Describes a Negro tramp, a drowned child, a lunatic and other casualties of life.

In a Latin American rainforest, Father Thomas, a Catholic priest, comes across a wounded soldier and takes him to his church in an Indian village. The Indians are wary of this new arrival. Venustiano, the proud young head of the village, is determined to protect his people. But his immediate problem is the jaguar prowling around the village.

Meet the author's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. This title is a graphic memoir.

In twenty-three dispatches - that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Edmund Wilson, the author offers a look at the modern novel. He connects his encyclopaedic understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, and V S Naipaul.

In the world of his large family, affluent Tamils living in the capital of Sri Lanka, Arjie is an oddity - a "funny boy" - who likes dressing as a girl. Through his eyes, the reader watches him come to terms with his homosexuality and with the violent racism of the society in which he lives.

In the summer of 2000 New York is a city living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. And into this tumultuous city arrives Malik Solanka. His life has been a sequence of exits. He has left in his wake his country, family, not one but two wives, and now a child.

A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out.

Renowned opera singer Antonio Mollini begins construction on what he hopes will be the most beautiful garden in Italy, unaware that its development will have tragic consequence for both him, and his series of lovers.