Book List Category:
By Tom Perrotta.
Teaching human sexuality from a perspective that information and pleasure are top priorities, divorced mom Ruth Ramsey butts heads with the local soccer coach, a divorced former addict who became an evangelical Christian after hitting rock bottom.
By Rachel Cusk.
Follows a single rainy day in the lives of the inhabitants of Arlington Park in the English suburbs, as they live out the dubious accomplishments of their lives in a world rife with contentment and anxiety but empty of belief.
By Susanna Moore.
The story of Helen, an inmate at Sloatsburg, and the horrible crime that led to her life sentence at the prison, is told through the voices of Helen herself; Dr. Louise Forrest, head of mental services at the prison; and Ike Bradshaw, a young correctionsofficer.
By Junot Díaz.
Publisher description: Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
By Matt Beynon Rees.
Omar Yussef is a schoolteacher in Bethlehem, struggling to teach history unfettered by politics. When a PLO soldier is murdered, and a Palestinian Christian is arrested for the crime (and accused of being a collaborator with the Israelis), Yussef launches his own investigation, convinced that the accused, a former student, is innocent.
By Matthew Klein.
Kip Largo was once the best in the business. A con man's con man. But then he spent five years in jail and lost everything except his sense of humor and a crummy little apartment. Then one day he meets Lauren Napier, wife of billionaire venture capitalist Ed Napier. She wants Kip to steal her husband's money for her, and in return, she'll cut him in on a sizeable chunk of the proceeds. Kip's been around long enough to know that when a beautiful woman wants something from you, all you're gonna get in return is a whole lot of trouble. So he makes the smart choice and walks away. But soon Kip's son shows up with a different tale of woe: he's gotten into a really bad situation with the Russian Mafia and needs his old man's help. Suddenly, the idea of stealing Ed Napier's money doesn't sound so bad. The con is on, but for Kip, the question will soon be: who's conning whom?
By Matt Haig.
A Hamlet redux with an unforgettable voice all his own. When eleven-year-old Philip Noble is confronted by the ghost of his recently deceased father and asked to avenge his death, the boy finds himself in a thorny dilemma. Revenge, after all, is a tricky business -- especially when Philip is already distracted by his girlfriend, school bullies, self-doubt, and all the other challenges of adolescence. Viewing the adult world through the eyes of a young boy.
By Chris Bohjalian.
Working at a homeless shelter, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel embarks on an obsessive search for the truth behind the photos.
By Stephen White.
Alan Gregory finds his family targeted by brilliant murderer Michael McClelland when the latter is released from the Colorado State Mental Hospital, a situation that is complicated by McClelland's detailed knowledge about Alan's innermost secrets.
By Christian Jungersen ; translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson.
Three office workers at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide suspect a new librarian when they begin to receive email threats, even though the evidence suggests a Serbian war criminal is behind them.
By Thomas Mallon.
Historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era. Washington, D.C., early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Timothy Laughlin, recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism, meets a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leading to Tim's first job and--after Fuller's advances--his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on "sexual subversives" in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. The novel moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star, the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe, energized by political drama, unexpected humor and heartbreak.--From publisher description.
By Mischa Berlinski.
Following his girlfriend to her new teaching position in Thailand, a young reporter researches the story of American anthropologist Martiya van der Leun, following her suicide in the Thai prison where she was serving a lengthy sentence for murder.
By Jon Clinch.
In this debut by a major new voice in fiction, the author takes readers on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature's most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn's father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain's classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own. Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body flayed and stripped of all identifying marks, drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim's identity, shape Finn's story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way the author introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn's terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn's mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to recreate Huck for a new generation, the author gives readers a living boy in all his human complexity,not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright. Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America's past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
By Michael Palmer.
A suspended Harvard Medical School student is kidnapped and left for dead in Rio de Janeiro, while a terminally ill medical genius works on a potentially world-changing cure, and a Chicago detective struggles to identify a mysterious accident victim.
By Ron Carlson.
Working together on a summer construction project high in the Rocky Mountains, drifter Arthur Key, shiftless Ronnie Panelli, and foreman Darwin Gallegos reveal details about their pasts and beliefs in cautious and profound ways.
By Anne Enright.
