Avidity Jones

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

A departure from London’s normal tales of the frozen North, all of these tales take place in the islands of Hawaii. The tales deal with racial issues, family relationships, leprosy quarantines, missionaries, and the diverse people who make their homes on the beautiful Hawaiian islands. London traveled to Hawaii in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including an eight-month stay shortly before he died in 1916. He had a fondness for the islands that is apparent in the rich descriptions in these tales.

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.

In this first novel, Chan comes to the aid of an aristocratic Boston family who find themselves in dire straits over what has befallen Dan Winterslip, the black sheep of the family, who lives in a mansion on Waikiki Beach - the house without a key.