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Vigil
by George Saunders
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - After his spectacular Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders returns . . . with a new novel even more spectacular than the last.--Los Angeles Times A daring (Time) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Tenth of December, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.--The Boston Globe Not for the first time, Jill Doll Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man's room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone's postdeath future. With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we've come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time--the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress--and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
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The Devil's Daughter
by Danielle Steel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Two diametrically different sisters--one calculating and egotistical, the other honorable, kind, and compassionate--clash in this compelling novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel. Graduating magna cum laude from MIT is the happiest day of Billie Banks's life, although her family is not part of it. Her mother, who always supported her, died when Billie was seventeen. Since then, her father has been slowly drinking himself to death on the family farm in Iowa, and she and her younger sister, Mickie, have grown even more estranged. Growing up, the siblings could not have been more different. Billie was shy, small, bookish, more like their mother; tall, blond Mickie was boldly sexual, craving attention, and lacking empathy for anyone, like their father. Despite Billie's attempts to look after Mickie following their mother's death, her sister consistently treated her with cruelty. So when Mickie invites Billie to move in with her in Los Angeles, Billie is both wary and hopeful. Taking a leap of faith, she joins her sister on the West Coast. While Mickie lands a questionable modeling job and falls in with a fast crowd, Billie begins working at a pathology lab and starts dating a warm, supportive reporter at the Los Angeles Times. But then the siblings' difficult history once again rises to the surface. This gripping story of a sisterly bond strained to the breaking point by narcissism and temptation is an unforgettable tale of good and evil from Danielle Steel.
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Private Rome: A Private Novel
by James Patterson
Jack Morgan, ex-Marine helicopter pilot and CIA agent, is in Italy to open the latest outpost of his international private investigation firm. Its wealthy client base demands maximum force and maximum discretion. But when a priest is murdered at the firm's opening party, Morgan and Matteo Ricci--a decorated former Rome police inspector, now Morgan's newly appointed deputy--come under intense scrutiny. As Morgan and Ricci work the case, they discover that eight priests have died, all under watch of the Swiss Guard and the Vatican Police--
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