Abraham Verghese

Joseph Olshan

Mahlon Johnson

A physician describes how he went from surgeon to patient when a slip of a scalpel during an autopsy led to HIV infection and offers a personal account of his fierce battle with the AIDS virus

Working on a Miracle

From the acclaimed author of CLARA’S HEART and CLOUDLAND comes a rich, literary mystery based and united by two real events that occurred at Middlebury College; the disappearance of a student during winter break; and the vandalism of the Robert Frost Homestead located on one of the outer campuses. Luc Flanders has just finished playing a game of pond hockey with his college roommates when he realizes he has lost something precious and goes back to the ice to find it. He never returns, and the police department in Middlebury, Vermont are divided in their assessment of what may have happened to him. Some feel that Flanders left on his own accord and is deliberately out of touch. Others, including detectives Nick Jenkins and Helen Kennedy, suspect that harm may have come to him. As the search for Luc Flanders widens and intensifies, suspicions about several different people, including his Middlebury College roommates and ex-girlfriend arise. Unfortunately, Sam Solomon an older man with whom Luc has been having a secret relationship, cannot prove his whereabouts during the hours when the younger man may have disappeared and Solomon, too, comes under suspicion. As Luke Flanders disappears, the Robert Frost house near the Middlebury campus is vandalized. And there seems to be a link between the two events that the police are determined to discover. Alternating points of view between Luc Flanders Sam Solomon, Luc’s mother and detective Nick Jenkins, BLACK DIAMOND FALL races to a disturbing and astonishing conclusion in a lush, literary mystery that could only come from the mind of acclaimed author Joseph Olshan.

Black Diamond Fall

Clara's Heart

Vanitas

Drawn together by their mutual attraction, two gay men find their relationship haunted by former lovers who have disappeared or died, the threat of AIDS, and their fears of intimacy, loss, and betrayal. Reprint.

Nightswimmer

A powerful novel of family secrets, doomed passion, and the fragile love between a bisexual man and an emotionally damaged woman A talented musician, James arrives in Italy in 1983, just ahead of the panic in New York City caused by the burgeoning AIDS epidemic. In Rome, the Eternal City, he meets Diana. Their attraction is intense and immediate. A passionate relationship is born and soon they are inseparable, reveling in their shared love of art and Italian culture. But storm clouds hang over their union: dark secrets of abuse from his youth, her pain over her brother’s death, and James’s open admission that he has known other men sexually. Back in New York, their relationship falls apart. For James and Diana, it is time to move on; to come to terms with the ghosts that haunt their lives and family histories; to find new paths and new lovers. But the darkness of their relationship is inescapable and persistent even though their love is gone. James has received news that will impact both their lives in devastating ways: He is HIV positive. Joseph Olshan’s The Sound of Heaven is an extraordinary novel, at once romantic and troubling, terrifying and compassionate.

A Novel

The Sound of Heaven

The Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire is a rural region that lies on either side of the Connecticut River. It is a place populated by wealthy and working class people, a place where people feel safe. But when a serial killer begins to target young women, everything changes.

Cloudland

The Conversion

A unique bond forms between a twelve-year-old and a Jamaican housekeeper in this moving novel that is “a work of art” (Los Angeles Times). The basis for the beloved film starring Whoopi Goldberg, this prize-winning novel by the author of Nightswimmer and Cloudland charts the profound, rare friendship between a wise woman named Clara and David, a twelve-year-old boy adrift in the wake of a family tragedy and his parents’ broken marriage. As the two grow closer, she brings him into her special world of patois and Jamaican beauty parlors and shadowy alliances, and he comes to realize that in her native country Clara has left behind a mystery, which he grows determined to unveil. Heralded as a classic, Clara’s Heart is at once moving and comical, a tribute to unconventional love, by “a writer in total command of his narrative” (Ian McEwan).

Sie kommt aus Jamaika. Sprühend vor Temperament und Vitalität, warmherzig, doch mit einem düsteren Geheimnis umgeben, zieht Clara Mayfield den kleinen David völlig in ihren Bann. Zwischen dem heranwachsenden New Yorker Jungen und der bald fünfzigjährigen Haushälterin der Familie entwickelt sich eine ungewöhnliche Liebe, die Joseph Olshan mit viel Einfühlungsvermögen in einem Roman voller Spannung und Sprachwitz erzählt.

Roman

Claras Herz

The pursuit of Eros, the yearning for intimacy, and the struggle to reconcile bisexuality with a longing for children -- these are the desires etched in the hearts of the characters of this brave and probing novel by the award-winning author of Clara's Heart and Nightswimmer. The moment that Sam Solomon, the protagonist of Vanitas, is transfixed by an erotic drawing that hangs in the apartment of a dying art dealer, Elliot Garland, he finds himself caught in an under-tow of confusion and longing. Garland, stricken with AIDS, has hired Sam to write his memoirs and yet manages to withhold crucial information about his life. Sam suspects, however, that the drawing, called Vanitas, is the relic of a dramatic, and secret, history that could provide answers to the questions his subject has refused to address. Vanitas explores the intersections between the disparate worlds of art and art restoration, publishing, and urban relationships, all of which are in the grip of an implacable epidemic. As Sam traverses the landscapes of disease, romance, and mystery, he is enveloped by a culture in which individuals make tenuous connections with one another as land mines explode all around them. And as he negotiates the hazards of the volatile allegiances and jealousies attendant to his own romantic entanglements, he finds himself face to face with a familiar existential dilemma -- the desire to raise a child despite society's condemnation of nontraditional families. A brilliantly written story of the lonely, painful search for happiness in unconventional choices, Vanitas is a rare novel -- a daring orchestration of event and character that is a bold, hopeful, and accomplished piece of literature.

Joseph Olshan

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