Akron Public Library

As a child, Lydia Pallas became all too familiar with uncertainty when it came to the future. Now, she's finally carved out a perfect life for herself - a life of stability and order. She adores her apartment overlooking bustling Boston Harbor, and her skill with languages has landed her a secure position as a translator for the U.S. Navy. Then Alexander Banebridge, who equally attracts and aggravates Lydia, hires her to translate seemingly innocuous...

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...

Professional translator and amateur detective Cassandra Reilly travels to Barcelona in search of a missing man-but finds much more than she bargained for in this mystery, hailed by the New York Times as a "high-spirited comic adventure" American but with an Irish passport, the itinerant translator Cassandra Reilly is living in London when she receives an unexpected phone call. The voice on the other end belongs to Frankie Stevens, a San Francisco...

Cassandra Reilly is embroiled in a case of international intrigue and murder as two factions battle over a crumbling resort London-based lesbian translator and part-time sleuth Cassandra Reilly is on the move again. Her latest trip is to China, via Eastern Europe, where, upon receiving a call about a murder in a run-down Transylvanian health spa, she suddenly finds herself embroiled in a murky and wholly unusual investigation. The woman accused of...

"It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts--or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she...

Battling feelings of loss and apathy in the wake of a painful divorce, novelist Jeanette struggles to complete a book about the long-term relationship between Clara Schumann, a celebrated pianist and the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, and her husband's prot©♭g©♭, the handsome young composer Johannes Brahms, while at the same time dealing with her feelings towards the mysterious, worldly Hart whose casual help with translations quickly...

"A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses...

"A young couple on the brink of marriage--the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist--find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other's dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-Ã-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous...

Fairytale of wonder and magic where an orphan girl is haunted by thorns, a reluctant queen rules between sea and sky and epics never end.