On a London street in broad daylight, world traveler Amity Doncaster is trapped in a carriage with a blade-wielding man in a black silk mask who whispers the most vile taunts and threats into her ear. Thanks to quick thinking and her secret weapon, Amity escapes with her life. But the monster known as the Bridegroom, who has left a trail of female victims in his wake, has survived the wounds she inflicted and will soon be on his feet again.

Now that the dullish Henry Pulling has left his job with an agreeable pension and a firm handshake, he plans to spend more time weeding his dahlias. Then, for the first time in fifty years, he sees his aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral. Charging into her seventies with florid abandon, not a day of her life wasted, and her future as bright as her brilliant red hair, Augusta insists that Henry abandon his garden, follow her, and hold on tight. With...

The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California.

A woman strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her on a plane after some turbulence. He returns home to tragic news that has also impacted another stranger, a shaken pilot on his way to another continent who seeks comfort from a journalist he meets that night. Her life shifts subtly as well, before she heads to the airport on an assignment that will shift more lives in turn. In this wondrous, profoundly moving novel, Szalay's diverse...

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship...

On a desolate stretch of desert highway, weary travelers - two men on the run from their past, a band on their way to the next gig, a man struggling to get home, a brother in search of his long-lost sister, and a family on vacation are forced to confront their worst fears and darkest secrets in a series of interwoven tales of terror and remorse on the open road.