26a
Diana Evans
Tugs-of-war between dueling identities define the Hunters, a biracial family in suburban London. This first novel speaks eloquently about identity, displacement, anguished losses and bone-deep love.

Acts of Faith
Philip Caputo
Caputo's ambitious adventure novel, set against a backdrop of the Sudanese wars, makes for a dense, riveting update on Graham Greene's The Quiet American.
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Baker Towers
Jennifer Haigh
The author of Mrs. Kimble returns with an emotionally rich and evocative exploration of community, love, and family set in a western Pennsylvania coal town in the years following World War II.
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Beautiful Inez
Bart Schneider
Schneider returns to the setting, San Francisco in the early 1960’s, and several of the main characters from Secret Love (2000), focusing this time on Inez Roseman, a deeply melancholic violinist who finds herself drawn into an affair with another woman.
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Beyond Black
Hilary Mantel
Neurotic, demanding ghosts haunt a British clairvoyant in this darkly comic novel.
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Cast of Shadows
Kevin Guifoile
A bereaved doctor undertakes a diabolical experiment in a shattering philosophical thriller that anticipates the moral, social, and metaphysical dilemmas science is poised to confront.
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Changed Man
Francine Prose
Vincent Nolan is a neo-Nazi who walks into a human rights foundation and proclaims that he wishes to renounce his previous way of life. The author uses great humor to light up key social issues, to skewer smugness and to create characters whose flaws only add to their depth and richness.
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Death of an Ordinary Man
Glen Duncan
Narrated by a dead man with a cloudy memory, this is a powerful, unflinching and frequently dazzling meditation on the kind of courage it takes to endure the unthinkable.
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Diviners
Rick Moody
A wild and wooly take on our media-saturated culture, Moody follows the doings of Move On Productions and its feverish attempts to launch the miniseries, “The Diviners”, a multigenerational saga about dowsing.
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Drive
James Sallis
Driver, the antihero of this quintessential noir novella about a loner with a passion for driving fast cars, is a Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway car driver by night. But he has no interest in either movies or crime; he just wants to drive. Life won't let him, of course, as described in this textbook example about driving circles around your life.
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Empire Rising
Thomas Kelly
“The Empire State Building will dominate the Manhattan skyline,” all New Yorkers realize in 1930 as construction proceeds, but then, too, “nothing gets built in Gotham without a kickback.” This is the basic premise of this riveting novel which evokes in authentic detail the underside of New York City politics during the era of Mayor Jimmy Walker.
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English Teacher
Lily King
When Vida Avery, an English teacher at a Maine prep school, marries a local widower after a brief courtship, the narrow world she has maintained for herself and her teenage son, Peter, begins to fall apart. The author expertly weaves together diverse themes: the exhilaration and manipulations of teaching, along with a sympathetic view of teenage insecurities and the tensions of taking on the role of stepmother.
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Envy
Kathryn Harrison
Harrison’s sixth novel, an intoxicating work of psychosexual suspense, portrays the family of a New York psychoanalyst wracked by tragedy, some of it obvious, much hidden. Harrison's dialogue is electrifying, the sophistication of her psychology is mesmerizing, and her astutely drawn characters are bewitching.
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Europe Central
William T. Vollmann
Vollman presents an epic inquiry into the nature of conscience and the cost of survival during the horrific WWII conflict between Russia and Germany, creating a many-faceted story anchored by a fictionalized portrait of the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
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Exposure
Talitha Stevenson
Stylish yet penetrating, this work portrays the Langford family—the picture of smug contentment until an attack on noted judge Alistair unlocks a lifetime of deception. Meanwhile, immigrant couple Goran and Mila, the pet project of Langford son Luke, struggle with fictions of their own. A morality tale? Yes, but this is especially affecting as a portrait of people who perpetually sabotage themselves.
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Foer
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old budding inventor, musician and scientist, whose father perished in the World Trade Center on 9/11. When Oscar finds a key hidden in his father's things that doesn't fit any lock in their New York apartment, Oskar shifts his boundless energy to a quest for answers. Foer works in humor as a deceptive, glitzy cover for a serious tale about loss and recovery, and demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.
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Follies: New Stories
Ann Beattie
Beattie’s latest includes a superb novella and collection of brilliant stories about adult children, aging parents and the chance encounters that alter lives.
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Freshwater Road
Denise Nichols
In the summer of 1964, 19-year-old Celeste Tyree, straddling the strong race consciousness of her father and the race aversion of her estranged mother, takes time off from college and her white boyfriend, traveling from Michigan to Mississippi to lend her efforts to Freedom Summer. This debut novel by Nichols offers a sensitive and absorbing story of a young woman coming of age emotionally and racially.
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Goat Bridge
T. M. McNally
In this lacerating and exquisite novel of loss and mourning, a photographer whose young son has disappeared prowls the dangerous streets of besieged Sarajevo, focusing his lens not on images of death, but on visions of life’s persistence under even the most brutal circumstances.

God's Gym
John Edgar Wideman
The first story collection in more than a decade from one of the most celebrated African-American authors of modern-day literature contains stories that move from the intimate to the political, from shock to transcendence.
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Historian
Elizabeth Kostova
In this riveting debut novel, a young girl discovers her father's darkest secret and embarks on a harrowing journey across Europe to complete the quest he never could--to find history's most legendary fiend: Dracula.
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History of Love
Nicole Krauss
The last words of this haunting novel resonate like a pealing bell. "He fell in love. It was his life." This is the unofficial obituary of octogenarian Leo Gursky, a character whose mordant wit, gallows humor and searching heart create an unforgettable portrait. A WWII refugee in New York, Leo has become invisible to the world. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love. Writing with tenderness about eccentric characters, Krauss uses earthy humor to mask pain.
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Holy Skirts
Rene Steinke
This is a lively, sympathetic fictionalized account of the true adventures of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a poet and artist's model whose irrepressible life bordered on the fashionably sordid. Wildly uninhibited Elsa, haunted by family tragedies and three extravagantly disastrous marriages, ends up living hand-to-mouth publishing poetry and creating performance art while protesting everything from sexism to censorship. Sadly, her bravado masks an engulfing loneliness, and the brilliant flame of her boldly improvised life burns out of control.
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How We Are Hungry: stories
Dave Eggers
A shining miscellany peopled by characters in close touch with childhood.
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Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans where attacks by deadly tigers are common. Tidal floods rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. In this place of vengeful beauty and through his characters' very different mind-sets, Ghosh questions humankind's place in nature in this drama of love and survival that has particular resonance in the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami.
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In Case We're Separated: connected stories
Alice Mattison
The stories concern a family whose members couldn’t lose each other if they tried.
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Indecision
Benjamin Kunkel
This first novel vacillates between serious comments on American values and habits (the effect of 9/11 or our pharmaceutical dependencies, for instance) and describing a lighthearted romp through the jungle of love and life of twenty-something Manhattanite Dwight Wilmerding who suffers from a fictional condition called abulia-- the inability to make up his mind.
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It's All Right Now
Charles Chadwick
Written by a 72-year-old British civil servant, this novel is told in the first person an unprepossessing, ordinary businessman, whose story gradually builds a powerful momentum, taking readers on one man’s incredible, transformative journey.
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Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Two characters alternate in this dreamish novel: a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy and a witless old man who can talk to cats.
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Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories
Billy Lombardo
In this sweetly soulful coming-of-age short story collection, preternaturally observant, young Petey lives in an Italian enclave in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood in the early 1970sIn these ten shimmering short stories, the author deals with the broad subject of relationships.
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A Long Way Down
Nick Hornbys
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. In his trademark warm and witty prose, Hornby follows four depressed people from their aborted suicide attempts on New Year’s Eve through the surprising developments that occur over the following three months. Funny and moving.

Lost in the Forest
Sue Miller
In a riveting novel about a grieving family, Miller once again demonstrates her singular gift for capturing the rhythms of daily family life with laser-like clarity while also summoning the turbulent emotions swirling just beneath the surface.
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Lunar Park
Bret Ellis
A novel starring a brat named Bret Easton Ellis, who knows everybody and has more fun than even happens to real people.
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Mambo Peligroso
Patricia Chao.
This high-voltage novel set in the sensuous world of salsa dancing is filled with believable, complex characters and a throbbing insistent beat.
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Maps for Lost Lovers
Nadeem Aslam
Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. Unhappy Pakistani exiles in a cold, hard Britain populate this intricate novel.
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March
E. L. Doctorow
With exceptional lyricism, deep psychological insight and peppery humor, Doctorow transforms General Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia and the Carolinas into a poetic vision of the span of humankind’s cruelty and glory.
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Columbian master storyteller’s latest lyrical novel captures a single year in the life of a nonagenarian, who proves himself capable of undergoing a significant life alteration by paying for sex but finding love.
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Missing Mom
Joyce Carol Oates
This novel peers into the void left by a woman’s sudden absence.
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Mission to America
Walter Kirn
In his latest novel, Kirn takes an interesting look at contemporary life from two outsiders' perspectives. Looking at America this way raises many questions about belief, consumerism, and what we call modern life.
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Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Umberto Eco
The plotline of an Italian rare book dealer with amnesia, who must construct his life anew, reads as compelling storytelling with learned discussions of history, religion and philosophy.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
In exquisitely rendered language, Kathy H. recalls her lost youth with difficult Ruth and sweet, confused Tommy at Hailsham, an English estate one might call idyllic—were the students not clones who in later life will be harvested for their vital organs. What's horrific about this scenario is that the protagonists aren't so horrified; how shattering to realize that we can be so easily bent.
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No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
Women grieve and men fight in this hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel.
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Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Lydia Millet
Miller time-travels pioneering atomic physicists Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard to present day Santa Fe, then sets in motion events of catastrophic proportions and cosmic dimensions. A remarkable mix of realism, fantasy and keen satire.
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On Beauty
Zadie Smith
More than beauty, it is love that binds together art professor Howard Belsey, his African-American wife Kiki, and their three complicated children. And it's love that threatens to tear them apart. Smith masterfully handles a range of complex topics, from adolescent angst to identity politics, but the book's greatest gift is its perceptive and keenly felt portrait of a family remaking itself.
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One Sunday Morning
Amy Ephron
The setting is New York and Paris in the 1920’s seen through the prism of the lives of four well-heeled, socially connected women friends caught up in the conflict between the old social behavior and the new post WWI attitude of a lessening of the strict ideas of conduct.
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Painted Drum
Louise Erdrich
This latest title in Erdrich’s cycle of novels revolving around an Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota, homes in on the role of a sacred drum that serves to connect a disaffected Native American to her heritage and to her deepest emotions.
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Paradise
A. L. Kennedy
The cause of Hannah's alcoholism is never made clear, but what is clear is that Hannah is out of control. In Kennedy's masterful hands, however, her torment is the stuff of poetry. There's humor amid the horror of Hannah's dissolution, a sublime pathos balanced by a gritty realism, in which Kennedy continually astounds the reader with her language.
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Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood
Launched this year by 30 publishers worldwide, this series will offer the retelling of favorite myths by leading authors.
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Perfect Stranger: and other stories
Roxana Robinson
Good breeding, genteel professions, and comfortable lifestyles are not enough to insulate Robinson's characters from the headaches and heartbreaks that everyone suffers.
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Please Don't Come Back from the Moon
Dean Bakopoulos
When the fathers in the Rust Belt town in this novel abandon it en masse, their sons take over.
