In this memoir, Kate Millett, author of "Sexual Politics" details the formative events of her youth. In the late 1950s, her wealthy, glamorous, aesthete Aunt Dorothy presented a cash gift which enabled her to study at Oxford, but with strings attached. Millett was made to promise never to see her female lover, Jaycee, again. Needless to say, she chose not to trade her love in for Oxford, and brought Jaycee along with her. Millett candidly recounts the reverberations of her decision, her family life choked by money, her closeted sexuality, the great Irish divide between peasants and immigrants, and her struggles as an artist.

The maverick travel writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey, known principally for his distinctively American writing, provides more of the same in this evocative book of essays, but he also ventures outside the States and travels to Scotland, Australia, and the bleak Isla de la Sombra in Mexico.

Macon Leary, the middle-aged author of a series of books for armchair travellers, has recently had his grief over the murder of his son compounded by the breakup of his marriage. He begins to descend into obsessive behavior and must soon take refuge with his unmarried sister, who is already occupied with the two other Leary brothers, both of whom are also divorced. Macon's unlikely rescuer is Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer who tames Edward, the increasingly obnoxious corgi left to Macon by his son. Macon transcends his own social class prejudice to find that he has a lot to offer Muriel and her disabled son Alexander, and that they have much to offer him as well.

In this first major work in 10 years from Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, Harry Trellman, the narrator, is an elderly Chicagoan who becomes the uneasy friend of Sigmund Adletsky, an even older millionaire. Adletsky shows Trellman how he must pick up his life with Amy Wustrin, a high school sweetheart he has never forgotten. As the story reaches its intensely poignant climax, we find Trellman in a cemetery in the middle of a Chicago snowstorm, helping Amy to re-bury her ex-husband, and finding a little self-redemption in the bargain. THE ACTUAL (1997), at 112 pages, is actually a novella. And, as in so many of Bellow's later novels, it includes an intense awareness of the approach of death.

A law clerk and the judge she works for are murdered. The suspect is the judge's ex-wife Abigail, a prosecutor in the DA's office. The state's witness against Abigail is a sociopathic criminal whom Abigail had put on death row, but who was released by her ex-husband. Abigail hires Matthew Reynolds, a death penalty attorney whose assistant grows suspicious.

A debut novel, set during the Battle of Britain, about the effects of war on the men who fight in it and those they leave behind.

Alice McDermott's sixth novel begins shortly after the end of WWII and shows a young woman unexpectedly meeting the man she will marry. With her typically masterful storytelling, McDermott tracks the woman and her family through the tumult of children, war, and the 1960s.