Book List Category:
By Dean Bakopoulos.
A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke Pappas has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.
By Chad Harbach.
"At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big-league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended."--from publisher's description.
By S.J. Watson.
An amnesiac attempts to reconstruct her past by keeping a journal and discovers the dangerous inconsistencies in the stories of her husband and her secret doctor.
By Jess Walter.
A novel that spans fifty years. The Italian housekeeper and his long-lost American starlet; the producer who once brought them together, and his assistant. A glittering world filled with unforgettable characters.
By Rebecca Makkai.
Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes.
By Julie Otsuka.
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
By Yannick Murphy.
When a hunting accident leaves his son in a coma, the son's veterinarian father tries to find the man responsible while maintaining normalcy for his family until an unexpected visitor asks a favor that will test his resolve and force him to come to terms with what it truly means to be a family.
By David Vann.
When the construction of their dream cabin on an isolated Alaskan island is interrupted by an early Arctic winter, Gary and Irene find their marriage unraveling as they become stranded with their daughter, Rhoda, who watches helplessly as her parents drift further apart.
By Carolyn Cooke.
It's 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God. With Cape Wilde engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation and the sexual revolution, Byrd has confidently promised coeducation "over my dead body." And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.
By Deborah Harkness.
Witch and Yale historian Diana Bishop discovers an enchanted manuscript, attracting the attention of 1,500-year-old vampire Matthew Clairmont. The orphaned daughter of two powerful witches, Bishop prefers intellect, but relies on magic when her discovery of a palimpsest documenting the origin of supernatural species releases an assortment of undead who threaten, stalk, and harass her.
By Stewart O'Nan.
Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities.
By Benjamin Hale.
Bruno Littlemore, the world's first chimpanzee with the ability to speak, tells the story of primatologist Lydia Littlemore's efforts to educate him; his untimely outbursts, which ultimately cost Lydia her job; and the unforgettable road trip that follows.
By Therese Fowler.
Sexting leads to big trouble for two teenagers. Anthony Winter, a charismatic 18-year-old raised by a single mom, is dating Amelia Wilkes, a nice girl from a wealthy, conservative family that doesn't want her in a relationship with a student who can afford private school only because his mother teaches there. Kids being kids armed with camera phones and digital cameras, they e-mail each other nude digital photos, and when Amelia's father comes across pictures of Anthony on his daughter's computer, he calls the police, and a nightmare begins for all involved: Anthony faces being branded a sex offender, and Amelia gets in trouble with the law as well.
By Jennifer Haigh.
When her older brother Art--a Catholic priest and the popular pastor of a large suburban parish--finds himself at the center of a scandal, Sheila McGann, estranged from her family for years, returns to Boston, ready to fight for him and his reputation.
By Kevin Wilson.
Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world. When the lives they've built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance-- their magnum opus-- whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what's ultimately more important: their family or their art. The novel displays a keen sense of the complex performances that unfold in the relationships of people who love one another.
By by Sarah Bird.
A novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest.
By Mark Childress.
Georgia Bottoms, a Southern belle who keeps six lovers--none of whom know of the others--so she can maintain a lavish lifestyle, finds her ruse crumbling when a married preacher she has been seeing plans to confess their affair in front of his congregation.
By Norb Vonnegut.
Jimmy Cusack's rise to the top of Wall Street takes a quick turn for the worse when his hedge fund collapses, leaving him unemployed and broke, but when he is hired by Leeser Capital, he hopes his luck is turning around, but he soon realizes Leeser Capital is pulling him into a dangerous web of greed, lies, and illegal gains.
By Allison Pearson.
In 1970s South Wales, Petra and Sharon live for David Cassidy and take the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz thinking that David's letters are all his own work. Over two decades later, bruised by grief, Petra is living with her thirteen-year-old daughter and meets the reluctant pop journalist who compiled the quiz.
By Steve Earle.
Wracked by guilt and addiction ten years after administering a fatal morphine overdose to Hank Williams, Doc Ebersole performs illegal medical services in the red-light district of San Antonio before meeting a young Mexican immigrant who seems to heal others with her touch.
By Adam Ross.
A collection of stories includes the tales of a lonely professor who fears he is being made an accessory to murder and an adolescent who uses his brief career as a child actor to attract a girl.
