Erich von Däniken claims to have never seen a UFO. But in the fall of 1987, on a desert ride, he experienced a close encounter of a very different kind. A being materialized before his eyes, and since the "thing" had no name, von Däniken called it "Tomy". This book is the story of Tomy. Some say that Tomy is a scientific impossibility. Yet Tomy was there, science or not. After all, Tomy had for a few weeks lived among us, and that was enough for plenty of interpersonal relationships.

You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: Your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes - it would be too awkward - and you can't say no - it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all.

In 1940, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.

Born in the United States, but reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed muralist Diego Rivera. When he goes to work for Rivera, his wife, exotic artist Kahlo, and exiled leader Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.

Hoping to make a clean break from a fractured marriage, Agatha Christie boards the Orient Express in disguise. But unlike her famous detective Hercule Poirot, she can't neatly unravel the mysteries she encounters on this fateful journey. Her cabinmate Katharine Keeling's first marriage ended in tragedy, propelling her toward a second relationship mired in deceit. Nancy Nelson - newly married but carrying another man's child - is desperate to conceal the pregnancy and teeters on the brink of utter despair.

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.

Alice Pendelbury believes everything in her life is pretty much in order - from her good friends to her burgeoning career. But even Alice has to admit it’s been an odd week. Not only has her belligerent neighbor, Mr. Daldry, suddenly become a surprisingly agreeable confidant, but he’s encouraging her to take seriously the fortune-teller who told her that only by traveling to Turkey can Alice meet the most important person in her life. What’s more, the peculiarly insistent Mr. Daldry has even agreed to finance Alice’s trip - one that against all reason seems to be predestined.

When Jamie Maslin decides to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road, he decides to travel first and plan later. Then, unexpectedly stranded in Iran - a country he's only read about in newspapers - he wonders whether he'll make it out alive. After crossing the border on foot from Turkey, Maslin finds himself suddenly plunged into the subversive, contradictory world of Iranian subculture, where he is embraced by locals who are happy to show him the true Iran as they see it....

It’s love at first sight when Penelope Kite sees Le Chant d’Eau - The Song of Water - the stone farmhouse tucked high in the hills above the Luberon valley. For years, Penelope put her unfaithful ex-husband and her ungrateful stepchildren first. Now, she’s going to start living for herself. Though her dream house needs major renovations, Penelope impulsively buys the property and moves to St. Merlot. But Penelope’s daydreams of an adventurous life in Provence didn’t include finding a corpse floating face down in her swimming pool.

The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met.

The year is 1988. The place, Baja California. And Philip Marlowe - now in his 72nd year - is living out his retirement in the terrace bar of the La Fonda hotel. Sipping margaritas, playing cards, his silver-tipped cane at the ready. When in saunter two men dressed like undertakers, with a case that has his name written all over it. For Marlowe, this is his last roll of the dice, his swan song. His mission is to investigate the death of Donald Zinn - supposedly drowned off his yacht, and leaving behind a much younger and now very rich wife. But is Zinn actually alive?

Miles Flint is a spy who has been making some serious mistakes. His last assignment led to the death of a foreign official in London, and after getting too close to his current subject he wound up in police custody. But something is wrong at the agency that has nothing to do with Miles' errors. Why did his last suspect know more about Miles' assignment than Miles did? Why have so many operatives recently resigned?

When Inspector Shanti de Silva moves with his English wife, Jane, to his new post in the sleepy hill town of Nuala, he anticipates a more restful life than police work in the big city entails. However an arrogant plantation owner with a lonely wife, a crusading lawyer, and a death in suspicious circumstances present him with a riddle that he will need all his experience to solve. Set on the exotic island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the 1930s, Trouble in Nuala is an entertaining and absorbing mystery spiced with humor and a colorful cast of characters.

Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his Maserati, has hit a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, obsessed with all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. So begins a fateful dalliance with the African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.

Baghdad is holding a secret superpower summit, but the word is out, and an underground organization in the Middle East is plotting to sabotage the talks. Into this explosive situation appears Victoria Jones, a young woman with a yearning for adventure who gets more than she bargains for when a wounded spy dies in her hotel room. The only man who can save the summit is dead. Can Victoria make sense of his dying words? "Lucifer...Basrah...Lefarge."