New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (1994)

On a lake deep in Minnesota's north woods, John and Kathy Wade are trying to reassemble their lives. John, a rising political star, has just suffered a devastating electoral defeat. Kathy attempts to comfort her husband, but soon it becomes apparent that something is horribly wrong between them, that they have hidden too much from each other. Then one day Kathy vanishes. Their boat is gone - did she drown or is she lost? Or did she flee, disappearing into a new life? As a massive search gets under way, the possibilities multiply in terrifying directions. Uncovering the truth requires an investigation of Wade's life, and gradually we come to see that he is a sorcerer lost inside his own magic, a Houdini capable of escaping everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (1994)

In a West Virginia girls' camp in July 1963, a group of children experience an unexpected rite of passage. Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy. Like Buddy, the wide-eyed boy so at home in the natural bower of the forest, Lenny and Alma are forever transformed by violence, by family secrets, by surprising turns of love. What they choose to remember, what they meet within and around the boundaries of the camp, will determine the rest of their lives. In a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas, Lenny and Alma confront a terrible darkness and find in themselves a knowledge never lent them by the adult world. Visceral, filled with suspense and surprise, Shelter is an extraordinary achievement. Jayne Anne Phillips continues to explore family ties and generational complexities. She questions the idea of the existence of evil and brings to startling immediacy the primal divinity of the isolated, mountainous landscape of rural Appalachia. Shelter is a novel of transcendent beauty by one of the finest writers of our time.

Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (1994)

Very good in dust jacket.

The bestselling author of In The Land of Dreamy Dreams expands her fictional landscape and for the first time recounts a story set in ancient times. 500 B.C.--Pericles is dead; the Golden Age has peaked; and, in its aftermath, in a Grecian setting of declines and fall, a slave girl begins her ascension to freedom and self-discovery.

New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (1994)

From the lore of her people, the Sioux, Susan Power presents an extraordinary debut novel rich in drama and infused with magic. Set on a North Dakota reservation, this book weaves the stories of the old and the young, broken families, romantic rivals, and men and women in love and at war.

New York, NY: Hyperion (1994)

For years, Det. Dave Robicheaux of the New Iberia Sheriff's office kept the secret of the watery resting place of the Nazi submarine. Now decades later, when a powerful Jewish activist and a neo-Nazi psychopath named Will Buchalter both want to find the sub first, Robicheaux's knowledge puts him at the center of a terrifying struggle of conflicting desires.

New York, NY: Atheneum Publishers (1994)

In 1984 a large cancer was discovered in Reynolds Price's spinal cord. Here he recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction. He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and radiation that temporarily arrests it; the trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; the discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life.

New York, NY: Doubleday (1994)

In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm:

Twenty -six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case.

Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison:

Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now facing the death penalty for a fatal bombing in 1967. He has run out of chances -- except for one: the young, liberal Chicago lawyer who just happens to be his grandson.

While the executioners prepare the gas chamber, while the protesters gather and the TV cameras wait, Adam has only days, hours, minutes to save his client. For between the two men is a chasm of shame, family lies, and secrets -- including the one secret that could save Sam Cayhall's life... or cost Adam his.

New York, NY: Delacorte (1994)

Thorn, the dark, brooding hero of Hall's mega-hit Under Cover of Daylight, returns in a brilliant thiller of obsession and madness--a suspenseful tale of environmental revenge, set in the Florida Keys.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (1994)

Near fine in dust jacket.

In three tantalizing novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on a quintessentially American journey -- from the fishing waters of the South to the hunting woods of the North ranches of the West -- as he leads us the wondrous landscape of the human heart.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (1994)

A collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart against the backdrop of God's creation, this astonishing work charges headlong past the hard surface of modern life to illuminate man and his relationship with the modern world.

Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (1994)

Near fine in dust jacket.

On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, award-winning novelist Larry Brown quit the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. With three published books to his credit and a fourth nearly finished, he made the risky decision to try life as a full-time writer. On Fire, his first work of nonfiction, looks back on his life as a full-time firefighter. Unflinching accounts of daily trauma - from the blistering heat of burning trailer homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes - catapult readers into the hard reality that has driven Larry Brown. As firefighter and fireman-turned-author, as husband and hunter, and as father and son, Brown offers insights into the choices men face pursuing their life's work. And, in the forthright style we expect from Larry Brown, his diary builds incrementally and forcefully to the explanation of how one man who regularly confronted death began to burn with the desire to write about life.

Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press (1994)

When Thea Tamborella returns to New Orleans after a ten-year absence, she finds a city gripped by fear. The privileged white socialites of her private-school days pack guns to fancy dinner parties and spend their free time in paramilitary patrols. The black gardeners, maids, and cooks who work days in the mansions of the elite Garden District return each evening to housing projects wracked by poverty, drugs, and gang violence. The city's haves and have-nots glare at each other across a yawning racial divide as fear turns to hate and an us-against-them mentality.