By by Glen Duncan.
Jacob Marlowe has lost the will to live. For two hundred years he has wandered the world, enslaved by his lunatic appetites and tormented by the memory of his first and most monstrous crime. Now, the last of his kind, he contemplates suicide -- until a violent murder and an extraordinary meeting plunge him straight back into the desperate pursuit of life -- and love.
By David Levithan.
A modern love story told through a series of dictionary-style entries is a sequence of intimate windows into the large and small events that shape the course of a romantic relationship.
By Jeffrey Eugenides.
Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.
By by John Sayles.
"In 1897, gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. This is the story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of our greatest storytellers of all time...'A Moment in the Sun' takes the whole era in its sights--from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism overseas. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward across five years and half a dozen countries...this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen."--P. [4] of cover.
By Dean Bakopoulos.
A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke Pappas has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.
By Erin Morgenstern.
Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways.
By Bonnie Jo Campbell.
Margo Crane, a beautiful and uncanny markswoman, takes to the Stark River after being complicit in the death of her father and embarks on an odyssey in search of her vanished mother.
By Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel.
An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.
By Louise Dean.
Estranged from the gruff parents who blame him for their divorce, Nick enjoys life with his attractive wife and teenage daughter until his father's belief in his imminent death forces a haphazard attempt at reconciliation.
By Teju Cole.
Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed.
By Daniel Orozco.
In this collection, Orozco leads the reader through the secret lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. Each story in the collection has a gut-punch impact, softened only by lyricism and black humor.
By Ellen Meister.
Hiding the truth about her ability to cross into alternate realities where she has made different life decisions, a married and pregnant Quinn Braverman learns that her unborn child will be disabled and glimpses into a parallel life where she is married to someone else and childless.
By David Foster Wallace.
The character David Foster Wallace is introduced to the banal world of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and the host of strange people who work there, in a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author's death.
By Paula McLain.
Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway, and after a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband's career.
By Stephen Kelman.
Lying in front of Harrison Opuku is a body, the body of one of his classmates, a boy known for his crazy basketball skills, who seems to have been murdered for his dinner. Armed with a pair of camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television shows like CSI, Harri and his best friend, Dean, plot to bring the perpetrator to justice. They gather evidence-fingerprints lifted from windows with tape, a wallet stained with blood-and lay traps to flush out the murderer. But nothing can prepare them for what happens when a criminal feels you closing in on him.Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London?s enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience-obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer.Told in Harri's infectious voice and multicultural slang, Pigeon English follows in the tradition of our great novels of friendship and adventure, as Harri finds wonder, mystery, and danger in his new, ever-expanding world.
By Thelma Adams.
Inside their picture-perfect homes, the residents of this quiet California suburb are not at all what they seem. As looming Santa Ana winds threaten to turn brushfires into catastrophe; relationships are complicated and the bonds between families, spouses and children are never quite what they seem. What happens next door, beyond the hedges, in the romper room and executive office--it's all as combustible as a quick brushfire on a windy day.
By Elizabeth Stuckey-French.
In 1953, Dr. Wilson Spriggs gave Marylou Ahearn a radioactive cocktail without her consent as part of a secret government study that had horrible consequences. For 50 years she's been plotting her revenge. At last she's found Spriggs.
By Amor Towles.
A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.
By Jesmyn Ward.
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
By Francisco Goldman.
In a novel based on the author's real-life tragedy, Goldman, consumed with grief and guilt over the accidental death of his wife just before their second anniversary, obsessively collects every memory of her, especially her writings, with the hope of keeping her alive in his mind.
By Sarah Pekkanen.
What would you do if your husband suddenly wanted to rewrite the rules of your relationship?
By A.D. Miller.
Witnessing the progression of regional corruption in his work as a British lawyer in early 2000s Moscow, Nick Platt rescues two sisters from a purse snatcher and pursues a glamorous romantic relationship with one of the sisters before he is asked to help with a dubious family endeavor.
By Charles Frazier.
Named the guardian of her murdered sister's troubled twins, Luce struggles to build a family with the children before being targeted by the twins' father--her sister's killer--who believes that the children are in possession of a stolen cache of money.
By Paul McEuen.