"The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him - something that happened in their grandmother's house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, she shows how memories warp and secrets fester."--BOOK JACKET.
By Aryn Kyle.
Based on the author's short story titled "The Foaling Season," the tale of rancher's daughter Alice Winston finds her helping to support the family business by boarding the horses of rich neighbors and leaving behind the innocence of her youth.
By Joe Hill.
A collector of obscure and macabre artifacts, unscrupulous metal band musician Judas Coyne is unable to resist purchasing a ghost over the Internet, which turns out to be the vengeful spirit of his late girlfriend's stepfather.
By Hisham Matar.
"Ultimately, this is a novel most concerned with relationships between people - friends, spouses, comrades, and , particularly, parents and their children. Matar movingly charts the ways in which love endures in situtations of great represasion, but salso shows how repression threatens everything, even love, putting relationships under a strain that can be unendurable .... Whatever his subject, Matar writes beautifully." Guardian (UK). From the bookjacket.
By David Leavitt.
Leavitt's novel centers on the relationship between mathematicians G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). In January of 1913, Cambridge-based Hardy receives a nine-page letter filled with prime number theorems from S. Ramanujan, a young accounts clerk in Madras. Intrigued, Hardy consults his colleague and collaborator, J.E. Littlewood; the two soon decide Ramanujan is a mathematical genius and that he should emigrate to Cambridge to work with them. Hardy recruits the young, eager don, Eric Neville, and his wife, Alice, to travel to India and expedite Ramanujan's arrival; Alice's changing affections, WWI and Ramanujan's enigmatic ailments add obstacles. Meanwhile, Hardy, a reclusive scholar and closeted homosexual, narrates a second story line cast as a series of 1936 Harvard lectures, some of them imagined. Ramanujan comes to renown as the the Hindu calculator discussions of mathematics and bits of Cambridge's often risque ̌academic culture (including D.H. Lawrence's 1915 visit) add authenticity.
By Howard Jacobson.
Having grown up in the 1950s wake of the Holocaust, Jewish cartoonist Max Glickman recalls a shocking crime committed against his family and faith by a neighbor, an act involving a long-hidden motive that reveals startling truths about twenty-first-century religion.
By Vendela Vida.
After her father dies, Clarissa journeys to Lapland in search for the truth about her parentage.
By Daniel Alarcón.
The powerful and searing novel of three lives fractured by a civil war For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war. But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
By Helon Habila.
Twin brothers growing up in the tiny Nigerian village of Keti, where their lives are dominated by their controlling father, Mamo and LaMamo are separated when LaMamo escapes to pursue his dream of becoming a soldier, but when religious zealots incite the people to violence, he returns home to battle the enemy and to be reunited with his brother, now a renowned historian.
By Armistead Maupin.
Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, lives on in this novel about growing older joyfully. Almost twenty years after ending his saga of San Francisco life, author Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the 55-year-old gardener tell his own story. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. This book follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady. This stand-alone novel is accessible to new readers, while fans of Tales of the City will find a reassuring number of familiar faces.--From publisher description.
By Nathan Englander.
In 1976 Buenos Aires, Kaddish Poznan, the outcast son of a whore, and his wife, Lillian, are devastated by the disappearance of their own son, Pato, which forces them into the bleak corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases in search of the truth.
By Ariana Franklin.
Sent to medieval Cambridge in order to exonerate Jewish prisoners with financial ties to King Henry I, University of Salerno medical examiner Adelia struggles to avoid being accused of witchcraft and discovers that the killer may be a former crusader.
By Colm Tóibín.
A sequence of nine short works explores the intricate bonds between mothers and sons as reflected at pivotal junctures that shift the way each sees and understands the other.
By Ian McEwan.
The story centers around two newlyweds, Edward and Florence Mayhew both virgins who must struggle through their internal battle with sexual anxiety.
By Naeem Murr.
The closeness of five friends growing up in 1950s Pisgah, Missouri--including Rajiv Travers, a boy born to a East Indian mother and English father, abandoned by his family, and adopted by the American romance writer his uncle left behind by suicide--is threatened when a love triangle develops within their group and the dark secrets of Pisgah's residents emerge.
By Lalita Tademy.
