A Good House - second hand

"Terrific stories...Just about perfect" ( Entertainment Weekly ): Brownsville is the collection that established Oscar Casares as one of the leading voices in the literature of the modern Southwest.



At the country's edge, on the Mexican border, Brownsville, Texas, is a town like many others. It is a place where people work hard to create better lives for their children, where people bear grudges against their neighbors, where love blossoms only to fade, and where the only real certainty is that life holds surprises.



In his sparkling debut, Oscar Casares creates a cast of unforgettable characters confronting everyday possibilities and Diego, an eleven-year-old whose job at a fireworks stand teaches him a lesson in defiance; Bony, a young man whose discovery of a monkey's head on his lawn drives a wedge between him and his parents; Lola, whose stolen bowling ball offers an unlikely chance for change. The achievement of Brownsville lies in its remarkably honest portrayal of these lives -- the lives of people whose dreams and yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal.




"Marvelous... Brownsville resembles early Steinbeck work more than anything else." --Carolyn See, Washington Post

'The screaming ambulance slows down a fraction as it hits the junction of parkway and Camden High Street. It feels as if my bladder is in my head, and any minute now it will explode, and blast piss and blood at a million-foot-pounds pressure out of my coke-scarred nostrils.' Noah Arkwright has experienced too much. A filmmaker and now a dry alcoholic, he's lived life to the full - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll his relentless backdrop - but now the stakes are even higher. In his struggle to survive, Noah's cancer forces him to evaluate his chequered past life, and as a picture builds of a brave and incredibly foolish man, gradually it becomes clear that he's a modern-day hero of truly epic proportions.

Twins are forced to confront a violent secret from their past in Jenna Blum's first novel since her runaway bestseller, Those Who Save Us

How far would you go to protect a sibling-and at what cost to yourself?

In Those Who Save Us, Jenna Blum proved herself a master storyteller with brilliant insight into the spectrum of human emotion. Now, Blum turns her sights to the most intimate and mysterious of family relationships-that between twins-in her powerful and provocative second novel.

As a teenager, Karena Jorge had always been the one to look out for her twin brother Charles, who suffers from bipolar disorder. But as Charles begins to refuse medication and his manic tendencies worsen, Karena finds herself caught between her loyalty to her brother and her fear for his life. Always obsessed with the weather-enraptured by its magical unpredictability that seemed to mirror his own impulses—Charles starts chasing storms, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic . . . until a terrifying storm chase with Karena ends with deadly consequences, tearing the twins apart and changing both of their lives forever.

Two decades later, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to the doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional stormchasers-passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption—and embarks on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself . . . or to someone else.