Jonathan Miles

Sometimes the planes don't fly on time. Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as...

“Funny, bighearted...Miles specializes in giving fully rounded humanity to characters who might elsewhere be treated as stock figures...pitch-perfect.”
— New York Times Book Review
"Miles is a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him."
— Los Angeles Review of Books
A profound new novel about a paralyzed young...

Established in 1703 by the sheer will of its charismatic founder, the homicidal megalomaniac Peter the Great, St. Petersburg's dazzling yet unhinged reputation was quickly cemented by the sadistic dominion of its early rulers. This city, in its successive incarnations-St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and, once again, St. Petersburg-has always been a place of perpetual contradiction. It was a window to Europe and the Enlightenment, but so much...

"Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years...

Lord Cassia is taken prisoner, while a plague sweeps over the land. Three years later, he wants only to return to his home. Meanwhile, his home has changed, and an assassin has targeted the queen.