The Abstinence Teacher
Tom Perrotta
In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay”.
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After Dark
Haruki Murakami
Translated by Jay Rubin. This darkly entertaining novella takes place over seven hours during one Tokyo night. It intercuts three loosely related stories, linked by Murakami's signature magical-realist absurd coincidences including two sisters, a jazz trombonist and a Chinese prostitute.
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ARSONIST’S GUIDE TO WRITERS’ HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND
Brock Clarke
This is an amusing dark tale narrated by a beleaguered man, who, thanks to the time he accidentally set Emily Dickinson’s home on fire and killed two people, is now being blamed for a rash of fires.
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THE ASSASSIN’S SONG
M.G. Vassanji
The tension between India's centuries-old spiritual traditions and contemporary religious militancy drives this memorable, melancholy family saga. Frequent shifts in time and perspective (including flashes of India’s early history) heighten Vassanji's evocative depiction of India's ongoing post-colonial tumult, mournfully personalized by the fate of the fractured family at the novel's heart.
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AWAY
Amy Bloom
Life is no party for Lillian Leyb, the 22-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist of Bloom's outstanding fifth novel. Her entire family was killed in a Russian pogrom and since arriving in New York she lives in squalor and works in a sweatshop. This story may start as a familiar immigrant chronicle, but it soars to a sweeping saga of endurance and rebirth. Encompassing prison, prostitution, poetry, Yiddish humor and Yukon settings, Bloom gives the reader linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit and a compelling vision of the past. Also available as LP & eBook
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THE BAD GIRL
Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Edith Grossman. Everywhere Ricardo Somocurcio goes, his “bad girl”, Lily, shows up in dramatically different disguises. Vargas Llosa is a master of description, and his gift for evoking sounds, smells and tastes makes each (often very graphic) encounter with Lily fresh. Ricardo's work as a translator for UNESCO takes him over the decades everywhere from Paris to the Beatles's London to gangland Tokyo. This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
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BE NEAR ME
Andrew O'Hagan
David Anderton, a fifty-six-year-old English priest recently assigned to a parish in a gritty Scottish town, comes from a long line of Catholic martyrs, but he himself has settled for quieter satisfactions: good Alsatian wines, Chopin Nocturnes, banter with his housekeeper about the twelfth-century roses in the garden. His parishioners, suspicious of his education and intellect, help fuel an inevitable clash between the spiritual and the secular, the adult and adolescent, the Utopian 1960s and the neoconservative 2000s.
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BEARING THE BODY
Ehud Havazelet
In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction. The story reveals less about the brother’s death than about the accumulated grievances and regrets that comprise his, as well as his father's, legacies. Havazelet treats painful subjects - the death of an infant, concentration camp scenes - with wrenching understatement, and his depictions of his character’s therapy sessions provide insight and levity. The novel ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, but what lingers are its portraits of people bearing the weight of their family history.
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THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS
Dinaw Mengestu
A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship. With its well-observed characters and brisk narrative pacing, greatly benefited by the characters' tension-laced wit, Mengestu's novel benefits from his plausible depiction of characters caught on the seams between two worlds -- rich/poor, black/white, citizen/foreigner.
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THE BIG GIRLS
Susanna Moore
In this compelling jail-house drama, Moore blurs the lines between criminals and their jailers, emphasizing their common humanity. Reading this heart breaker is like watching a train wreck while dialing for help on your cell phone. You can't turn away.
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BRIDGE OF SIGHS
Richard Russo
In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo offers multilayered portraits of a trio of childhood friends and, by extension, their quintessentially American hometown. Class differences and racial hatred are portrayed with compassion and even humor. Also available on CD and as an eBook
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THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO
Junot Diaz
Diaz’s powerful, inventive, and big-hearted family saga takes measure of the Dominican Republic’s cruel history as he tells the story of an immigrant “ghetto nerd” and boy of conscience and his wild and heroic mother and sister. Also available in LP
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BY GEORGE
Wesley Stace
This multi-linear, multi-generational saga follows the backstage failures behind the onstage success of a wildly eccentric, dysfunctional family of ventriloquists. Narrated in part by a sardonic ventriloquist’s dummy, Stace’s uproarious tragic-comedy begs the question, “Who’s in control, the puppet or the puppet master?”
