The family of a successful but elderly actor find themselves on the receiving end of his wish to plan his own death, on the eve of his celebratory 90th-year birthday party

In a house on the Cape 'older than the Republic', Robert MacIver, a historian who long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list of rules by which to live out his last days. The most important rule, to "tell a story to its end", spurs the old Scot to invent a strange and gripping tale of men in the trenches of the First World War. This invented tale of inhumanity and betrayal prompts MacIver's memories of his own role in World War II and of Vietna,...

The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost twenty-five dollars. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island,...

"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals...

What follows a wedding? A honeymoon, of course. The beginning of a happily-ever-after future in which Ivy and Mac will travel the country in their motor home searching for the perfect place to settle down and live. No more dead bodies. No more murders. Instead, here they are on a detour to an old dinosaur park, and Ivy is up to her possum-gray hair in ghost goats, deteriorating dinosaurs, and . . . what else? A dead body, of course.