confronts the "other woman". . . A young single mother resents her children . . . These stories touch on universal themes of passion and jealousy, motherhood's joys and sorrows, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment.

Entering the SAS after serving with the Royal Green Jackets, Gaz Hunter was following a family tradition. His missions have ranged from extracting hostages in Sierra Leone to counter-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland - and he has always led from the front. A former senior NCO of the SAS, Hunter is the highest-ranking member of the regiment to tell his story yet.

San Francisco’s art world is exhibiting murderous tendencies… Geez, make a splash in the world of art forgery at the age of seventeen and people can’t stop bringing it up. Lesson learned: genuine art is priceless, and forgery gets you arrested. Now Annie puts her artistic talents to honest use as a faux finisher in San Francisco. But carving out a new reputation can be a creative challenge… Modernism isn’t Annie’s thing, but even she is surprised to discover that the “sculpture” in a prestigious gallery’s grisly new exhibition is an all-too-real corpse—the artist’s. Meanwhile, a Chagall painting is stolen from the Brock Museum, and Annie’s old friend Bryan is accused of being in on the fix. To track down the missing Chagall, she’ll need the dubious assistance of a certain sexy art thief. And if Michael—or whatever his real name may be—isn’t distraction enough, Annie’s mother shows up in town, acting strangely. Annie’s got to solve these mysteries, and fast—because art is long, but life can be very, very short.

With time running out, Dewey Andreas is the last hope for a kidnap victim. The US Vice President has a problem. Her son, off in college, doesn't care for his security detail. So when Spring Break comes around, he slips away from his bodyguard, picks up his best friend, and heads to Mexico. But, at the airport, he’s kidnapped. If an exorbitant ransom isn’t paid in hours, he’ll be killed. Dewey Andreas, CIA operative and former Delta, happens to be in Mexico, taking some time off. Now he’s in a race against the clock, with a highly-trained group of vicious men waiting at the other end. An original Dewey Andreas short by New York Times bestseller Ben Coes, perfect for fans of Mark Greaney, Kyle Mills and Brad Thor.

Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.

The novel A Brief Excursion anchors this collection of fiction by one of the most significant postwar Croatian writers. This novel and six stories, including many from Soljan's first book, Traitors, reveal a sensibility both comic and poignant, devoted to questions of identity and solidarity, of how the one and the many conflict and intermingle-issues that were at the center of both political and literary life for Soljan. Whether fixing up a summerhouse on the Istrian coast or confronting prejudice and the past in a tourist town, Soljan's characters are stirred to action by an undefined longing, only to find the stark landscape of self-knowledge and loss.

Bel Ami (The History of a Scoundrel): The story chronicles journalist Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power from a poor ex-NCO to one of the most successful men in Paris, most of which he achieves by manipulating a series of powerful, intelligent, and wealthy mistresses. The novel is set in Paris in the upper-middle class environment of the leading journalists of the newspaper La Vie Française and their friends. Pierre et Jean - is a naturalist or psycho-realist story, notably so by the subjects on which it treats, including knowledge of one's heredity (whether one is a legitimate son or a bastard), the bourgeoisie, and the problems stemming from money. Notre Coeur (A Woman's Pastime): The novel tells the story of a woman without a heart, frigid and probably a lesbian. The hero, facing this fascinating and awesome being, takes another mistress, who can hardly satisfy him. He is devastated by this passionate love, violent, melancholic and cruel. A Life is a satirical novel about the folly of romantic illusion. The novel tells the story of young Jeanne, full of hope and dreams of love, who discovers the outside world after finishing an education in a convent. She is looking forward to her new life and she is dreaming of the day when she will find the man who loves her. All her expectations are fulfilled, however… Mont Oriol Strong as Death. Guy de Maupassant was a French writer, remembered as a master of the short story form, and as a representative of the naturalist school of writers.