The Wedding People is a propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.
Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other. In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River, an immersive, propulsive novel about a missing child whose disappearance sends shockwaves through three very different worlds—an opulent Adirondack summer estate, the rustic teen summer camp that operates in its shadow, and the blue-collar community that serves them both.
When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn't just any camper; she's the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp—as well as the opulent nearby estate and most of the land in sight. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara's older brother also went missing fourteen years ago, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again?
Liz Moore weaves a richly textured drama, both emotionally nuanced and propelled by a double-barreled mystery. The God of the Woods is a story of love, inheritance, identity, and second chances, a thrillingly layered drama about the tensions between a family and a community, and a history of secrets that will not let any of them go.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River, an immersive, propulsive novel about a missing child whose disappearance sends shockwaves through three very different worlds—an opulent Adirondack summer estate, the rustic teen summer camp that operates in its shadow, and the blue-collar community that serves them both.
When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn't just any camper; she's the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp—as well as the opulent nearby estate and most of the land in sight. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara's older brother also went missing fourteen years ago, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again?
Liz Moore weaves a richly textured drama, both emotionally nuanced and propelled by a double-barreled mystery. The God of the Woods is a story of love, inheritance, identity, and second chances, a thrillingly layered drama about the tensions between a family and a community, and a history of secrets that will not let any of them go.
Behind You Is the Sea fearlessly confronts stereotypes about Palestinian culture, weaving a remarkable portrait of life's intricate moments, from joyous weddings to heart-wrenching funerals, from shattered hearts to hidden truths. This is a story that challenges perceptions, offering a heartfelt glimpse into the interior lives of those who call this community home.
An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who've all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for "dishonoring" their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.
Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.
Yellowface has been described as 'A riot' by PANDORA SYKES, 'Razor-sharp' by TIME, 'A wild ride' by STYLIST, 'Darkly comic' by GQ, and 'Satirical and humorous' by COSMOPOLITAN. It introduces us to Athena Liu, a literary darling, and June Hayward, literally nobody.
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. With a blend of dark humour, as evidence threatens June's stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves, leading to deadly consequences. What happens next is entirely everyone else's fault.
Yellowface has been described as 'A riot' by PANDORA SYKES, 'Razor-sharp' by TIME, 'A wild ride' by STYLIST, 'Darkly comic' by GQ, and 'Satirical and humorous' by COSMOPOLITAN. It introduces us to Athena Liu, a literary darling, and June Hayward, literally nobody.
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. With a blend of dark humour, as evidence threatens June's stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves, leading to deadly consequences. What happens next is entirely everyone else's fault.
Signal Fires weaves the lives of two families across fifty years, revealing the profound connections between them. Under an ancient oak on Division Street, retired doctor Ben Wilf and ten-year-old genius Waldo Shenkman share a moment beneath the stars, unaware of their intertwined destinies.
In a world where secrets and lies intertwine, the Wilfs and the Shenkmans are brought together by unforeseen forces. As the narrative spans the cosmos and half a century, these families are bound by the gravity of their shared history.
Signal Fires is an urgent and compassionate tale of kinship, remembrance, and the ties that bind us together. Dani Shapiro crafts a masterful story that illuminates the heart's capacity to heal itself through connections that transcend time and space.
In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
Trust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York. Can one person change the course of history? A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage. Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal?
Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou is an outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel that captures a Taiwanese American woman's coming-of-consciousness amid chaos on a college campus.
Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is on a mission to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and move away from reading about 'Chinese-y' things. However, years of grueling research have left her with nothing but a junk food addiction and stomach pain. When Ingrid stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives, she believes she's found her escape from academic hell. But she's about to discover she's in over her head. Her attempts to decipher the note's message lead to a shocking revelation that turns her academic life and her understanding of the world outside upside down.
Joined by her friend Eunice Kim and pursued by her rival Vivian Vo, Ingrid finds herself on a wild ride of mishaps and misadventures, ranging from book burnings and hallucinations to protests and propaganda. As Ingrid's life spirals out of control, she begins to question her relationships with white men and white institutions, and ultimately, she must confront herself.
Disorientation is a searing satire of privilege and power in America, a deep dive into personal complicity, and a compelling story of unspoken rage. Elaine Hsieh Chou presents a provocative question: Who gets to tell our stories, and how does the narrative shift when we take the reins?
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family.
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family.
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.
Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica.
Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds.
When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption?
Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones.
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones.
'You look the type to break your father’s heart.'
'Yeah, but he broke mine first.'
When Rosie Gennaro first meets Jimmy Hailler, she has walked away from life in Sydney, leaving behind the place on Dalhousie that her father, Seb, painstakingly rebuilt for his family but never saw completed. Two years later, Rosie returns to the house and living there is Martha, whom Seb Gennaro married less than a year after the death of Rosie’s mother. Martha is struggling to fulfil Seb’s dream, while Rosie is coming to terms with new responsibilities.
And so begins a stand-off between two women who refuse to move out of the home they both lay claim to. As the battle lines are drawn, Jimmy Hailler re-enters Rosie’s life. Having always watched other families from the perimeters, he’s now grappling, heartbreakingly, with forming one of his own.
An unforgettable story about losing love and finding love; about the interconnectedness of lives and the true nature of belonging, from one of our most acclaimed writers.
Anxious People is a poignant comedy about a crime that never took place and a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air. It cleverly weaves together the lives of eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.
The narrative unfolds at an apartment open house that becomes a life-or-death situation when the failed bank robber takes everyone hostage. The hostages include a retired couple addicted to home renovations, a wealthy banker too busy to care for others, a young couple expecting their first child and struggling with agreement, and an octogenarian unafraid of a gunpoint threat. With each character harboring secrets and grievances, they all crave some form of rescue.
Surrounded by authorities and media, these strangers reveal surprising truths about themselves. Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People explores the power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope in the most anxious of times.
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it's not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Casi siempre comienza en los hogares. Ya se registran miles de casos en Vancouver, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Oaxaca, y se está propagando rápidamente a todos los rincones del mundo. Los kentukis no son mascotas, ni fantasmas, ni robots. Son ciudadanos reales, y el problema —se dice en las noticias y se comparte en las redes— es que una persona que vive en Berlín no debería poder pasearse libremente por el living de alguien que vive en Sídney; ni alguien que vive en Bangkok desayunar junto a tus hijos en tu departamento de Buenos Aires. En especial, cuando esas personas que dejamos entrar a casa son completamente anónimas.
Los personajes de esta novela encarnan el costado más real —y a la vez imprevisible— de la compleja relación que tenemos con la tecnología, renovando la noción del vouyerismo y exponiendo al lector a los límites del prejuicio, el cuidado de los otros, la intimidad, el deseo y las buenas intenciones. Kentukis es una novela deslumbrante, que potencia su sentido mucho más allá de la atracción que genera desde sus páginas.
A moving portrait of what it means to be an American family today, a novel of love, identity and belonging that eloquently examines what it means to be both American and Muslim.
An Indian-Muslim family is preparing for their eldest daughter's wedding. But as Hadia's marriage - one chosen of love, not tradition - gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds- can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away? A Place for Us tells the story of one family and all family life- of coming to terms with the choices we make, of reconcingly past and present and of how the smallest decisions can lead to the deepest betrayals.
The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.
This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined.
Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center.
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.
In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family is forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.
This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees. Startlingly beautiful, Megan Hunter's The End We Start From is a gripping novel that paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. And yet, though the country is falling apart around them, this family's world—of new life and new hope—sings with love.
The Door is a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, and seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda’s housekeeper and has taken control over Magda’s household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda.
They share a kind of love—at least until Magda’s long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.
Con un ritmo y un lenguaje magistrales, Fernanda Melchor, autora de Falsa liebre explora en esta obra las sinrazones que subyacen a los actos más desesperados de barbarie pasional. Una novela cruda y desgarradora en la que el lector quedará envuelto, atrapado por las palabras y la atmósfera de terrible, aunque gozosa, fatalidad.
Un grupo de niños encuentra un cadáver flotando en las aguas turbias de un canal de riego cercano a la ranchería de La Matosa. El cuerpo resulta ser de la Bruja, una mujer que heredó dicho oficio de su madre fallecida, y a quienes los pobladores de esa zona rural respetaban y temían. Tras el macabro hallazgo, las sospechas y habladurías recaerán sobre un grupo de muchachos del pueblo, a quienes días antes una vecina vio mientras huían de casa de la hechicera, cargando lo que parecía ser un cuerpo inerte.
A partir de ahí, los personajes involucrados en el crimen nos contarán su historia mientras los lectores nos sumergimos en la vida de este lugar acosado por la miseria y el abandono, y donde convergen la violencia del erotismo más oscuro y las sórdidas relaciones de poder.
The Idiot, a novel by Elif Batuman, is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, exploring the themes of self-discovery and inventing oneself. Set in the year 1995, when email was a new phenomenon, we follow Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, as she begins her freshman year at Harvard. Without any preconceived plans, she enrolls in classes on unfamiliar subjects, forges a friendship with the charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate Svetlana, and, almost by chance, starts corresponding with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student.
Despite their limited face-to-face interactions, Selin and Ivan develop a complex relationship through their email exchanges, with each message adding new and mysterious layers to the act of writing. As the school year concludes, Ivan departs for Budapest, and Selin embarks on a teaching assignment in the Hungarian countryside, a position arranged by one of Ivan's friends. Her journey also includes a two-week sojourn in Paris with Svetlana.
Unlike the typical narratives of American college students abroad, Selin's experiences in Europe lead her on an introspective journey. She confronts the bewildering and exhilarating turmoil of first love and comes to an important realization: she is destined to become a writer. The Idiot is a candid reflection on the complexities of becoming an adult, filled with exquisite emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and a writing style that captures the unpredictable nature of memory itself.
Ana quiere plantar una milpa en su traspatio, en plena Ciudad de México. Pero en la tierra hay altos contenidos de plomo y la privada donde vive está plagada de ausencias. Su hermana murió, sus papás están de luto y sus hermanos de campamento; su única amiga se fue a buscar a quien la abandonó cuatro años atrás. Menos mal que queda Alfonso.
Alfonso es un antropólogo especializado en alimentación prehispánica. Es viudo y dueño de la privada Campanario. Él mismo la diseñó a partir de un esquema de la lengua humana y dio a las casas el nombre de cada uno de los cinco sabores que percibimos: Dulce, Salado, Amargo, Ácido y Umami.
En duelo, los habitantes de la privada desearían echar el tiempo atrás. Tejida al revés, esta novela se los permite. Mientras Ana remueve la tierra y clava las semillas, sus vecinos hurgan en el pasado. Pero el traspatio de la memoria está minado con preguntas: ¿Quién fue mi mujer? ¿Por qué se fue mi mamá? Y, ¿cómo es posible que se ahogara una niña que sabía nadar? Umami constituye una propuesta literaria original en su afán por explorar la amplia gama de sensaciones y emociones que el ser humano -en distintas etapas de la vida- experimenta.
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See is a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane.
When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr's combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
Space Invaders is a dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s Chile. It tells the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate, Estrella Gonzlez Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella's braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving.
They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friendsfrom her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelmewere old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it.
They could control only the stories they told one another and the "ghostly green bullets" they fired in the video game they played obsessively. Nona Fernández, one of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness—and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own.
In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.
Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, as he is also grappling with his own plight—losing his sight.
For her, the pain is multifaceted: the loss of both her mother and custody of her nine-year-old son within a short span of time. For him, it stems from growing up between Korea and Germany, the conflict between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing independence. Yet, through their shared suffering, they form a profound connection. Their voices intersect with startling beauty as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.
Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.
What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Haruki Murakami's deep dive into the very nature of consciousness. This new translation presents a narrative that intertwines two parallel stories to draw readers into a mind-bending universe. The tale features an eclectic mix of characters including Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and a host of thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters.
The novel emerges as a work that is both hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind. Murakami's inventive storytelling zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and unicorn skulls, John Coltrane and Lord Jim, uniting East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.
The Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka, which was first published in 1915. It tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.
The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, with differing interpretations being offered. The text was first published in the October issue of the journal Die weißen Blätter under the editorship of René Schickele. The first edition in book form appeared in December 1915 in the series Der jüngste Tag, edited by Kurt Wolff.
With a length of about 70 printed pages over three chapters, it is the longest of the stories Kafka considered complete and published during his lifetime. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel by the French professor of philosophy, Muriel Barbery. Set within an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, the story revolves around two main characters: Renée, the concierge, who is typically short, plump, middle-aged, and inconspicuous, with an unexpected passion for art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture; and Paloma, a twelve-year-old resident of the building, who is talented, precocious, and has decided to end her own life on her thirteenth birthday unless she can find something worth living for.
The narrative follows Renée who, despite her position, conceals a world of intellectual wealth and refined tastes beneath a veneer of simplicity. Similarly, Paloma hides her exceptional intelligence behind the facade of a mediocre pre-teen. When a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives at the building, their lives begin to change as they discover kindred spirits in each other.
Humorous and full of biting wit, the story exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous and explores rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors, evoking a sense of kinship and understanding of human complexities.
In Edinburgh in the 1930s, the Lennox family is having trouble with their youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.
Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?
Maggie O’Farrell’s intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth will haunt readers long past its final page.
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Ishiguro explores what it means to have a soul and how art distinguishes man from other life forms. But above all, Never Let Me Go is a study of friendship and the bonds we form which make or break while we come of age.
In this beautifully crafted novel, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of the proud cruelty of power, of how hard it is to grow up, and of how much harder still it is to find, in the world's darkness, gifts of light. Scattered among poor, desolate farms, the clans of the Uplands possess wondrous gifts: the ability—with a glance, a gesture, a word—to summon animals, bring forth fire, move the land. Fearsome gifts: They can twist a limb, chain a mind, inflict a wasting illness. The Uplanders live in constant fear that one family might unleash its gift against another.
Two young people, friends since childhood, decide not to use their gifts. One, a girl, refuses to bring animals to their death in the hunt. The other, a boy, wears a blindfold lest his eyes and his anger kill. Ursula K. Le Guin has delivered a story that captivates and draws the reader in. Fans of dark fantasy, such as Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, will relish this new work.
Gifts is an excellent read for teens of all interests. Fans of fantasy will be particularly drawn to it, but the world is grounded enough in earthly reality that it should appeal even to those who usually avoid the fantastical. Thought-provoking and suspenseful, with a dollop of action and romance, this novel is indeed a gift to its readers.
Cloud Atlas, authored by David Mitchell, is a visionary novel that combines elements of adventure, mystery, and philosophical speculation. The narrative begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary traveling from the Chatham Isles to California. During his journey, he becomes acquainted with Dr. Goose, who treats him for a rare brain parasite.
The story then leaps to Belgium in 1931, where we meet Robert Frobisher, a disinherited composer who finds himself in the household of an ailing maestro. The narrative continues to shift, taking us to the West Coast in the 1970s with Luisa Rey, a reporter uncovering a conspiracy, and then to various other settings including a near-future Korean superstate and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.
The unique structure of Cloud Atlas sees the narrative fold back on itself, with characters' fates intertwining across time and space. It's a novel that questions the nature of reality and identity, and how our actions reverberate through history. Mitchell's work is as playful as it is profound, earning it the status of a modern classic and a worldwide phenomenon.