Enjoying an active but lonely rural life, seventy-year-old Percy allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn and transform his quiet home into a lively, youthful community that compels him to reexamine the choices he made after his wife's death.

"Freddy leads a life of little responsibility, following his own meandering path. His only real attachment is to his memory-challenged grandmother, whose nursing home he regularly visits. His far-flung sisters may belittle his artistic ambitions, and his grandmother only occasionally knows who he is, but he can go with the flow. When another nursing home resident is murdered, though, Freddy panics. He can't take care of his grandmother alone, and...

"In 1954, six men who spent their young lives as cowboys in the Southwest, now gather at the Matador Hotel in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, for weekly games of cribbage. One rainy afternoon, on of the men brings his ten-year-old grandson with him to the cribbage game. The boy has on his red straw hat, his cap gun, and wears his leather bullet belt with silver painted wooden bullets. They play cribbage and tell stories - and the boy listens while...

"An international best seller: a vivid, masterly novel about a Flemish man who reconstructs his grandfather's story--his hopes, loves, and art, all disrupted by the First World War--from the unflinching notebooks he filled with pieces of his life. The life of Urbain Martien--artist, soldier, survivor of World War I--lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. His grandson, a writer, retells his story, the notebooks giving...