The race is on to stop the devastating proliferation of the ultimate bioweapon. What begins as a quest for answers soon leads to a horrifying series of revelations at the crossroads of biological warfare and nanoscience. At this dangerous intersection, a skilled and sadistic assassin, an infamous Japanese war criminal, and a ruthless U.S. government official are all players in a harrowing game of power, treachery, and intrigue--a game whose winner will hold the world's fate literally in the palm of his hand.
By Ann Patchett.
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
By Dana Spiotta.
Sharing a close bond that supersedes other relationships, Nic, a fiercely reclusive musician, and Denise, his dedicated sister and solitary audience member, become increasingly isolated in the wake of Nic's obsessive work.
By Alan Hollinghurst.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried--until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.
By Amy Waldman.
"When a Muslim architect wins a blind contest to design a Ground Zero Memorial, a city of eleven million people takes notice. Waldman, a former bureau chief for the New York Times, explores a diversity of viewpoints around this fictional event, bringing in politicians, businessmen, journalists, activists, and normal people whose lives--whether by happenstance, choice, or even due to their country of origin--get caught up in the controversy. Incredibly, she manages to keep all the balls in the air without ever fumbling. The story is moving and keeps the pages turning, but there are also bigger themes at work: of individuals versus groups; about the purpose of art, commerce, government, and journalism in society; of how people respond to grief and terror. The result is honest, compelling, and breathtaking."--Chris Schluep, Amazon Best Book of the Month
By Karen Russell.
Twelve year old Ava must travel into the Underworld part of the swamp in order to save her family's dynasty of Bigtree alligator wresting. This novel takes us to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator wrestling theme park, formerly no. 1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety eight gators as well as her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, the author has written a novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking.
By Eleanor Henderson.
When his best friend Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude Keffy-Horn finds his relationship with drugs and his parents devolving into the extreme when he gets caught up in an underground youth culture known as straight edge.
By T. Greenwood.
When he stumbles upon Ricky, a young Navajo man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow, part-time history professor Ben Bailey questions everything in his life, including his relationship with his fiancée Sara, and decides to discover the truth about Ricky's death.
By Téa Obreht.
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.
By Tom McNeal.
Judith Whitman, in a marriage hazy with secrets, considers getting in touch with the love of her life from twenty years ago.
By by Arthur Phillips.
When their long-imprisoned con-artist father reaches the end of his life, Arthur and his twin sister become the owners of an undiscovered play by William Shakespeare that their father wants published, a final request that represents either a great literary gift or their father's last great heist.
By Alice LaPlante.
Implicated in the murder of her best friend, Jennifer White, a brilliant retired surgeon with dementia, struggles with fractured memories of their complex relationship and wonders if she actually committed the crime.
By Victoria Patterson.
"The 1990s--Newport Beach, California. Money is God. A man's worth is judged by the size of his boat, the make of his car. A woman's value is assessed by the blank perfection of her quantifiable desirability: dress size, cup size, the whiteness of her teeth. And oh yes: her youth. Though Esther Wilson, the heroine of Victoria Patterson's debut novel, has the looks to marry well, things aren't going as planned. She's nearing her mid-30s and possibly aging out of the only role she's equipped to play: wife to a powerful member of the elite."--Dust jacket.
By Chuck Klosterman.
Treating a delusional scientist who has been using cloaking technology from an aborted government project to render himself nearly invisible, Austin therapist Victoria Vick becomes obsessed with his accounts of spying on the private lives of others.
By Justin Torres.
"An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures"--Provided by publisher.
By Eleanor Brown.
Unwillingly brought together to care for their ailing mother, three sisters who were named after famous Shakespearean characters discover that everything they have been avoiding may prove more worthwhile than expected.
By Dean Koontz.
After Detective John Calvino receives a signed confession to a shocking crime from 14-year-old Billy Lucas, he feels that somehow Billy has come home with him, to his family. Then another killing spree happens, just as and when John Calvino dreaded it would. Billy is safely locked away, but not the "ghost", if the ghost exists, that links these murders with past crimes, and with John Calvino. Anything could happen, and surely will-- again.
By T. Coraghessan Boyle.
Traces an incrementally violent confrontation between a National Park Service biologist who would eradicate invasive wildlife on the Channel Islands and two locals who are fiercely opposed to the killing of any creatures.
