"One winter night, Peter Lake--master mechanic and second-story man--attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty , the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter Lake, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead."--

Old Thomas Mann gets a second crack at fatherhood when a baby boy is delivered to his doorstep. A note identifies the boy as the illegitimate child of Mann's son, Eddie, a soldier killed in Vietnam. The novel is narrated by the boy.

A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick's Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who's moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in,...

In 1881 in New York City, teenaged Kevin O'Donnell, ever conscious of the prejudice against the Irish poor, struggles to support his sick father and young sister by working as a messenger for a prominent newspaper but finds his job threatened when he is falsely accused of stealing from his employer.

Four hundred year history of the Irish in Missouri, from the Bois Brule Bottom settlement of the 1790s and the first millionaire west of the Mississippi, the potato famine immigration of the 1840s, to Joseph Murphy's prairie wagons and Fr. Bernard Donnelly who brought the first Irish workers to Kansas City to level the downtown bluffs in 1856.

One of the most popular authors in recent times, Maeve Binchy first drew reader's and critics' attention with Light a Penny Cnadle, then with Echoes. This newest bestseller tells about changes that take place in a charming Irish village when a stranger turns a local manor house into a luxury hotel. Firefly Summer will be followed by Delacorte's hardcover, Silver Wedding, in September.