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Black and White and Dead All Over
Written by John Darnton
978-0-307-26752-8 (0-307-26752-0)
July 2008
Ellen Butterby had never before seen a dead body. So she was not at all prepared for what she found on that mid-September morning.
It was a chilly day, mist turning to rain. She emerged still groggy from New York's Port Authority bus terminal on Eighth Avenue--she had napped on the bus... Read More
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Real World
Written by Natsuo Kirino
Translated by Philip Gabriel
978-0-307-26757-3 (0-307-26757-1)
July 2008
Chapter OneNinna Hori
I’m penciling in my eyebrows when the smog alert siren starts blaring. It’s happened every day since summer vacation started, so it’s no surprise. “May I have your attention,” this woman’s voice drawls over a loudspeaker. “An air pollution advisory has just been issued,” and the siren continues to... Read More
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The Legal Limit
Written by Martin Clark
978-0-307-26835-8 (0-307-26835-7)
July 2008
The shooting came in October 1984, abrupt and rash, a quicksilver bang.
The day it happened, Mason Hunt had spent most of his morning settled into the afghan-covered recliner at his mother’s house, watching a nondescript brown and tan and gray wren fly against the big den window again and again as... Read More
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Palace Council
Written by Stephen L. Carter
978-0-307-26658-3 (0-307-26658-3)
July 2008
Hitting the Town
(I)
Had Eddie Wesley been a less reliable man, he would never have stumbled over the body, chased Junie to Tennessee, battled the devils to a draw, and helped to topple a President. But Eddie was blessed or perhaps cursed with a dependability that led to a lack... Read More
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Illegal Action
Written by Stella Rimington
978-0-307-26885-3 (0-307-26885-3)
July 2008
1
November
For once Alvin Jackson had made the wrong choice.
Usually he had an unerring eye for a soft target. It wasn't about size-once a man built like a nightclub bouncer had cried when Jackson showed him the knife. No, it was something less tangible, a kind of passivity that Jackson... Read More
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December
Written by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
978-0-307-26830-3 (0-307-26830-6)
June 2008
One
Saturday
Wilson’s got his arm deep in the twisted mess of wires, pipes, and tubing that festers there beneath his truck’s dented hood like the intestines of some living thing. He gropes at the undersides of things, trying to find whatever leaking crack it is that’s caused him now to fail inspection... Read More
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The Sister
Written by Poppy Adams
978-0-307-26816-7 (0-307-26816-0)
June 2008
It’s ten to two in the afternoon and I’ve been waiting for my little sister, Vivi, since one-thirty. She’s finally coming home, at sixty-seven years old, after an absence of nearly fifty years.
I’m standing at a first-floor window, an arched stone one like you’d find in a church, my face close... Read More
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How Perfect Is That
Written by Sarah Bird
978-0-307-26828-0 (0-307-26828-4)
June 2008
April 3, 2003
4:15 a.m.
Four-fifteen in the morning is the perfect time to catalog the one commodity I am still rich in: regrets. I keep trying to pare that lengthy list down to a manageably brief inventory of everything I failed to acquire during marriage to a scion of one of America's... Read More
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The Dawn Patrol
Written by Don Winslow
978-0-307-26620-0 (0-307-26620-6)
June 2008
The marine layer wraps a soft silver blanket over the coast.
The sun is just coming over the hills to the east, and Pacific Beach is still asleep.
The ocean is a color that is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite black, but something somewhere between all three.
Out on the line... Read More
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A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Written by Mohammed Hanif
978-0-307-26807-5 (0-307-26807-1)
May 2008
There is something about these bloody squadron leaders that makes them think that if they lock you up in a cell, put their stinking mouth to your ear, and shout something about your mother, they can find all the answers. They are generally a sad lot, these leaders without any squadrons... Read More
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The Boat
Written by Nam Le
978-0-307-26808-2 (0-307-26808-X)
May 2008
Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice
My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem--perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was... Read More
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A Writer's People
Written by V.S. Naipaul
978-0-375-40738-3 (0-375-40738-3)
April 2008
The Worm in the Bud
Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet in one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvellous first book... Read More
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featured authors:
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Photo © Jerry Bauer
Don Winslow, author of The Dawn Patrol
Don Winslow is a former private investigator and consultant and the author of ten novels, including The Dawn Patrol, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Power of the Dog, California Fire and Life, and The Death and Life of Bobby Z. He lives in Southern California.
A Conversation with Don Winslow
Q: Okay the first and most obvious, do you surf and are you any good? I believe you once described your surfing skills as limited to falling and swimming.
A: I do, but I pretty much suck. I'm awkward anyway—a friend once said that I walk like a broken duck—so balance isn't my best thing. Also, we've moved an hour inland from the beach, to an old ranch, so IÕm more into my 'cowboy' phase. But I do keep a wetsuit in the trunk of my car, and if I'm near the coast, I usually pop in for at least a body-surfing session. I do love it.
Q: Surfing has featured in your previous novels but never as front and center as in The Dawn Patrol. Have you been thinking about writing a big surfing novel for a long time? What made you want to do it now?
A: Yeah, I have been. You know that old adage, 'Write what you know.' I'd amend it to, 'Write what you know and love,' because you're going to be spending a whole lot of time there. I'd spent years doing a pretty grim book about the drug trade, then a mob book, so going to the beach seemed like a nice break. But really I've always wanted to try to capture in words what had always been an ineffable fascination in my life. I was raised along the ocean and have been in the surf since I can remember. My dad took me out and taught me about waves. The ocean has always been my refuge and my catharsis, if that's not overly pretentious. I walked to the beach after my father's funeral. The sound of a wave going off still gets my heart pounding, and I never feel as good, or as much at peace, as when I come out of the ocean after a good, rough session. Food tastes better, I sleep great. . . I hope I captured some of that in the written word.
Keep reading the Q&A
Don Winslow's tour schedule
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Photo © Debi Milligan
Poppy Adams, author of The Sister
Poppy Adams has worked as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC and the Discovery Channel. She lives with her husband and three children in London, where she is working on her next book.
Get the free Reader's Guide for The Sister
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