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CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
Andrew Aciman
This tender coming-of-age novel set in the romantic Italian Mediterranean coast tells the story of Elio—17, extremely well-read, sensitive and the son of a prominent expatriate professor. Elio finds himself troublingly attracted to Oliver, this year's visiting resident scholar, recruited by his father from an American university. What begins as a casual friendship develops into a passionate yet clandestine affair, and the last chapters fast-forward through Elio's life to a reunion with Oliver decades later.
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CASPIAN RAIN
Gina B. Nahai
Nahai, who left Iran as an adolescent, offers a rare glimpse into one family’s inner sanctum prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution. A tragic story told in memoir form, Caspian Rain reveals the class struggles and conflict between tradition and modernism that this Jewish family faced.
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CHEATING AT CANASTA
William Trevor
Irish author Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories delve into the lives of the marginalized and the melancholy in this latest collection of his stories.
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COAL BLACK HORSE
Robert Olmstead
Olmstead's new work (after “Stay Here with Me”) is a convulsive, bloody Civil War tale that tracks a boy's search for his father on the battlefield at Gettysburg. At 14, Robey Childs is on the cusp of manhood when he sets off from the family farm at his mother's behest to find his soldier father and bring him home. His return home and his testimony to what he saw forms a powerful, redemptive narrative. Also available as eBook
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THE COLLECTION
Gioia Diliberto
The author seamlessly weaves a tale about the life of Coco Chanel and the post-WWI Paris fashion scene. (Diliberto is married to the editor of Chicago magazine.)
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DANCING TO “ALMENDRA”
Mayra Montero
Translated by Edith Grossman. Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.
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DIVISADERO
Michael Ondaatje
In a complex novel that nevertheless proves an irresistible read, the author tells the story of how two sisters grew up with a young man their father practically adopted and how a horrible event in their youth became the determining factor in how the three of them led the rest of their lives.
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EXIT GHOST
Philip Roth
In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego in the “winter” of his life and a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth. This is a beautifully conceived tale of acceptance of one’s irreversible descent into oblivion.Also available on CD and as an eBook
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FALLING MAN
Don DeLillo
With a brilliant command of language, DeLillo parses the tragedy and heartbreak of 9/11 in a devastating novel that follows a lawyer from the moment he emerges from the World Trade Center through the succeeding months, which offer moments of both true connection and profound alienation. Also available as an eBook
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FELLOW TRAVELERS
Thomas Mallon
In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official in D.C. navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era. The author’s fondness for the city is evident as he shuttles from senate offices to seedy gay bars. And though real people pop up from time to time -- Richard Nixon, Perle Mesta, a memorable Roy Cohn -- the focus remains on Mallon's imaginary protagonists.
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FIELDWORK
Mischa Berlinski
Berlinski originally intended to write an account of the real-life Lisu tribe of Thailand, but held scant interest in the project until he decided to fictionalize the natives and turned his research into a novel. In this readable and clever debut, told almost entirely in back-story, Berlinski explores the problems inherent in trying to assume the perspective of another person or culture and the enduring conflict between faith and science. While he treats each perspective with genuine empathy, he refuses to take sides.
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FINN
Jon Clinch
Only a brave soul would venture to send Mark Twain’s beloved character, Huck Finn, down the river again in a new novel. Also available as an eBook
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THE FOLDED WORLD
Amity Gaige
As a young social worker, Charlie's empathy with his clients is both admirable and nearly fatal. An adoring husband and new father, Charlie risks his own cherished, private domestic world in which the author captures the simultaneous proximity and distance in a relationship.
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FOREIGNERS
Caryl Phillips
Phillips, a novelist who draws deeply from history’s well, fictionalizes the lives of three black men in England to form an indelible triptych depicting the suffering of individuals condemned to the status of aliens and undesirables. Each elegantly restrained yet finely detailed tragic tale portrays a cruelly and unjustly condemned man and reveals hidden facets of English history. Phillips gets at real-life complexities in a visceral, non-didactic way.
