Four unforgettable characters beckon you into this spellbinding new novel from the author of last year's explosive New York Times best seller The Senator's Wife. First among them is Wilhelmina - Billy - Gertz, small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The novel centers around her play, "The Lake Shore Limited", about the terrorist bombing of that train—and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife who is traveling on it. How Billy comes to write the play out of her own painful conflicts and ambivalence, how it is then created anew by the actors and the director, how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters' lives - these form the vital core of a story that drives the novel compulsively forward.

Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and like many kids with AS, Jacob has a special focus on one subject -- in his case, forensic analysis. He's always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do...and he's usually right. But then his town is rocked by a terrible murder and, for a change, the police come to Jacob with questions. All of the hallmark behaviors of Asperger's -- not looking someone in the eye, stimulatory tics and twitches, flat affect -- can look a lot like guilt to law enforcement personnel. Suddenly, Jacob and his family, who only want to fit in, feel the spotlight shining directly on them. For his mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication of why nothing is normal because of Jacob. And over this small family the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder?

Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, House Rules looks at what it means to be different in our society, how autism affects a family, and how our legal system works well for people who communicate a certain way -- and fails those who don't.

When Hannah Legare was 11, her father went on a fishing trip in the Charleston harbor and never came back. And while most of the town and her family accepted Buzz's disappearance, Hannah remained steadfastly convinced of his imminent return.

Twenty years later Hannah's new life in San Francisco is unraveling. Her marriage is on the rocks, her business is bankrupt. After a disastrous attempt to win back her husband, she ends up back at her mother's home to "rest up", where she is once again sucked into the mystery of her missing father. Suspecting that those closest are keeping secrets--including Palmer, her emotionally closed, well-mannered brother and Warren, the beautiful boyfriend she left behind--Hannah sets out on an uproarious, dangerous quest that will test the whole family's concepts of loyalty and faith.

Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories - her first in more than ten years. In "College Town l980," young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale "Mirrorball," a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; in "The Little Boy," a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child. Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body—of the intelligent body with the craving mind—that has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill's fiction.

From the moment she burst onto the Canadian literary scene with her instantly acclaimed debut book of stories, The Butterfly Ward (1976), Margaret Gibson proved herself to be "a writer of burning intensity and rare vision, an accomplished explorer of hidden caves of the mind" (Globe and Mail). In her five collections and award-winning novel, Opium Dreams, Gibson mapped a unique fictional world, one frequently populated by characters who—though they may be damaged, marginalized, or mentally ill—nevertheless remained intensely, and rivetingly, human. Published posthumously, Dark Angel is Margaret Gibson's definitive literary testament. Drawn from her entire body of work, this volume contains both published and some recently discovered unpublished stories, as well as an introduction by well-known fiction writer Lisa Moore. Unflinchingly honest, emotionally raw, luminous, this is writing consistently poised on the sharp edge of what it means to be alive. This beautifully designed collection of Margaret Gibson's fiction, some of which has been long unavailable, will introduce new readers to the work of one of Canada's most strikingly original writers, and will give her existing followers an opportunity to own the work of one of their admired writers in a single handsome volume.