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A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates is $2.99 (Amazon US) and CDN$ 3.08 (Amazon CA)

Book Description

An Otto Penzler Book

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she’s approached by silver-haired courtly Marcus Kidder—a local resident of some renown. At first his interest in Katya seems innocent, even as Katya’s interest in him seems precociously manipulative. His lovely oceanside home, the children’s books he has written, his classical music, and his lavish presents to her—Mr. Kidder’s life contrasts starkly with Katya’s working-class—and marginally criminal—family background. By almost imperceptible degrees, the relationship between Katya and the gentlemanly Marcus Kidder changes, and posing for him isn’t the romantic endeavor it had seemed. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

In the tradition of Oates’s classic novella Beasts, A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of mounting suspense and gradually unfolding horror.

When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome by Richard E. Rubenstein is $2.99 (Amazon US) and (Amazon CA)

Book Description

A thoroughly researched and vivid re-creation of one of the most critical periods in the history of Western religion

The life of Jesus, and the subsequent persecution of Christians during the Roman Empire, have come to define what many of us know about early Christianity. The fervent debate, civil strife, and bloody riots within the Christian community as it was forming, however, is a story that is rarely told. Richard E. Rubenstein takes readers to the streets of the Roman Empire during the fourth century, where a divisive argument over the divinity of Jesus Christ was underway. Ruled by a Christian emperor, followers of Jesus no longer feared for the survival of their monotheistic faith, but they found themselves in different camps—led by two charismatic men—on the topic of Christian theology. Arius, an Alexandrian priest and poet, preached that Jesus, though holy, is less than God, while Athanasius, a brilliant and violent bishop, saw any diminution of Jesus' godhead as the work of the devil. Between them stood Alexander, the powerful Bishop of Alexandria, in search of a solution that would keep the empire united and the Christian faith alive.

Claudia Silver to the Rescue by Kathy Ebel is $2.99 (Amazon US) and CDN$ 3.08 (Amazon CA)

Book Description

In this gutsy debut novel, flawed but unsinkable Claudia Silver cuts a wide comic swath through 1990s New York City in her misguided attempts to find love and happiness.

Estranged from her bohemian Brooklyn family and fired for an impropriety at work, Claudia Silver is officially in over her head. When her younger sister lands on her doorstep urgently in need of help, twenty-something Claudia desperately wants to offer the rescue that she herself has longed for. But Claudia missteps dramatically, straight into a disastrous love affair that disrupts three very different New York households. Ultimately, she discovers the resilient nature of love where she least expects it—among her own family.

Claudia Silver to the Rescue is the firece yet tender chronicle of the many humiliations and occasional triumphs of a young woman determined to wrest her identity from the spectacular wreckage of her mistake. Uncomfortably hilarious, quintessentially human, Claudia is an unforgettable heroine who shoots for the stars and hits the ceiling.

Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer is $3.79 (Amazon US) and (Amazon CA)

Book Description

In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists’ colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over—and change the course of—our lives. From points afar, they find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. The city is a wonderland for young people with dreams: cramped West Village kitchens, rowdy cocktail parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all, long talks along the Hudson River as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above.

Inspired by the lives of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, Frances and Bernard imagines, through new characters with charms entirely their own, what else might have happened. It explores the limits of faith, passion, sanity, what it means to be a true friend, and the nature of acceptable sacrifice. In the grandness of the fall, can we love another person so completely that we lose ourselves? How much should we give up for those we love? How do we honor the gifts our loved ones bring and still keep true to our dreams?

In witness to all the wonder of kindred spirits and bittersweet romance, Frances and Bernard is a tribute to the power of friendship and the people who help us discover who we are.