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FORGERY
Sabina Murray
Like quite a few things in this beautifully written book, the title is deceiving; although it does refer to dubious works of art, it also (and primarily) refers to Rupert himself, a man who isn't quite what he appears to be. Murray does a lovely job of transporting us to mid-1960s Greece as the setting for this deeply complex, emotionally and intellectually rewarding novel about the lengths people can go to make themselves into the people they wish they were.
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FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES
Min Jin Lee
A recent college graduate tries hard to strike a balance between her shifting American dreams and her Korean parents’ unassimilated views. Also available as an eBook
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A FREE LIFE
Ha Jin
A small family of Chinese expatriates struggles with life in America. Ha Jin (“Waiting”) does an exceptional job portraying the alien moments of everyday affairs in a new country.
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THE GATHERING
Anne Enright
As Veronica travels to London to bring her brother, Liam's body back to Dublin, her deep-seated resentment toward her overly passive mother and her dissatisfaction with her husband and children come to the fore. Enright skillfully avoids sentimentality as she explores the melancholic love and rage which bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan. Her hypnotic prose turns Veronica’s desperation into something fierce and beautiful in this recipient of the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
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GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD: a Tale of Adventure
Michael Chabon
Chabon has a wonderful time writing intentionally purple prose and playing with conventions that were most popular in the days of Rudyard Kipling and Talbot Mundy. Gary Gianni's elegant illustrations, a cross between Vierge's art for Don Quixote and Brundage's Weird Tales covers, perfectly complement the historical adventure. Set in10th-century Khazaria, the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, this dazzling trifle is a significant change from Chabon's weightier novels and is simply terrific fun.
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THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER
Joyce Carol Oates
Oates’ elegant prose shines in this tale of a long-suffering daughter whose family escaped Nazi Germany. Jacob, the father, instructs his children over and over that “The past is dead.” It's a lesson Rebecca learns as well, and she will act on it more than once in the four decades of her life that this novel covers. Also available on CD
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THE GUARDIANS
Ana Castillo
Castillo writes fiction of earthy sensuality, wry social commentary, and lyrical spiritualism that confront the cruel injustices accorded women and Mexicans in America, legal and otherwise. Infused with grit and charm, this novel of suffering and love traces life's movement toward the light even in the bleakest of places.
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A HANDBOOK TO LUCK
Christina Garcia
Garcia writes from several points of view as she tells unpredictably linked stories of people in flight from oppression during the 1970s and 1980s. As she constructs concentric worlds of conflict and longing, discerns cultural paradoxes and human contrariness, and writes rhapsodically of nature's beauty, life emerges as a cosmic game of chance under luck's misrule. Also available on CD
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HEYDAY
Kurt Andersen
British lad Benjamin Knowles garners a passage to America but, thanks to his big mouth, loses a girl in the voyage. This is a fun historical novel that ties together a great number of ideas, ideals and idols of 19th century America.
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HOUSE LIGHTS
Leah Hager Cohen
Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the sly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea's mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother's graces.
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HOUSE OF MEETINGS
Martin Amis
The book's anonymous narrator--a Red Army veteran and unapologetic war criminal--. chronicles his experiences in a book-length letter to his American stepdaughter. Wry remarks on contemporary Russia and the U.S. run up against gulag reminiscences, which tell of the years 1948 through 1956, The grim story builds with a Dostoyevskian sense of doom and a Nabokovian dark wit. But, for a Russian novel, this one is exceedingly economical, encompassing in its brevity Russian history and character, political intolerance and antisemitism, the psychology of incarcerated life and the problems of freedom, and the weight of crime on the conscience. The narrator is a man who's done terrible things and is able to look at them philosophically--a perfect character for a fearless writer like Amis. Also available as an eBook
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HOW THE DEAD DREAM
Lydia T. Millet
T. is a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. The author doesn't spend a lot of space on the old news that the ecosystem is slipping into a silent spring. Instead, she focuses on the quiet existential crisis that arises from living in a dying world.
