Alison Anderson

"In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible—short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she’s everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With...

What if Anton Chekhov, undisputed master of the short story, actually wrote a novel-and the manuscript still existed? This tantalizing possibility drives The Summer Guest, a spellbinding narrative that draws together, across two centuries, the lives of three women through the discovery of a diary. During the long, hot summer of 1888, an extraordinary friendship blossoms between Anton Chekhov and Zinaida Lintvaryova, a young doctor. Recently blinded...

"Tokyo, 1938. An amateur quartet, led by the compassionate Yu, gathers to practice. Suddenly, their rehearsal is brutally interrupted by military police. In the ensuing skirmish, Yu's violin is smashed while his son, Rei, witnesses his father's arrest. He will never see him again. Salvaging his father's instrument, Rei escapes thanks to a mysterious lieutenant. Paris, 2003. Raised in France, Rei--now Jacques--has dedicated his life to the broken violin's...

"In a snowbound valley, deep in the French Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylums's...

A mysterious death, unusual car accident, and anonymous threats have one thing in common-- the victims are all members of the Good Novel bookstore's secret selection committee. Set in Paris, this tale combines mystery, romance, and French theology and literature

""You did nothing." Christine Steinmeyer thought the anonymous suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve wasn't meant for her. But the man calling in to her radio show seems convinced otherwise. Bit by bit, strange things keep happening... it's as if someone has taken control of her life. Everything holding Christine's life together crumbles until all that is left is an unimaginable nightmare. Martin Servaz is on leave in a clinic for...

"Something has got Aurel Timescu’s attention: an unsolved and apparently unsolvable crime. A vacationer has been found hanged. And it is a crime that will go unpunished if Aurel isn’t ready for the fight of his life. Aurel Timescu’s French is tinged with a Romanian accent, he has the disheveled air of a character from between the wars, and a past as a performer in piano bars. Nobody can quite understand how he got to be Consul. Now, he’s taken...

"Alejandro de Yepes and Jesús Rocamora, young officers in the Spanish regular army, are stationed alone at Castillo when, out of nowhere, a friendly redhead appears to them in the cellar. There is something magnetic and deeply mysterious about this Petrus. Alejandro and Jess͠ are bewitched, and, in the middle of the sixth year of the longest war humankind has ever endured, they abandon their post to follow him across a bridge only he can see. Petrus...

"The Republic of the Congo, 1964. A young man faces a firing squad, preparing for his last moment on Earth. He is known as a complex and complicated man whose childhood left him hungry for affection and attention and who transformed his emotional wounds into a brilliant career as a diplomat and a negotiator. Now he finds himself negotiating for his own life, together with the lives of 1,500 Congolese citizens. Inspired by the life of her father and...

"When a volcano collapses in the ocean and generates a tidal wave of biblical proportions, the world disappears around Louie, his parents and his eight siblings. Their house, perched on a summit, stands firm. As far as the eye can see there is only choppy grey water. For six days the family waits for relief, as food becomes scarce. Then the water starts to rise again, and the parents realize they must make for the highlands. There isn't room, however,...