Joel Agee

"Six-and-a-half-year-old Peter reads, dreams, and plays with his friends. He is a nascent explorer, artist, philosopher, mystic, and scientist...And the actual world around him is a unique one in history: a community of leftist emigrés who have found refuge in Mexico from the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe...But the emigrés long for home...slowly, Peter begins to comprehend that his world may be turned upside down"--

"Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the so-called "man without qualities" who is the major character in Robert Musil's great, unfinished novel of that name. Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system-political, ethical, metaphysical-strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich...

"Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim's mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer--with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge..."-- Publisher description.

"The world's greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game, with the world as the stake? For Mobius...