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IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN
Hisham Matar
The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society. While there is no judgment in the narrative, the reader is left with a heavy patina of guilt. Well written, with evocative descriptions of heat and landscape, the story lingers long after the book is closed
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IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT
Helen asimpson
In a stunningly imaginative collection of short short stories, this English author offers hard-edged but soft-centered perceptions of real life from her unique, even odd perspective.
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THE INDIAN CLERK
David Leavitt
This novel is based on the true story of the relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.
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THE ITALIAN LOVER
Robert Hellenga
This sort-of sequel to Hellenga’s much-loved “Sixteen Pleasures” (1994) delivers another sumptuous, sensual story of love lost and found, again set in Florence but this time merging the facts of fictional and real-life publishing history.
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KEEPING THE HOUSE
Ellen Baker
Brimming with luscious details that authenticate the story's various time periods, from early to mid–twentieth century, Baker's accomplished, ambitious debut novel is a majestic, vibrant multigenerational saga in the finest tradition of the genre. A restless housewife in 1950 Wisconsin uncovers secrets about a family who left town a few years earlier.
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KENNEDY’S BRAIN
Henning Mankell
Mankell, author of the wonderful Kurt Wallender series (“Faceless Killers”, etc.), is a deft and imaginative plotter and an insightful observer of the human condition, here delivers a scathing indictment of how drug companies exploit, and Western nations ignore, Africa’s mounting medical horrors. There's nothing metaphorical about the core subject, but Mankell tempers his stridency by wrapping it inside a moving tale of loss. (Shelved in the Mystery section)
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KNOTS
Nuruddin Farah
After 20 years, with a failed marriage and dead son, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming her family house from warlord squatters who have devastated Somalia during its civil war. Farah describes these events in a lilting, poetic prose that is hypnotic in its ability to trace both the contradictions and hesitations of his protagonist and the complexities of Somali life. Despite its heavy subject, joy suffuses the novel as the author describes these events in a lilting, hypnotic, poetic prose.
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LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME
Vendela Vida
A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.
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LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories
Jim Shepard
This brilliant collection of wildly imaginative tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
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LOST CITY RADIO
Daniel Alarcon
Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Alarcón's native country, Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcón means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place to which we bring all the baggage of familiarity.
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MAN GONE DOWN
Michael Thomas
As a young black father of three in a biracial marriage, our narrator is trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has longed for since youth. In spite of his current desperate situation and his unfilled potential, he retains a note of hard-won optimism, and the author –in this first novel- resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality.
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MATRIMONY
Joshua Henkin
Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the new millennium, “Matrimony” is about love and friendship, money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality. Can love survive the passing of time?
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THE MAYTREES
Annie Dillard
With Cape Cod (in the years just after WWII) as her setting Dillard parlays her philosophical outlooks about willed bonds of loyalty, friendship and abiding love. Using free-spirited characters as her envoys, she tells the enthralling story of Toby and Lou’s marriage and their relationship with a local woman who helps raise their son.
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THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES
Nathan Englander
This staggering first novel portrays a Jewish family caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970’s. While focusing on the pessimistic Kaddish, whose name honors the dead, and his optimistic wife, Englander tells a much larger story about terrorist regimes and asks universal questions about remembering the dead, dealing with evil and addressing assimilation, love, ritual, and generational gaps.
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MISTER PIP
Lloyd Jones
In this eloquent homage to the power of storytelling, a group of young islanders, caught in the middle of a civil war, become entirely riveted by their teacher’s recitation of “Great Expectations”.
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MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories
Colm Toibin
In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.
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NEW ENGLAND WHITE
Stephen L. Carter
When Julia Carlyle is drawn into the murder investigation of a brilliant black economist, she uncovers connections between a powerful black social club and three former college roommates. A sharp, absorbing look at the black elite, academia, and power politics. Also available as LP and on CD
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ON CHESIL BEACH
Ian McEwan
This achingly beautiful narrative peers behind closed doors, but never lasciviously, at a young married couple on their disastrous wedding night in the early 1960s; an ingenious exploration of addled psychology. Also available in LP, on CD, and as an eBook
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ORPHEUS LOST
Janet Turner Hospital
The author explores how terrorism and its manifestations affect the lives of ordinary people. The story of Leela-May Magnolia Moore, her lover Mishka, and her old friend Cobb is more than just a romantic thriller; it is a post-9/11 reworking of the Orpheus myth by one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists.
