After nine years together, Kathryn and Chris have the sort of relationship most would envy. They speak in the shorthand they have invented, complete one another's sentences and help each other through every daily and existential dilemma. When Chris tells Kathryn about his attraction to Emily, a vivacious young woman he sees often at the laundromat, Kathryn encourages him to ask her out on a date - certain that her bond with Chris is strong enough to weather whatever may come.

With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared, and their mother works double, sometimes triple, shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home.

A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language. A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.

Joe, a 35-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York company, feels disillusioned with his life. Soon he starts dreaming of a mysterious man and, not long after, begins seeing him on the street and hearing his voice. The voice overwhelms Joe and he starts to listen to it, camping out on the front steps of his stoop, waiting for instructions. The media take note. And soon he has become a story, a media sensation, the center of a storm.

The international debut sensation Deafening launched the story of Grania, deaf from the age of five, and her sister Tress, who helped to create their secret language. Tell picks up from the return of the sisters' husbands from the war, and follows Tress' partner Kenan, a young shell-shocked soldier who confines himself indoors, venturing outside only at night to visit the frozen bay where he skated as a boy. Saddened by her altered marriage, Tress seeks advice from her Aunt Maggie.

Alternating between a woman's childhood in a small town and as an adult in the city, this novel traces a Jehovah Witness family's splintering belief system, their isolation, and the erosion of their relationships. As Emily becomes closer to her closeted Uncle Tyler, she begins to challenge her upbringing. Her questions about the Jehovah's Witnesses' insular lifestyle, rigid codes of conduct, and tenets of their faith haunt her older sister Lenora too.

Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married,) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close - raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life.

Charlie Bellerose leads a seminomadic existence, traveling widely to manage the language academies he has established in different countries. After separating, somewhat amicably, from his wife, he moves from Madrid back to his native Canada to set up a new school, and for the first time he forges a meaningful relationship with his brother, who's going through a vicious divorce.

Christophe has been in the New World only a year when his native guides abandon him to flee their Iroquois pursuers. A Huron warrior and elder named Bird soon takes him prisoner, along with a young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, whose family he has just killed, and holds them captive in his massive village. Champlain's Iron People have only recently begun trading with the Huron, who mistrust them as well as this Crow who has now trespassed onto their land; and her people, of course, have become the Huron's greatest enemy.

Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who long ago abandoned her ambition to be a successful artist, has become the "woman upstairs", a reliable friend and tidy neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents - dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar and professor at the École Normale Supérleure; and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist - have come to Boston for Skandar to take up a fellowship at Harvard.

With her powerful debut novel, author Marjorie Celona has made a mark with critics and listeners everywhere. In Y, Shannon is abandoned as an infant on the doorstep of a local YMCA. Taken into the foster-care system, she endures years of abuse. But her luck finally changes when she’s sent to live with a kind single mom named Miranda. Even so, Shannon remains haunted by a burning question: Why did her birth mother leave her on the very day she was born?

The Erskine Clan, long shunned by the people of Gideon, live in secrecy and isolation on North Mountain. For generations, the clan’s children have suffered unspeakable acts of abuse, incest and psychological torture. The intolerant, self-righteous Gideonites decline to intervene, believing their neighbours to be beyond salvation. Yet in both groups, nearly everyone has secrets, and nothing is as it seems.

A young, enigmatic woman - Lily Azerov - arrives in postwar Montreal expecting to meet her betrothed, Sol Kramer. When Sol sees Lily at the train station, however, he turns her down. His brother, Nathan, sees Lily and instantly decides to marry her. But Lily is not who she claims to be, and her attempt to live a quiet life as Nathan Kramer's wife shatters when she disappears, leaving her baby daughter with only a diary, an uncut diamond, and a need to discover the truth.

Ru est composé de très courts récits liés un peu comme dans une ritournelle : la première phrase du chapitre reprend le plus souvent l'idée qui terminait le chapitre précédent...

Summer 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin, Israel and Egypt are inching towards peace, and in the bustling, polyglot streets of Rome, strange new creatures have appeared: Soviet Jews who have escaped to freedom through a crack in the Iron Curtain. Among the thousands who have landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the West are the members of the Krasnansky family - three generations of Russian Jews.

When Vito Santoro's body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth.

A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated.

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table” - as far from the Captain’s Table as can be - with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury.