THE BOOK THIEF - SECOND HAND

In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck’s father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days, Layla finds herself far from her accustomed social whirl, assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia, and destined, in her opinion, to go completely mad with boredom. But once she secures a room in the home of the unconventional Romeyn family, she is drawn into their complex world and soon discovers that the truth of the town is entangled in the thorny past of the Romeyn dynasty.

At the Romeyn house, twelve-year-old Willa is desperate to learn everything in her quest to acquire her favorite virtues of ferocity and devotion—a search that leads her into a thicket of mysteries, including the questionable business that occupies her charismatic father and the reason her adored aunt Jottie remains unmarried. Layla’s arrival strikes a match to the family veneer, bringing to light buried secrets that will tell a new tale about the Romeyns. As Willa peels back the layers of her family’s past, and Layla delves deeper into town legend, everyone involved is transformed—and their personal histories completely rewritten.

An ancient prophecy threatens the foundation of the church...and those who dare to die for what they believe.

The year is 1339, the height of the Inquisition. A secret half a millennium old is on the brink of being exposed. Centuries before, the Church compiled the letters written by St. Paul with other texts to form the foundation of the Christian canon. But what the world doesn't know is that Paul wrote another letter-a letter speaking of men and women who, though begotten of men, possess mysterious spiritual gifts. Now, the time has come for the Gifted to gather. The beautiful healer; the wise priest; the slave with the gift of prophecy; the knight with faith enough to leave the Church-as their talents grow more powerful, so do those who wish to destroy them. Now, they must race against time to find the rest of the Gifted ones, and to decipher the prophecy that foretold of their coming. For only by combining their powers will they vanquish those determined to destroy them, and uncover the secret of the letter that will determine the fate of the Church...and the world.

From the Booker Prize-winning John Banville comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory.

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car―also borrowed―onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and b...