Bittersweetness is a tendency towards states of longing, poignancy and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death - bitter and sweet - are forever paired. If you seek out beauty in your everyday life . . . If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day . . . If you react intensely to music, art and nature . . . Then you probably identify...

Returning home from a client visit late one evening, Adam Snow takes a wrong turn and stumbles across the derelict old White House. Compelled by curiousity he decides to enter, only to be repelled when he feels the unmistakeable sensation of a small hand creeping onto his own. This is just the beginning of a series of odd experiences.

Sid Halley, former British jump racing champion and private detective, is not having a good time. His wife Marina has decided she needs some time out of their marriage to think about the future and Sid is devastated. But then Gary Bremner, an ex-jockey trainer, calls him to ask for his help - he is being threatened by someone in the racing world and he needs a friend he can trust. However, the very next morning, Gary?s stable yard is torched, horses...

Leaving Home brings together three, previously published short pieces, each dealing with a variation on the theme of leaving home. The first, 'Weights and Measures', deals with the tragic loss of a child; the second is a non-fiction letter Picoult wrote to her eldest son as he left for college; and, 'Ritz' tells the story of a mother who takes the vacation all mothers need sometime. Jodi Picoult has the remarkable ability to portray an event's key...

How do you stop a murder that?s already happened? 'Somebody's going to be murdered at the ball tonight. It won't appear to be a murder and so the murderer won't be caught. Rectify that injustice and I'll show you the way out.' It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden - one of the...

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." These words are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When...

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. But it isn'�t the monster Conor'�s been expecting. He'�s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he�s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming.� The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing...