Jeff Bayones Honors Bridge Club in New York is the largest in North America, perhaps in the world. This book is based on their beginners course, a series of six lessons that have started thousands of people on the road to enjoying the worlds most popular card game. And no, you wont be able to play bridge when youve read it but if you were to take up tennis, or the piano, how far would six lessons get you? The hope is that the reader will be hooked, and having acquired a taste for bridge, will go on to more comprehensive courses. This one is just to whet the appetite.

This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Like navigating a monkey bridge—a bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries—the narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge—her mother's tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the "luminous motion," as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future. "With incredible lightness, balance and elegance," writes Isabel Allende, "Lan Cao crosses over an abyss of pain, loss, separation and exile, connecting on one level the opposite realities of Vietnam and North America, and on a deeper level the realities of the material world and the world of the spirits." • Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and New Voices Award nominee • A Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award Book Prize nominee

Written for complete beginners, this book is based on material that Barbara Seagram uses in her own classes to introduce hundreds of new players to the game every year. The book will take readers to the point where they can enjoy a social game with friends or begin to explore their local bridge club.

Another title in the best-selling '25' series, using the same popular format. Over the last fifteen or so years, the 2/1 Game Forcing bidding method has gained substantial popularity, but for various reasons it is not taught in beginner classes. This book is therefore designed for players who are familiar with Standard bidding and are interested in switching to the 2/1 method. It covers basic concepts as well as the differences between 2/1 and Standard auctions, and includes a discussion of more advanced ideas and conventions that fit particularly well with 2/1 methods. Existing books on this topic (notably by Max Hardy and Mike Lawrence) are too advanced and/or too technical for this level of player.

From the author of USA Today bestseller The Girl With All the Gifts, a terrifying new novel set in the same post-apocalyptic world. Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy. The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world. To where the monsters lived.

The best-selling author of Nixonland presents a portrait of the United States during the turbulent political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, covering events ranging from the Arab oil embargo and the era of Patty Hearst to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the rise of Ronald Reagan.