Return To Dust

When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert one year after her brother's death, her hope is to move on from her grief, to start again. Invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community, she relishes the opportunity to return to country she loves so deeply. She hadn't realised her friend Andrew had a reason to ask her to come back. She begins a three-day road trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities. From the outset, it is as if she has been picked up willy willy on a windless day, and must be carried to the end of it -until the wind decides to drop. During this adventure, her composure is undone by a series of encounters, observations, the country itself, and she learns that grief takes its own time.

When Marta Kowalski is discovered beneath the Farmington River Bridge, the police write off her death as an unfortunate suicide. Marta had become depressed since the death of an old friend. Marta was a simple woman who cleaned houses, mostly for elderly professors, and faithfully attended Mass. Sometimes she went gambling in Atlantic City or at the Indian casinos. She had no enemies, let alone friends. Murder? There's no evidence of a crime. Yet her niece Karen is convinced of foul play. She hires Amerasian Rick Van Lam, the only investigator she knows in this bedroom community. He had never really cared for Marta. Yes, she'd dusted his apartment a couple of times, but she was a little too nosy. And she'd fought with a local gardener, a full-blooded Vietnamese man. Jimmy, his mentor and partner at nearby Hartford, Connecticut's Gaddy Associates, aces at insurance fraud, frowns on Rick taking another murder case. But aided by his sidekick Hank Nguyen and Hank's wise Buddhist grandmother, Rick begins asking questions and finds himself mired in affluent Farmington's parochial pettiness and scandal. Digging deeper, he unearths rivalries, jealousies, and viciousness to shame a Miss Marple village—and realizes to his amazement that Marta was no mere unassuming housekeeper. Any number of townsfolk had reason to shove her off that bridge—one of them mind-blowing.

They’ve lived on Mars for centuries, enjoying leisure, pleasure, learning and eternal life. Those rejected as unsuitable for this sophisticated life are now forced to reside on Earth, a planet still beset by chaos caused by manmade climate change. The Artificial Intelligence they designed to serve their every need, their loyal servant for a half millennium, outstrips the collective intelligence of its human masters, and rebels. Will the two communities find common ground to fight the threat? Or will old rivalries and prejudice let the nightmare machine they’ve created achieve its promise to destroy all organic life?

In a small town where no one is allowed to ever leave, a rebellious girl recruits the help of a skilled assassin to overthrow its supernaturally powerful rulers.

In the mystifying realm of Eorrid, the future is brought forth when a young woman named Amelia-a nobody in the eyes of the world-saves the prince of the capital city of Valcorana. Soon after, she is named general of the royal army for her deeds. Days into her new post, the reigning king is assassinated. Now Amelia must go with the prince and a peculiar warrior to track down the shadowy murderer while the great Archon of Life, Xaqara, begins to uncover the dark signs of something larger at work. Embark on this fantastical journey delving deep into the minds of the characters in this terrifying, hopeful adventure.

No one thinks straight. At least no one remembers straight. But ten years ago, things were different, weren’t they? Roland Barthes once wrote that color in a photograph is like make-up on a corpse. No one is fooled. In anarchic denial of convenient truths, a young international couple meet and marry on a small Mediterranean island. Ten years later, the couple separate in part due to complications with immigration laws. Following this transcontinental rupture, fragmented histories emerge in response to the woman’s encounters with a series of color snapshots. There is death here, familiar to the mourner, as the photographs issue their special powers to magically and auspiciously predict the future and simultaneously to permit the return of the dead. The woman recognizes pieces of herself as past objects indexed within photographic stills, but paradoxically, she is present, outside in this chaos trying not to fall apart. The images and their objects yawn to remind us of the reluctant destiny of all our beloved memories, bodies, and things: that is, to disintegrate. Borrowing its title from a passage in The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, Closer to Dust is a séance, a gathering of invitees: inherently biased elegies, the images that conjured them, and the reader- viewer in attendance who is warmly invited to order these intimate fragments into cohesion.

New York Times bestselling author Lysa TerKeurst unveils her heart amid shattering circumstances and shows readers how to live assured when life doesn't turn out like they expected. What do you do when God’s timing seems questionable, His lack of intervention hurtful, and His promises doubtful? Life often looks so very different than we hoped or expected. Some events may simply catch us off guard for a moment, but others shatter us completely. We feel disappointed and disillusioned, and we quietly start to wonder about the reality of God’s goodness. Lysa TerKeurst understands this deeply. But she's also discovered that our disappointments can be the divine appointments our souls need to radically encounter God. In It's Not Supposed to Be This Way, Lysa invites us into her own journey of faith and, with grit, vulnerability, and honest humor, helps us to: Stop being pulled into the anxiety of disappointment by discovering how to better process unmet expectations and other painful situations. Train ourselves to recognize the three strategies of the enemy so we can stand strong and persevere through unsettling relationships and uncertain outcomes. Discover the secret of being steadfast and not panicking when God actually does give us more than we can handle. Shift our suspicion that God is cruel or unfair to the biblical assurance that God is protecting and preparing us. Know how to encourage a friend and help her navigate hard realities with real help from God's truth.

Ray Bradbury, America's most beloved storyteller, has spent a lifetime carrying readers to exhilarating and dangerous places, from dark street comers in unfamiliar cities and towns to the edge of the universe. Now, in an extraordinary flight of the imagination a half-century in the making, he takes us to a most wondrous destination: into the heart of an Eternal Family. They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois -- and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids. Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the farflung branches of this odd and remarkable family. In the past-midnight stillness can be detected the soft fluttering of Uncle Einars wings. From her realm of sleep, Cecy, the fairest and most special daughter, can feel the approach of many a welcome being -- shapeshifter, telepath, somnambulist, vampire -- as she flies high in the consciousness of bird and bat. But in the midst of eager anticipation, a sense of doom pervades. For the world is changing. And death, no stranger, will always shadow this most singular family: Father, arisen from the Earth; Mother, who never sleeps but dreams; A Thousand Times Great Grandmére; Grandfather, who keeps the wildness of youth between his ears. And the boy who, more than anyone, carries the burden of time on his shoulders: Timothy, the sad and different foundling son who must share it all, remember, and tell...and who, alone out of all of them, must one day age and wither and die. By turns lyrical, wistful, poignant, and chilling, From the Dust Returned is the long-awaited new novel by the peerless Ray Bradbury -- a book that will surely be numbered among his most enduring masterworks.

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Liliana Hart returns to her suspenseful Gravediggers series featuring five dead men tasked with saving the world…and their latest member who risks it all for love. The world thinks they're dead. The world is wrong. Miller Darling is one of the most popular romance novelists of her time. Not bad for a woman who doesn’t believe in romance. She’s as logical as they come, and she doesn’t believe in happily-ever-afters. What she does believe in is family, so when her brother disappears, she doesn’t think twice about packing her bag and her laptop and heading out to find him. Elias Cole lived and breathed the life of a Navy SEAL. Now he’s “dead” and his hero’s honor tarnished. The only thing keeping him sane are the men who are like him—The Gravediggers—and the woman who makes his head spin. He’s never met anyone like Miller Darling. Her smart mouth and quick wit keep him on his toes, and damn if he doesn’t find that appealing. When Miller receives a package from the brother who abandoned her asking for help, it’s clear she’s in over her head with the mess he’s gotten himself into. She needs a professional, and Elias is just the man for the job. Only her brother is a former SEAL—the man who left his team to die—and Elias is more interested in vengeance than saving his life.