In June 2005 Jock Soto, at forty years old, gave his farewell performance as a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. The program, an event of unprecedented ambition, showcased pieces from five legendary choreographers, and it capped one of the most storied careers in ballet history--an ascent that be­gan when Soto was just three years old. After retiring, Soto was determined to embrace a new future, but he found himself obsessed with questions about his past--where had he come from, and where had he been?Every Step You Take weaves together the diverse strands of Soto's life: being the half-breed offspring of a Puerto Rican--Navajo couple, the gay son of a fiercely macho man, a naive teenager from the desert running in the sophisticated art world of New York, and a driven artist by day and hard-core party animal by night. Soto recalls his professional relationships with such icons as George Balanchine, Christopher Wheeldon, Darci Kistler,...

When a deadly plague stalks the Amazons of Tristaine, Jess and Brenna must return to the place of their nightmares, the notorious City Clinic, to find a cure.Tristaine's hard-won peace is shattered when a lethal epidemic threatens to devastate the Amazon clan. Their only hero for a cure lies in the sinister laboratories of the City Clinic. To save the sisters they love, Jess and Brenna must leave their mountain village and return to the malevolent government facility that almost cost them their lives. The danger they face is harrowing, the stakes enormous...and they have precious little time.Book Four in the Tristaine Series

When Matt's Great-great-aunt Violet dies, she leaves him a precious gift: a photo album he loved as a child. Then Matt starts having dreams—very good dreams—about Joseph, one of the men in the pictures from the 1940s. One morning when Matt wakes up, the bruises are still there. Could there be more to Violet's present than he thought?

This was social history - entertaining, fascinating and informing - in the making.Days of Wine and Rage explores the tempo and shifts in mores and style of a dynamic decade - the 70s - in Australia's cultural development. Deftly interweaving literature and documentary history, Frank Moorhouse traces, from their avant-garde origins, significant threads in Australia's social fabric - the sub-cultural movements towards sexual liberation, cultural identity and a new creative and intellectual confidence. The multi-faceted examination evokes a lively impression of the ambience in which these social changes were generated and of the characters who got them going. Frank Moorhouse was hailed as 'the widest-read chronicler of the new intelligentsia and their uncertainties'. Nowhere are his skills in literary and editorial craftsmanship and his acuity as observer of social nuance more evident than in this book.

The doubts of yesterday left as soon as I caught my first wave. I felt so strong and powerful and forgot the crap in my life as I skimmed down the face of a wave.$linebreak$Julie is getting her life back together after the tragedy that destroyed her family. She has a passion for surfing, and is making new friends and finally starting to feel like she belongs.$linebreak$But when her brother Toby wants to leave Sydney and return to the bush to live, and Aunt Jean becomes unwell, Julie fears she is losing what's left of her family, and wonders if she is being punished for being happy.$linebreak$While Julie continues to be besieged with dramas, she also finds an inner strength, and vows to stop crying and make this her laughing year.$linebreak$The letter sat there. Why did it look so innocent? I guess because it was only words on paper. But what would those words say?$linebreak$Laurene Kelly has worked with abused children and women in refuges for many years, and now works part-time as a carer of children. Her interest in young adult fiction derives from a wish to give hope to teenagers in our often chaotic and confusing world. She lives in Tasmania, where she cares for her elderly mother. She is the author of two other young adult novels, I Started Crying Monday, and The Crowded Beach.

"An American beauty this book . . . The narrator of Jane Hamilton's sensational first novel is a holy lusty innocent." —VOGUE "Ms. Hamilton gives Ruth a humble dignity and allows her hope —but it's not a heavenly hope. It's a common one, caked with mud and held with gritted teeth. And it's probably the only kind that's worth reading about." —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Hamilton's story builds to a shocking crescendo. Her small-town characters are as appealingly offbeat and brushed with grace as any found in Alice Hoffman's or Anne Tyler's novels." —GLAMOUR "Jane Hamilton's novel is authentically Dickensian . . . The real achievement of this first novel is not so much the blackness as the suggestion of resilience. At the end, Ruth begins to put together her shattered body, spirit and life. Her words are awkward, as they have been all along, but suddenly and unexpectedly they shine. —LOS ANGELES TIMES

DI Tom Mariner is about to take a well-earned break when six-week-old Jessica Klinnemann is abducted from the cr che at a local day nursery. His leave cancelled, Mariner becomes the lead on the highly public case. But what at first appears to be a random kidnap gradually begins to look like a meticulously planned operation. The motive remains unclear, until Mariner discovers that the baby's father works for a scientific research company that has long been the target of animal rights activists. Two days later when the incident comes to an astonishing conclusion, a crude note seems to confirm that that animal rights protesters were behind the scare. But when one of the cr che workers is killed in a hit and run, the case is blown wide open...

In the Book of Revelations, the Four Horsemen herald the arrival of the Apocalypse. When the First Horseman thunders forth, pestilence will spread throughout the land. For the First Horseman is Plague... The Spanish Flu killed thirty million people worldwide in 1918. Now, with history threatening to repeat itself, a scientific expedition speeds toward a remote island in the Arctic Sea to recover strains of the lethal virus preserved under layers of ice. For Washington Post reporter Frank Daly, it is the story of a lifetime. But his plan to join the expedition is ruined by a ferocious storm that delays him. And when he meets up with the ship upon its return to port in Norway, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Fear haunts the faces of the crew. No one will talk. And someone wants Daly to stop asking questions. But if there's a wall around the facts, Daly will batter it down. Persistent and resourceful, he knows how to get answers when none are given....