LETRAS

In The Handmaid's Tale, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War and the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead's Commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. In The Testaments, set more than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, The Republic of Gilead maintains its repressive grip on power, but it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women come together, with potentially explosive results.

Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy’s unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. But when he discovers he has the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, he feels a new sense of obligation and possibility—something to offer the community and impress the spirited girl he has come to love. By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, grief intrudes, and the future of the fishing village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends, newly empowered, must decide who they want to be, and what they are willing to give up.

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party never seems to end, he's often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him--that he's a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby's just across the bay.

“Tommy Spaulding has such a profound gift for storytelling and for collecting wonderful people and experiences.”—Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers Researchers estimate that the average person will influence up to eighty thousand people over the course of their lifetime—or 2.8 people daily. That’s a stadium full of people each of us affects in ways positive or negative, sometimes without our realizing. What if we paid attention to this fact? Would we live differently? Would we lead differently? Would we put down our phones and be more present with the people in front of us?

This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress..