It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. With dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, and vicarious reflections on the postmodern age, this is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.

McEwan has created a symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative combined with the provocation readers have come to expect from this master of English prose.

No other annual story collection delivers the quality, excitement, and visibility of the renowned Best American Short Stories. This year's volume surprises with selections chosen by Walter Mosley from magazines that range from Esquire to Tin House.

This seventh installment of the premier mystery anthology boasts pulse-quickening stories from all reaches of the genre, selected by the world-renowned mystery writer Michael Connelly. His choices include a Prohibition-era tale of a scorned lover's revenge, a Sherlock Holmes inspired mystery solved by an actor playing the famous detective onstage, stories of a woman's near-fatal search for self-discovery, a bar owner's gutsy attempt to outwit the mob, and a showdown between double-crossing detectives, and a tale of murder by psychology.

Beloved, award-winning author Sandra Cisneros presents her long-awaited second novel - the first since her multi-million-copy best-seller The House on Mango Street. "Joyful, fizzy...This is one of those novels that blithely leap across the border between literary and popular fiction." -New York Times Book Review

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his family in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, a mysterious place they are forced to contend with. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is an essential book.

In Alice McDermott's first work of fiction since her National Book Award-winning Charming Billy, a woman recalls her fifteenth summer with the wry and bittersweet wisdom of hindsight. "We have echoes and stirrings of Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens, James, Beatrix Potter, Christina Rosetti...[Theresa] is a vessel containing multitudes of heroines, a transcendence of ethereal beauties who loved and live in the minds of their readers and inventors." -Chicago Tribune

Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet - if you don't count Eliot - who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition." Now, for the first time, the collected work of America's preeminent postwar poet. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the brilliant willfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, and other masters, to the late spontaneity of History, winner of another Pulitzer Prize, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day.

The 17th-century Spanish masterpiece, recently voted the world's best work of fiction by a poll of the world's leading authors--in the definitive English translation by Edith Grossman, translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A highly anticipated new book based on the life of Fanny Wright - Scottish gentlewoman, early abolitionist, plantation owner, and newspaper publisher.

Family Matters is Rohinton Mistry's third novel, following the success of his highly acclaimed A Fine Balance (1995), which won several major literary awards internationally. Now he returns with an enthralling domestic drama that is also an evocative portrait of present-day Bombay. "Family Matters moves and engages at every moment....Mistry is among the most distinguished of the Indian writers currently visible, partly because he does not try to make India itself his main subject....His real territory is the divided heart."-The New York Review of Books

This grand collection of 103 stories gathers together almost all the short fiction that John Updike published between 1953 and 1975; it begins with "Ace in the Hole," written when Updike was a Harvard undergraduate and later taken by The New Yorker, and ends with "Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer."

Here is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again."Shirley Hazzard has written an hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone, and at the center of it all, a love story." -Joan Didion

"Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn…Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s - inhaled them whole -and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks." —Publishers Weekly

A major new novel about sex and the citizen by the award-winning author of Being Dead. Here he charts the sexual history of a loving, baffled man, the sexual emancipation of a city, and the sexual ambiguities of humankind. "Crace may be the most original and interesting of living British writers." - New York Times

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? "Erudite and playful...An impassioned account of the émigré as a character on the stage of European history." —New York Times Book Review

Donna Tartt, bestselling author of The Secret History, returns with a grandly ambitious novel of childhood, innocence and evil. “The Little Friend seems destined to become a special kind of classic. . . .It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it's all just make-believe.” —The New York Times Book Review

Following the triumph of his Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey now ventures into the Far East with a novel shot through with mysteries at once historical, literary, and personal.

“Love seduces with Toni Morrison’s signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, scheming, suffering, and loss.” —Elle “Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style.” —Booklist

In this new, long-anticipated translation of Metamorphoses, Charles Martin combines a close fidelity to Ovid's text with verse that catches the speed and liveliness of the original. Hailed in Newsweek for his translation of The Poems of Catullus ("Charles Martin is an American poet;he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the streets back into the English Catullus. The effect is electric"), Martin's translation of Metamorphoses will be the translation of choice for contemporary readers.

In this new book, The Murder Room, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James's formidable and fascinating detective, returns to find himself enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery -- and in love.

Expanding on her signature themes of the immigrant experience, the clash of culture, and the tangled ties of generations, Lahiri brings to her terrifically poignant first novel the remarkable powers of emotion and insight that have drawn more than half a million readers to her debut story collection.

A stunning collection of new and selected poems and essays by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner. "A great poet...She is amazed but not blinded." -The Boston Globe

Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he's achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.

From the critically acclaimed best-selling author of Cryptonomicon comes an eagerly anticipated three-part epic - an ambitious adventure set in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the most acclaimed literary debut of the year, Adam Haslett explores lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them. “Extraordinary. . . . Frighteningly tender. . . . Displays an order as natural as a tree branch in winter—lithe and achingly austere.” —The Boston Globe