Concentration, but with Book Covers

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

With only a handful of "tourists" - CIA-trained assassins - left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can't let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo's compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo...

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

A powerful retelling of Sleeping Beauty that is "heartbreaking and heartwarming." Ever since she was a child, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Gemma's stories about Briar Rose. But a promise Rebecca makes to her dying grandmother will lead her on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Gemma's astonishing claim: I am Briar Rose. A journey that will lead her to...

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado

It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes - a gambler notorious for never winning - dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding...

Don't Go Near the Water by William Brinkley

At once a rousing entertaining farce and gentle love story, this novel is set on a remote Pacific island during the waning days of the World War II. It follows the adventures of a group of young officers in the public relations sector of the Navy - described as commissioned without the corrupting influence of any intervening naval training - as they face wartime adversities with...

Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George

When an orphan girl named Creel befriends a dragon, she unknowingly inherits a pair of slippers that could be used to save her kingdom, or destroy it.

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives...

Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate's least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

Scandal Takes a Holiday by Lindsey Davis

Ancient Rome's organized crime syndicates have never been more dangerous or more conning than in this latest adventure featuring First Century sleuth Marcus Didius Falco.

Songbook by Nick Hornby

Songs, songwriters, and why and how they get under our skin... Songbook is Hornby's labor of love. A shrewd, funny, and completely unique collection of musings on pop music, why it's good, what makes us listen and love it, and the ways in which it attaches itself to our lives - all with the beat of a perfectly mastered mix tape.

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl

These four stories are, by turns, funny, bawdy, touching, and outrageous. They are for lovers of tales that combine the macabre and the erotic with intriguing twists of plot.

The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom

Young Alphonsus Cohenburg enters his mother's bedroom and finds her covered in blood. She tells him his uncle has murdered his father, and orders him to flee Cohenburg castle forever to save his own life! A disconsolate exile, Alphonsus wanders the earth seeking the means of survival, first as a soldier, then a miner, and finally as sacristan of a church, where he meets the beautiful...

The Minaret of Djam by Freya Stark

Stark traveled the difficult and often dangerous journey from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat in search of one of Afghanistan's most celebrated treasures, the Minaret of Djam. This magnificent symbol of the powerful Ghorid Empire that once stretched from Iran to India lies in the heart of central Afghanistan's wild Ghor Province. Surrounded by over 6,000 foot high mountains and by the...