Full AspenCat Catalog

Fifty-year-old Alice Howland, a Harvard professor of cognitive psychology, is at the top of her game. Her kids are grown, her marriage secure, her career on fire, when after mere months of forgetfulness she finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of early onset Alzheimer's disease. With no cure or treatment, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self slips away. Without memory or hope, she is forced...

"New York Times and worldwide bestselling "dazzling storyteller" (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil. In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident--which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two...

One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college...

"Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of this novel, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her husband, Sam suddenly dies. And then more jolt: her big-hearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her...

"Olive Kitteridge has returned, as indomitable as ever ... this time as a person getting older, navigating her next decade as she comes to terms with the changes--sometimes welcome, sometimes not--in her own life. Here is Olive, strangely content in her second marriage, still in an evolving relationship with her son and his family, encountering a cast of memorable characters in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine. Whether it's a young girl coming to...

"A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking--about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as twostrangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during...

Leningrad, 1952. Andrei, a young doctor, and Ana, a nursery school teacher, know their happiness is precarious. When Andrei treats the child of a senior secret police officer, it becomes painfully clear that his own fate, and that of his family, is bound to the child's.

"As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated...

In the halls of Newport Academy, a unique private school that has attracted generations of rebels, outcasts, and visionaries, a poignant and unforgettable lesson in the eternal truths of sisterhood is about to begin for Maggie Shaw, her fourteen-year-old daughter Beck, and her sixteen-year-old son Travis.

Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants. Escaping with his family to New York City and its crowded streets, Malik seeks to extinguish himself and forget the life he left behind in London.