Faint Promise Of Rain

Shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing It is 1554 in the desert of Rajasthan. On a rare night of rain, a daughter is born to a family of Hindu temple dancers just as India’s new Mughal Emperor Akbar sets his sights on their home, the fortress city of Jaisalmer, and the other Princely States around it. Fearing a bleak future, Adhira’s father, the temple’s dance master—against his wife and sons’ protests—puts his faith in tradition and in his last child for each to save the other: he insists that Adhira is destined to “marry” the temple’s deity and to give herself to a wealthy patron. Thus she must live in submission as a woman revered and reviled. But Adhira’s father may not have the last word. Adhira grows into an exquisite dancer, and after one terrible evening she must make a choice—one that will carry her family’s story and their dance to a startling new beginning.

A grumpy lobster fisherman tosses a fashion influencer’s impeccably curated life overboard in the next romantic comedy from international bestselling author Amy Lea. In a last-ditch effort to rescue her brand from the brink of irrelevance, Boston fashion influencer Melanie Karlsen finds herself in a rural fishing village on the east coast of Canada. The only thing scarier than nature itself? The burly and bearded bed-and-breakfast owner and fisherman, Evan Whaler—who single-handedly disproves the theory that Canadians are “nice.” After a boating accident lands Evan unconscious in the hospital, Mel is mistaken for his fiancée by his welcoming yet quirky family, who are embroiled in a long-standing feud over the B&B. In a bold attempt to mend family fences, Mel agrees to fake their engagement for one week in exchange for Evan’s help with her social media content. Amid long hikes and campfire chats, reeling in their budding feelings for each other proves more difficult by the day. But is Mel willing to sacrifice her picture-perfect life in the city for a chance at a true, unfiltered love in the wild?

Valerie Tagwira has a gift for capturing the mood of a social or political moment: its concerns, unease, compromises and hopes. So it is with her second novel, Trapped. Trapped explores the lives of three characters: Unesu is a doctor, Cashleen trained as a journalist and Delta qualified as a chemical engineer. Unesu is employed, but his work exposes him to the deficiencies in the system every day as he faces the challenges of life and death. Each of the two young women, good friends, daunted by having their job applications repeatedly rejected, make moral and ethical compromises in order to find work, or at least an income that will pay their bills. These three individuals provide the pivot around which the action unfolds, introducing the reader to people and situations that paint a vital picture of life in Harare at a time of crisis, when survival depends on courage, determination, friendship and humour.

Chibelu is a happily married man with a well-paying job in Gaborone, Botswana. He has a very flirtatious secretary He makes a decision that leads to a transfer to Tsebeyatonki village, a very superstitious village... Snakes somehow start finding their way into his office. There is one common disturbing thing amongst them: they are all turning up dead... It suddenly dawns on him that he made the wrong decision. But its too late...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

Shoko, a man form a poor family in Francistown, Botswana, attends the University of Gaborone, but seduced, by drug taking, fails his exams, commits an assault, is suspended and embarks on a crime spree in murder, mental institutions and alcohol abuse. Shoko is forced to return home to his mother, a stern believer in witchcraft and traditional medicine, struggling with her other children threatening to go the same way as Shoko. Will the family survive....

Fifteen-year-old Mina Clark lives in a future Manhattan that is ruled by extremists. Girls aren’t allowed to get an education, they need permission to speak to boys, and all marriages are negotiated by contract. But Mina’s grandmother has secretly been teaching her to read, leading Mina down a path of rebellion, romance, and danger that not only threatens to destroy her family’s reputation, it could get Mina killed. Suspenseful and empowering, Time Zero is about what it’s like to be powerless, underestimated, and manipulated and what it takes to go against society to assert who you actually want to be.

"Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing...bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night." —The New Yorker With the savage humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith brought a distinct twentieth-century acuteness to her prolific body of fiction. In her more than twenty novels, psychopaths lie in wait amid the milieu of the mundane, in the neighbor clipping the hedges or the spouse asleep next to you at night. Now, Norton continues the revival of this noir genius with another of her lost masterpieces: a later work from 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, is a tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice that lies beneath the peculiarly American veneer of righteousness. This novel, out of print for years, again attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).