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A collection of essays exploring the world takes readers from Bensonhurst, to Budapest, to Morocco, to the Roman flat of Gore Vidal, and introduces them to such figures as Oprah Winfrey and Mario Cuomo. By the author of Italian Days. 12,500 first printing.

After bank president Sirus McDougald's daughter dies, he must recover from grief in time to prevent white power brokers from destroying the cohesion of his middle-class, segregated, southern black community. A first novel. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Tour.

A rich and evocative novel about fidelity and betrayal, exploitation and colonialism. Cape Town, 1899. Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist and diamond tycoon, believes that he has only months to live, and that the only thing that can save him is the sound of English birdsong in the South African countryside surrounding his Cape residence. "The Colossus," as Rhodes is known throughout South Africa, recruits Francis Wills, an Oxford don and the world's leading expert in birdsong, to transport two hundred British songbirds-blackbirds, nightingales, chaffinches, robins and starlings-by sea from Southampton to the Cape Province. But the birds, confused by the change of season and hemisphere, refuse to sing. This is but the first obstacle for Wills, who finds himself irresistibly drawn to intrigue-romantic, political, and ornithological-in a country on the brink of war. Ann Harries' splendid first novel is cast with a host of sharply drawn real-life characters, among them Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll who are friends of Wills' in England, and Rudyard and Mrs. Kipling, intimates of Rhodes in his imperialist oasis.

Maurice Guest's dream of becoming a great pianist is ruined by his destructive relationship with pianist Louise Dufrayer, who remains obsessed with thoughts of her old lover, Schilsky

Narrates the life of a young female Episcopal priest in High Balsam, a small, economically distressed Smoky Mountain town, which is shaken up by the arrival of three strangers

The president emerita of the Poetry Society of America explores her decision not to have children through a sincere, profound account of her growth as a poet and as a woman, and of the choices that have shaped her fate.

The narrator, an Australian woman, looks back on her complex relationship with her mother

Anna Teller leads her Jewish-Hungarian family over the course of seventy-five years, through the death of her husband, the horrors of the Nazi occupation, the Hungarian revolt, and her son's emigration to the United States

With colorful characters, including many based on real figures, and a plot that hinges on romance, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin combines domestic comedy and regional history to examine slavery, Protestant theology, and gender differences in early America.