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OUT STEALING HORSES
Per Petterson
Translated by Anne Born. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwells in self-imposed exile at the eastern edge of Norway in a primitive cabin. Recalling the distant summer of 1948, Trond reflects on an incident that he and his friend experienced. With this retelling, he reflects on the fragility of life while discovering secrets about his father's wartime activities.
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OUTCAST
Shimon Ballas
Tr. By Ammiel Alcalay. Iraqi civil engineer and historian Haroun Soussan left Judaism, embraced Islam, and fought Zionism, fracturing family and friendships. With the Iran-Iraq War looming, he now feels outcast even within his homeland.
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PEONY IN LOVE
Lisa See
Lisa See's new novel, based on actual historical events, takes readers back to 17th century China, after the Manchus seized power and the Ming dynasty was crushed. The plot mirrors that of the opera, “The Peony Pavilion” and eternal themes abound: an intelligent girl chafing against the restrictions of expected behavior; fiction's educative powers; the rocky path of love between lovers and in families. Also available in LP and as an eBook
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PETROPOLIS
Anya Ulnich
This brave blend of satire, farce, and heart-wrenching realism charts an immigrant’s journey in which a mixed-race Russian Jew, desperate for escape, decamps to America as a mail-order bride, but finds an even more absurd reality than the one she left behind.
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THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD
Lionel Shriver
Shriver's wonderful new novel creates parallel universes that indulge all our what-if speculations. Spared any fork-in-the-road choices, Irina McGovern, a children's book illustrator, can have her beefcake and eat it too. Shriver leads readers on a two-pronged narrative: one consisting of what Irina imagines would have happened if she had given in to temptation, the other showing Irina staying with Lawrence while fantasizing about Ramsey. Also available as an Ebook
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REMAINDER
Tom McCarthy
The nameless narrator in this eerie debut is a Londoner severely injured in an accident. Months later, he received an £8.5 million settlement on the condition that he never speak about the payout or the incident again—not a problem, since he doesn’t remember it. Our hero then begins to wholly recreate and re-enact portions of his old life with a salaried cast of extras, set designers, and stuntmen. In taut and chilly prose, McCarthy describes how this mission becomes a disturbing obsession.
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RETURNING TO EARTH
Jim Harrison
Donald, who, at age 45 is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, dictates his family history to his wife, Cynthia, who records this tale for their two grown children. As the narrative shifts to record how Donald's family members cope with their grieving in the year after his passing, Harrison (“Legends of the Fall”) sounds the themes he has been working out over the course of his long and prolific career, including the healing power of nature and the deep connection between the sensual and the spiritual.
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ROPE WALK
Carrie Brown
A mixed-race New York City kid and a motherless Vermont tomboy spend their summer reading to an almost blind artist suffering from AIDS. In the midst of these unusual friendships they learn the first of many hard truths about the way adults see the world. The children’s’ narrative is a profound experience of innocence, of perception balanced between childhood and adulthood.
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RUN
Ann Patchett
A Boston snowstorm results in a traffic accident – and some shocking discoveries within one family.
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THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
Roberto Bolano
Translated by Natasha Wimmer. This Chilean-born novelist has written a craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas as they travel the globe over 20-plus years.
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THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ
Dalia Sofer
In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.
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THE SEVENTH WELL
Fred Wander
Tr. By Michael Hofmann. In this slim, overwhelmingly powerful Holocaust novel, written by a concentration camp survivor, the narrator, in ironically beautiful prose, tells the stories of the men whom he knew during his long months of incarceration.
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THE SHADOW CATCHER
Marianne Wiggins
This multihued novel about Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), a photographer who spent decades snapping shots of American Indians, is suffused with crackling social commentary.
