The Miracle
by John L’Heureux ’56

John L’Heureux ’56 is the author of The Miracle, his ninth novel. The story of Fr. LeBlanc, a charismatic young priest transferred from his South Boston parish to a small town on the New Hampshire coast, the book wrestles with issues of faith, love and mortality. Set in the 1970s, the novel has won praise from reviewers. According to Publisher’s Weekly, “L’Heureux’s strength is his ability to expose the all-too-human foibles and flaws of his outstanding ensemble cast, as he connects the dots with short, punchy scenes that instantly get to the heart of the matter.” And Booklist trumpets, “There is great humanity in this well-crafted story, expressed largely through the appealing characters, and a final message: choose life.”

Called a “master storyteller” by The Washington Post, L’Heureux has also written short fiction and poetry. He teaches at Stanford University.

Death Among the Ruins
by John R. Feegel ’54

Death Among the Ruins, by John R. Feegel ’54 is a fast-paced mystery set in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and Mayan ruins, featuring a Florida County sheriff’s deputy who unravels a case involving murder, drugs and deception.

John R. Feegel, M.D., is a board-certified forensic pathologist and a practicing attorney. Recipient of the Edgar Award for a previous novel, Autopsy, Feegel is also the author of Death Sails the Bay, The Dance Card, Malpractice and Not a Stranger. He has contributed chapters to medical textbooks and written a monograph, The Legal Aspects of Laboratory Medicine. Feegel, who lives and practices law and medicine in Tampa, Fla., is currently working on another novel.

Nine Horses
by Billy Collins ’63

Nine Horses by Billy Collins ’63 is the poet’s first book of new work since Picnic, Lightning in 1998. “Charm has always been essential to his work,” writes a critic in Booklist, “and it now blossoms into sweet benevolence as readers board Collins’ buoyant poems as though each were a small boat, carrying them gently into the dazzle of sun or the caress of soft rain.”

Collins, a professor of English at Lehman College at the City University of New York and writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y., is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and the Levinson Prize. Named Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001-2002, Collins was reappointed to the position for the 2002-2003 term. He lives with his wife, Diane, in Somers, N.Y.

Twilight on the Bay
by Brian J. Cudahy

Twilight on the Bay, by Brian J. Cudahy, is the story of the late B.B. Wills ’22, who built an “excursion boat empire” in the United States during the 1940s and ’50s. As Cudahy explains in the book’s preface, “The true American excursion boat … steamed away from a downtown pier at nine-thirty or ten o’clock on a summer morning and took mom, pop, all the kids and a big wicker hamper full of good things to eat on an inexpensive two-or three-hour cruise to a nearby picnic grove, bathing beach or amusement park.” Virtually extinct today, the excursion boat craze was a staple of American leisure for a brief time, and Benjamin B. Wills was its premier entrepreneur. Wills owned 22 boats over the years, operating such companies as Nantasket Boat Line and the Robert E. Lee Steamboat Company. Retiring in 1967, he died in 1986, at the age of 89.