Literary Fiction Psychological

After his daughter's tragic death, Ismail struggles to continue living. A divorce, years of heavy drinking, and sex with strangers only leave him more alone and isolated. But Ismail's story begins to change after he reluctantly befriends two women: Fatima, a young queer activist kicked out of her parents' home; and Celia, his grieving Portuguese-Canadian neighbour who lives just six metres away. A slow-simmering romance develops between Ismail and Celia.

This masterful National Book Award winner explores the shattering effects of war on the human mind. Growing up, Birdy dreams of flying like a bird and shares these fantasies with his best friend Al. Years later, World War II sends both men to hospitals - Al for physical wounds and Birdy for psychological trauma. When Birdy falls into a catatonic state, it is Al who tries to pull him out.

Mona's perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness - leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality.

His life's work and ambition fulfilled, Francis Brimm believes the only metamorphosis left him is a slow, affable decline toward death. So he returns to the town of his youth and to his sister, Muriel, whose life has been as uneventful as Francis's has been exciting.But life is not about to let Francis go. Faces from the past haunt him, surprises in the present unsettle him. And suddenly, two people who thought their lives were over find themselves struggling not to be overwhelmed by new knowledge, hidden truths, and unexpected danger.

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows listeners an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the moving picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials - particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert - and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising.

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles.

Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.

One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire’s life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound.

Frieda Klein is uninterested in catching up on old times when her former classmate, Maddie Capel, shows up at her door - until she hears about Maddie’s troubled daughter, Becky. The teenager claims she was raped in her own bed one night while her mother was downstairs. Her assailant left her with a warning: “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.” And no one does - except Frieda.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men - employees at the resort - are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. With this celebrated sentence, one of the towering achievements in American fiction, and a novel read throughout the world, begins. By fate or chance, a monk has witnessed the collapse. Brother Juniper, moved by the tragedy, embarks on a quest to prove a higher order is at work in the deaths of those who perished. His search leads readers on a timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

Zara has always felt a little ordinary next to her spirited best friend Ivy. Even her dreams seem mundane: a boyfriend, marriage, children. Besides, who would pick her when they could choose Ivy? So when Zara meets Henry and there's an instant spark, she can't believe her luck. A wealthy CEO who wants to settle down? He's perfect...until Ivy insists he's too good to be true.

Three female friends face midlife crises in a no-holds-barred exploration of sex, marriage, and the fragility of life. As one woman’s family comes apart at the seams, another’s reconfigures into something bigger and better. In this story of connections and disconnections, one woman’s up is another one’s down, and all of them will learn the meaning of friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness. Get lost in the world of Triangles, where the lives of three unforgettable women intersect, and where there are no easy answers....

Stella and Violet are best friends, and from the moment they met in college, they knew their roles. Beautiful, privileged, and reckless Stella lives in the spotlight. Hardworking, laser-focused Violet stays behind the scenes, always ready to clean up the mess that Stella inevitably leaves in her wake. After graduation, Violet moves to New York and lands a job in cable news, where she works her way up from intern to assistant to producer, and to a life where she's finally free from Stella's shadow.

From the award-winning author of Minor Characters comes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories. In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in "lucky and unlucky convergences," a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her.

April Lavery has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a trail-blazer in the deeply conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional, as evidenced by her current boyfriend, a handsome and charismatic medical student from Nigeria.

Just moved in to a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.