"The intertwining stories of two Louisiana families--three generations of African-American men--and their struggles to make a place for themselves in a country deeply divided in the aftermath of the Civil War and beyond"--Provided by publisher.
By Mohsin Hamid.
"Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love"--Book jacket.
By Yasmin Crowther.
On a blustery day in London, the dark secrets and troubled past of Maryam Mazar surface violently with tragic consequences for her daughter Sara and her newly orphaned nephew Saeed.
By Roberto Bolaño ; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: To track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesarea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
By Lisa Lutz.
Izzy Spellman launches her career as a private investigator while working for the firm of her outlandishly dysfunctional family.
By Kevin Baker.
Rev. Jonah Dove returns home to World War II-era Harlem, troubled by his history of passing as a white man in college, and finds his life colliding with that of Malcolm Little, a teenage hustler from Michigan who is destined to rename himself Malcolm X.
By Jane Smiley.
On the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards, Max--an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned--and his lover, Elena, are in bed, still groggy from last night's red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, talking about the just-begun war in Iraq. But a house full of guests demands attention. They share their stories of Hollywood past and present; they watch films in Max's luxe screening room; they gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms. The tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers a virtuosic, unputdownable romp of a novel about love, war, sex, politics, storytelling--and, of course, redemption--that's Hollywood!
By Stef Penney.
1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, an isolated settlement in Canada's Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. But soon she makes another discovery: her son has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. A variety of outsiders are drawn to the crime and to the township--but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, searchers set out to follow the tracks across a desolate landscape, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.--From publisher description.
By Dan Simmons.
A horror novel based on the Lost Expedition of Sir John Franklin.
By Joshua Ferris.
No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way : through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. Among coworkers fighting for their jobs and their precious perks: Tom Mota, recently divorced and inexplicably wearing three company polo shirts, one on top of the other, every day; Joe Pope, a workaholic and perpetual victim of office sabotage; Carl Garbedian, whose unchecked depression has led him to "borrow" Janine Gorjanc's medication and black out his windows; Chris Yop, suspected of stealing Tom Mota's chair; and Marcia Dwyer with whom Benny Shassburger is in love, despite her mean streak and badly dated haircut. As one colleague after another is laid off, everyone strikes their best busines-as-usual pose, pretending to make headway on the mysterious pro bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work". Meanwhile tempers flare, office furniture disappears, and the survivors parse their bosses' decisions in ever-more paranoid sessions at the nearest bar.--Cover.
By Denis Johnson.
The lives of Skip Sands, a spy-in-training engaged in psychological operations against the Vietcong, and brothers Bill and James Houston, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war, intertwine in a novel of America during the Vietnam War.
By Robert Crais.
Working as a bodyguard for a spoiled federal witness, Joe Pike hatches a desperate plan to disappear with the woman in the underworld of Los Angeles and turn on her would-be killers, an effort in which he enlists the help of private investigator Elvis Cole.
By Laura Lippman.
Interviewing a distressed and disoriented woman who has fled the scene of an accident, Baltimore County police department detective Kevin Infante is amazed when she claims to be the younger of a pair of sisters who were abducted thirty years earlier.
By Jim Butcher.
Assigned to investigate the deaths of several magic practitioners, all of whom lacked the ability to become full-fledged wizards, professional Chicago wizard Harry Dresden is shocked when the evidence points to his half-brother Thomas as the killer.
By Michelle Richmond.
Photographer Abby Mason's life is changed forever by the disappearance of the young girl with whom she had been walking on a cold and foggy beach, and her desperate search for the truth behind the child's vanishing.
By Michael Chabon.
In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.
By Christopher Moore.
Waking up after a fantastic night only to discover that his girlfriend is a vampire and has transformed him into one, Thomas C. Flood adapts to his new powers while dealing with a dangerous faction of bloodsuckers trying to kill off all other vampires.
By Colum McCann.
"A passionate story of love, loss, and renewal set against the political upheavals of twentieth century Europe, Zoli captures the world of Gypsies more vibrantly than any other novel of the modern era. Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As fascism spreads over 1930s Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. But as Zoli's fame grows and her poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own repressive purposes. Cast out from her family, Zoli finally abandons her past to journey to the West." From the bookjacket.