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Portrait
Iain Pears
An unnamed artist who has exiled himself from glittering early 1900 London, paints the portrait of the critic friend who made his career, recalling their shared past and the sitter's irredeemable sins in darkly escalating language. In this startling departure from his weighty literary thrillers, Pears accomplishes the near-impossible: he turns relentless monolog into a chilling tour de force.
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Saturday
Ian McEwan
On Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne has a minor fender bender with irascible lowlife Baxter, and by evening Baxter and his cohorts have invaded Henry's house, a trespass so painfully and realistically rendered that it's almost unbearable to witness. Although superbly polished, the book is prickly with uneasy issues, and the tension here is palpable.
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Saving Fish From Drowning
Amy Tan
In Tan’s most politically astute and shrewdly satirical novel to date, twelve American tourists find themselves in over their heads in Myanmar (Burma) in a piquantly humorous ship-of-fools tale of cultural collision, oppression, media spin, tragedy and folly.
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The Sea
John Banville
Middle-aged Max, after losing his wife to cancer, answers an inner call to return to a seaside resort, the site of his childhood vacations. This beautifully written novel offers lessons aplenty about how the shadow of the past does not necessarily cast darkness over the present.
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Seven Types of Ambiguity
Elliot Perlman
A psychological thriller and deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love, this story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways.
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Shalimar the Clown
Salman Rushdie
What contemporary novelist knows more than Rushdie about the political-religious tensions besetting the globe? He again proves his knowledge in the story of a former American ambassador to India who is stabbed to death by his enigmatic chauffeur.
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Slight Trick of the Mind
Mitch Cullin
Cullin has produced an ambitious, beautifully written novel that examines an enfeebled but still intellectually curious Sherlock Holmes as he copes with the indignities of old age. He skillfully blends three distinct story lines and time periods while offering a fresh perspective on the Holmes legend.
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Slow Man
J.M. Coetzee
While riding his bicycle one day, Paul Rayment, a sixty-something French-born photographer living in Australia, is involved in an auto accident and loses a leg. This is a finely wrought portrait of a not entirely sympathetic protagonist crippled in ways that go well beyond the loss of a limb.
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Small Island
Andrea Levy
Told in four distinct voices, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, encapsulating the most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
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Specimen Days
Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. In this follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize- winning The Hours, Cunningham offers another dazzling tour de force that examines the intimate ways in which the past is woven into the present and future. Where in The Hours Virginia Woolf was the guiding spirit, here Walt Whitman acts as the characters' Virgil, steering them through the vicissitudes of their lives.
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Successor
Ismail Kadare
A whodunit tragicomedy by Albania’s pre-eminent novelist about a loyal Communist who dies before succeeding to power in that unlucky land.
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Sudden Country
Karen Fisher
With this compelling account of life on the Oregon Trail and the waning days of the fur trade, newcomer Fisher offers a literary masterpiece. Powerful as the historical notes are, the novel's themes of love and connection, resolution of grief, and the wantonness of civilization transcend the Western genre to resonate with all readers.
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Tales H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
This is a collection of classic stories of the strange and fantastic by the visionary master of cosmic horror.
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Towelhead
Alicia Erian
Erian's story of an impressionable yet resilient girl who must grow up in American against the backdrop of the Gulf War is mesmerizing--a coming-of-age tale that is at once brutally honest and unexpectedly humorous.
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Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
Beautifully and sensitively crafted, Gaitskill offers an ode to the complex feelings that manifest in women's friendships. Much of the narrative takes place on a single day in which a now middle-aged Alison reflects on her sex and drug-filled life in the 1980’s.
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Winslow in Love
Kevin Canty
Richard Winslow, a failing, hard-drinking poet who accepts a visiting professorship at a small college in Montana, begins a romance with the most troubled yet intellectually accomplished female student on campus. Canty masterfully explores the complex, heartbreaking subtleties of this romance, as these improbable lovers find some small measure of comfort together.
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Zorro
Elizabeth Allende
This exciting novel’s conceit is that the testimony offered here is a bird’s-eye view of the provenance of Zorro as recorded by someone who knew him well.
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