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SHAKESPEARE’S KITCHEN
Lore Segal
The thirteen interrelated stories of “Shakespeare's Kitchen”, several of which appeared in “The New Yorker”, are about the longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we can lose them.
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SHORTCOMINGS
Adrian Tomine
What a relief to find such unpretentious, intelligent, dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand. Tomine accomplishes in one panel of this graphic novel what so many writers have failed to do in entire books. Graphic novel
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SKYLARK FARM
Antonia Arslan
Tr. By Geoffrey Brock. Arslan conjures the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 in the story of her immediate family forebears—all but one of them female—who survived it. Related as if it were a legend, charged with suspense, this is a soul-shaking first novel.
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STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN
Ann Pancake
Debut novelist Pancake’s poetic and compelling West Virginian family drama exposes the terrible and far-reaching consequences of the environmentally disastrous practice of mountain-top-removal coal mining.
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SUNSTROKE: And Other Stories
Tessa Hadley
These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.
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TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS
Jane Smiley
Better think twice before gifting this to your mom. Sex is the major theme in this smoldering novel set in the Hollywood Hills. The shallow, yet sometimes profound characters indulge in a roundelay of lasciviously detailed sexual encounters and, most of all, talk, holding absurd, meandering, beguiling conversations about movies, Hollywood, relationships, the war and the state of the world. Also available on CD and as an eBook
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THEM
Nathan McCall
When a traditionally black neighborhood in Atlanta (Martin Luther King Jr.’s parish) is gentrified, new residents and old clash over expectations for the future. McCall is a master of details and while his message may be less than hopeful, he tells a story both poignant and grimly humorous.
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THEN WE CAME TO THE END
Joshua Ferris
Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
Khaled Hosseini
Following his best-selling “The Kite Runner” (2003), Hosseini views the plight of modern Afghanistan through the eyes of two very different women to create an unforgettably sad and beautiful tale. Also available in LP, on CD, and as an eBook
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THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories
Jean Thompson
The women in this Illinois writer’s stories are smart and strong but drawn to losers.
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THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN
James Lee Burke
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath provide the backdrop for an account of sin and redemption in New Orleans in Burke's 16th Dave Robicheaux novel.
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TREE OF SMOKE
Denis Johnson
This terrifying epic revolves around a murky intelligence operation and offers a zinger of a story about the CIA and a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War. Johnson is a gifted writer with a knack for erudite and colorful dialogue, and his sense of time is immaculate and visceral. Also available as an eBook
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TRESPASS
Valerie Martin
When a privileged son jumps into a shotgun wedding with a little-known Croatian woman, his mother is more than a little concerned about the girl’s intentions.
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UP HIGH IN THE TREES
Kiara Brinkman
The Asperger's afflicted narrator of Brinkman's sincere, sober debut struggles to cope with his pregnant mother's recent death. Already keenly sensitive to emotional and sensory stimuli, Sebby Lane finds his mother's loss almost unbearable. Told in brief poetic vignettes, the novel moves quickly and episodically, like a series of snapshots from the camera of Sebby's unique mind.
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VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories
Lydia Davis
In her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.
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THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories
Alice Munro
This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.
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THE VISIBLE WORLD
Mark Slouka
The grown son of Czech immigrants, a Hyde Park resident, tries to uncover the mystery of his mother’s first love and his parents’ wartime involvement in Prague. The suspense is extremely well paced, and the action scenes are vividly recounted.
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THE WELSH GIRL
Peter Ho Davies
During World War II, a Welsh teenager does the unthinkable, falling in love with a German prisoner of war. What makes this first novel by an award-winning short-storyteller an intriguing read are the beautifully realized characters, who learn that life is a jumble of difficult compromises best confronted with eyes wide open.
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WHAT IS THE WHAT: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel
Dave Eggers
A lost boy of the Sudanese civil war finds himself just as misplaced in America. Based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng.
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THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION
Michael Chabon
Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska. They are the “frozen chosen” in Chabon’s alternate reality. Also available in LP and on CD
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