Literary Fiction Psychological

Largely autobiographical, Christ in Concrete opens with the dramatic Good Friday collapse of a building under construction, crucifying in concrete an Italian construction worker, whose death leaves his pregnant wife and eight children impoverished. His oldest son, Paul, at just 12 years old, must take over his father’s role—and his job.

Mai 2013. Chloé et Gabriel, mariés depuis plusieurs années, mènent une existence heureuse à Saint-Malo, jusqu'au jour où la jeune femme se noie accidentellement au cours d'une baignade matinale. Gabriel, incapable de surmonter seul son chagrin, se décide à chercher du soutien auprès d'un groupe de parole. Il fait alors la connaissance d'Emma, une photographe récemment arrivée en ville, qui l'aide à surmonter son deuil.

Detailing a six-hour window on April 21, 1941, The Bus features eight different narrators: six mental patients, the doctor who will kill them, and the man who will burn their corpses. Crammed into a bus with 35 others and unable to see out the painted windows, the patients are transferred from the Scheuern institution to the Nazi euthanasia clinic in Hadamar, Germany.

Estelle Paradise wakes up in a hospital after being found near dead at the bottom of a ravine with a fragmented memory and a vague sense of loss. Then a terrifying reality sets in: her seven-month-old daughter, Mia, is missing. Frustrated and unable to explain her daughter's disappearance, Estelle begins a desperate search. But when the lack of evidence casts doubt on her story, Estelle becomes the number-one suspect in the eyes of the police and the media.

The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her.

In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame - beautiful, sharp-tongued Daisy.

Though Diane Randall’s jewelry business is a great success, her marriage is not, and she finds herself growing lonely as her children near adulthood. Meanwhile, her eighteen-year-old daughter Julia is falling dangerously in love, and Diane’s mother, Jean, is relishing her newfound freedom as a single woman in Europe. Distracted by their individual concerns, the three women are ill-prepared for the crisis that suddenly appears on Diane’s doorstep in the form of a handsome FBI agent asking about an explosive secret that’s laid buried for decades.

Jan needs this. She’s flying to Crete to reunite with friends she met there five years ago and relive an idyllic vacation. Basking in the warmth of the sun, the azure sea, and the aura of antiquity, she can once again pretend - for a little while - that she belongs. Her ex-boyfriend Marcus will be among them, but even he doesn’t know the secrets she keeps hidden behind a veil of lies. None of them really know her. Then again, how well does she know them? When Jan awakens in utter darkness, chained to a wall, she desperately tries to reconstruct what happened....

As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, author Norman Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the listener by the throat and refuses to let go.

A debut novel already praised as "unbearably poignant and beautifully told" (Eimear McBride), this captivating story follows - over the course of four seasons - a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog. It is springtime, and two outcasts - a man ignored, even shunned by his village, and the one-eyed dog he takes into his quiet, tightly shuttered life - find each other, by accident or fate, and forge an unlikely connection. As their friendship grows, their small seaside town suddenly takes note of them.

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue - a woman who looks, talks, and behaves almost exactly like her and who audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better. Certain that his real wife is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love.

Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire.

Illumination Night follows the lives of a young blond giant who is as beautiful as he is frightening; an old woman at the end of her life whose last mission is to save her granddaughter's soul; a family torn apart by a wife's fears and a husband's unrealized desires; and the high school girl who comes to Martha's Vineyard against her will, who steals husbands and cars, and who will bring everyone together in a web of yearning, sin, and ultimate redemption.

It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist - an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer - fully unravels. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of - or into - the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief.

It’s the day before Mike Frame’s 50th birthday, and his quiet, provincial life is suddenly falling apart. But perhaps it doesn’t matter because it’s not his life in the first place. He has a past that his partner, Miranda, and stepdaughter, Sam, know nothing about. Now Mike is seeing ghosts - a dead ex-lover, and an old friend who wants to reminisce. Mike can no longer ignore the contradiction between who he is and who he once was.

Chloé a l’impression que sa vie est enfin devenue parfaite quand elle revient s’installer dans sa ville natale avec son fiancé. Sa carrière au sein du FBI est plutôt prometteuse et son mariage se profile à l’horizon. Mais très vite, elle se rend compte que la banlieue n’est pas toujours ce qu’elle paraît. Chloé en découvre la face cachée - les rumeurs, les secrets, les mensonges - et elle se retrouve hantée par ses propres démons : la mort mystérieuse de sa mère quand elle avait dix ans et l’incarcération de son père.

TEEN VOGUE BOOK CLUB PICK A Harvard freshman becomes obsessed with her schizophrenic brother’s suicide. Then she starts hearing voices. “A rich, intricately plotted thriller . . . Serritella, who is a Harvard grad herself, writes about the campus with an insider’s savvy...

When her plane is delayed overnight, Gaby Struthers finds herself forced to share a hotel room with a stranger: a terrified young woman named Lauren Cookson - but why is she scared of Gaby in particular? Lauren won't explain. Instead, she blurts out something about an innocent man going to prison for a murder he didn't commit, and Gaby soon suspects that Lauren's presence on her flight can't be a coincidence.

An old man sits in a room, with a single door and window, a bed, a desk, and a chair. Each day he awakes with no memory, unsure of whether or not he is locked into the room. Attached to the few objects around him are one-word, hand-written, labels and on the desk is a series of vaguely familiar black-and-white photographs and four piles of paper. Then a middle-aged woman called Anna enters and talks of pills and treatment, but also of love and promises.

An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a longtime resident of a psychiatric hospital, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn teenaged volunteer. Told with Chekhovian restraint and compassion, and conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not a Stranger Here is a triumph of storytelling.