An insider's groundbreaking investigation of the ways the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo.

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely...

The book is a history of Boston's emergence as a world-class city. Once upon a time, Boston Town was an insulated New England township. But the community was destined for greatness. Between 1850 and 1900, Boston underwent a stunning metamorphosis to emerge as one of the world's great metropolises, one that achieved national and international prominence in politics, medicine, education, science, social activism, literature, commerce, and transportation....

"An astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying...

Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan's cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin's linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Joyce's Dubliners and Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, these stories comprehensively illuminate a world, describing members of parliament and...

The author's second work of satirical commentary reflects on one of the cruelest decades in memory, the 2000's, in which she finds a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty. Her first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, was about the Reagan era. The one problem was the title: couldn't some prophetic fact-checker have seen that the worst years of our lives, far worse,...

From the Publisher: After more than two years on the bestseller lists, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel of enormous contemporary relevance. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years--from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding--that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human...

"'The first treatment to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism ... its position has hardly been challenged'-- Mary Beard"--Cover.

Two kids with the same name were born blocks apart in the same decaying city within a few years of each other. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, army officer, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, this is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation trying to find their...