South Atlantic Requiem

It is 1982 and the British prime minister and the Argentine president are both clinging to power. Downing Street, having ignored alarm bells coming from the South Atlantic, finds itself in a full-blown crisis when Argentina invades the remote and forgotten British territory of the Falklands Islands. Catesby is dispatched urgently to prevent Argentina from obtaining more lethal Exocet missiles by fair means or foul. From Patagonia to Paris, from Chevening to the White House, Catesby plays a deadly game of diplomatic cat and mouse determined to avert the loss of life. The clock is ticking as diplomats and statesmen race for a last-minute settlement while the weapons of war are primed and aimed. Edward Wilson's stunning new spy thriller brilliantly evokes the intricate world of high-stakes espionage with a rare authenticity and deeply-felt sympathy for the human cost and tragedy of conflict.

Catesby takes over the South America Desk at MI6, only to discover that disaster in the South Atlantic is looming. Downing Street is slashing defence spending, but refusing to negotiate a Falklands deal. With hostilities imminent, Catesby's job is to prevent the Argentine Junta from obtaining more Exocet missiles. Catesby is summoned and given a secret and highly sensitive task by the Foreign Secretary. He is sent to Peru via Washington to help negotiate a last minute peace deal. Catesby knows that the peace deal involves Faustian pacts. The right-wingers in Reagan's White House want the repressive Junta to survive - and many in London would prefer Thatcher not to survive. But Catesby and the Foreign Secretary have an unspoken bond. Both men have experienced the horror of war and want to spare others.

National Book Award winner: This story of a family torn apart by the Vietnam era is “a magnificent portrayal of two noble men who broke each other’s hearts” (Booklist). James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, instead began a career in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, rising through the ranks and eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived a privileged life, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope—all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents’ house. James fulfilled the goal his father had abandoned, becoming a priest himself. His feelings toward his father leaned toward worship as well—until the tumult of the 1960s came between them. Their disagreements, over Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; turmoil in the Church; and finally, Vietnam—where the elder Carroll chose targets for US bombs—began to outweigh the bond between them. While one of James’s brothers fled to Canada, another was in law enforcement ferreting out draft dodgers. James, meanwhile, served as a chaplain at Boston University, protesting the war in the streets but ducking news cameras to avoid discovery. Their relationship would never be the same again. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer, and a husband with children of his own, did he begin to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In An American Requiem, the New York Times bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword and Christ Actually offers a benediction, in “a moving memoir of the effect of the Vietnam War on his family that is at once personal and the story of a generation . . . at once heartbreaking and heroic, this is autobiography at its best” (Publishers Weekly).

In the near future, the living and the dead share the same space. Most of the "Blue Lights" are harmless, witless drones, as lost in death as they were in life. Some want revenge. Some want power. Some even want company to join them in the ranks of the departed. Enter Alice Hotwire, Detective Exorcist. She's the best there is at keeping the peace on the Blue Light beat, and her fellow officers hate her for it. It's a job she doesn't want, in a world she doesn't understand -- but when a break-in at the Maximum Security Necropolis sets off a surge of violent, brutal hauntings, Alice Hotwire knows she's the only one that can pull the city from the brink of chaos.

From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any other feature of the American landscape -- as home to the continent's first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil War, and birthplace of America's twentieth-century navy. In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself -- he hoped not literally -- in the river and its history. What Swift survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his sidekick Martin -- whose photographs accompany the text -- Swift points his bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay. Readers who accompany him through his Journey on the James will come away with the accumulated pleasure, if not the bruises and mud, of four hundred miles of adventure and history in the life of one of America's great watersheds.

The mysterious death of a young woman on an Australian farm reveals a bittersweet story of doomed wartime romance amidst a family crisis. Alan Duncan returns to his family home in Australia after the war and several years of study in England. But his homecoming is marred by the mysterious suicide of his parents' quiet and reliable parlour-maid. A search through her belongings in search of clues leads to heartbreaking revelations about the woman's identity, the death of Alan's brother Bill and, above all, the disappearance of his brother's fiancée, Janet.

A thrilling SOE spy novel by a former special forces officer who is 'poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré' 'Edward Wilson seems poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré' Irish Independent 'More George Smiley than James Bond, Catesby will delight those readers looking for less blood and more intelligence in their spy thrillers' Publishers Weekly Cambridge, 1941. A teenage William Catesby leaves his studies to join the war effort. Parachuted into Occupied France as an SOE officer, he witnesses remarkable feats of bravery during the French Resistance. Yet he is also privy to infighting and betrayal - some of the Maquisards are more concerned with controlling the peace than fighting the war. Double agents and informers abound, and with torture a certainty if he is taken, Catesby knows there is no one he can trust. Passed from safe house to safe house, with the Abwehr on his tail, he is drawn towards Lyon, a city of backstreets and blind alleys. His mission is simple: thwart an act of treachery that could shape the future of France. 'Edward Wilson's excellent Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man draws on his own special forces training' Independent 'Engaging . . . Dynamic . . . Wilson's fascination is as much with how the spy betrays himself as with how he manipulates others' The Times Praise for Edward Wilson: 'Stylistically sophisticated . . . Wilson knows how to hold the reader's attention' W.G. Sebald 'A reader is really privileged to come across something like this' Alan Sillitoe 'All too often, amid the glitzy gadgetry of the spy thriller, all the fast cars and sexual adventures, we lose sight of the essential seriousness of what is at stake. John le Carré reminds us, often, and so does Edward Wilson' Independent

From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a mélange of beautifully rendered relationships. In ”After the Season,” a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she’s rich. In “Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,” a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn’t his father who was the distant one. A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in “The Night in Baden-Baden,” but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. And in “Stranger in the Night,” an obliging professor becomes an accomplice—not entirely unwittingly—to the temporary escape of a charismatic fugitive on a delayed flight from New York to Frankfurt. The truth, as once character puts it, is “passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free.” Tantalizingly, so is the act of telling a lie—to others and to ourselves.

Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Rutgers University Press is pleased to make these important books available again in newly designed editions.