Literary Fiction Psychological

It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.

This timeless saga traces the intertwined lives of a group of prosperous Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City after World War II. A chain of events disrupts the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present and explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama.

This wonderful novel is set in what is known as the Soviet period of stagnation - the 1970s, or late Brezhnev era. The university-educated narrator wistfully looks back on a few months in mid-decade when he left his cynical and jaded friends in Leningrad to travel to a small provincial town near the White Sea. Ostensibly writing about provincial folk customs, but also hoping to gather material for an anti-Soviet satire, he instead meets Vera, a woman much older than he who has waited 30 years for her lover to return from World War II.

To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John's evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong.

Very evil…very funny A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland’s new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive...

On an isolated beach set against a lonely windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores.

The first novel to appear in English by one of the most talked-about and critically acclaimed writers of new Mexican fiction. From a psychoanalyst's couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood - in which she was born with an abnormality in her eye into a family intent on fixing it. In a world without the time and space for innocence, the narrator intimately recalls her younger self - a fierce and discerning girl open to life's pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy.

Internationally best-selling author Umberto Eco is a master stylist whose books, including The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, have been savored by millions around the world. Now, with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco crafts another of the ambitious and breathtaking novels that are his trademark.

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers 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...

In this tense, gripping novel by a star of Korean literature, Oghi wakes from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house.

On the outside, Lily Isley's life seems perfect: a wealthy husband, a ritzy gated community in Dallas, and a handsome son, AJ - a decorated marine about to be married to his love, Shea. But when a bridesmaid is murdered in AJ's apartment and he can't be found, Lily's world collapses and a long-held family secret is at risk of exposure.

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.

Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.

Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese father and has not seen her American mother since she abandoned the family when Stephanie was six years old. Both Rann and Stephanie yearn for a sense of genuine identity. Rann feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world. Stephanie struggles to reconcile the Chinese part of herself with her American and French selves.

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire, vowing to let no one stand in their way, especially those newly rallying around Teddy Roosevelt's nascent environmental movement.

When Carl awakens from a coma after being attacked on a subway train, life around him feels unfamiliar, even strange. He arrives at his best friend's house without remembering how he got there; he seems to be having an affair with his secretary, which is pleasant but surprising. He starts to notice distortions in his experience, strange leaps in his perception of time. Is he truly reacting with the outside world, he wonders, or might he be terribly mistaken?

It's hot and getting hotter this summer in Afghanipakiraqistan - the preferred name for the ambiguous stretch of the world where the US Special Forces operate with little outside attention. Team leader Dutch Shaw is missing his late grandmother. She was the last link he had to civilian life, to any kind of world of innocence.

At forty-five, Hannah Smith is at a crossroads. That's her spin on it. The reality is she's divorced, jobless, and moving back to her family home in Iowa to keep an eye on her mother, who's slipping into dementia. Her return stirs up the same unnerving sense of disconnect Hannah has felt since childhood - always the odd girl out, the loner outshone by her two older sisters. Hannah knew the feelings of hurt would come back. But she never expected fear....

In 1975 Paul and Roz Mellow wrote a best-selling Joy of Sex-type book that mortified their four school-aged children and ultimately changed the shape of the family forever. Thirty years later, as the now dispersed family members argue over whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children and their conflicts in love, work, marriage, parenting, and, of course, sex - all shadowed by the indelible specter of their highly sexualized parents.

Alice was a hopeful young graduate student when, on a beautiful August night, her body was found in the woods. She'll always remember the night she was murdered. And she still suffers the grief and rage that destroyed her family. But what Alice regrets most is the last fight she had with her boyfriend, Enrico - and the fact that she never had the chance to tell him something that would have changed everything. A decade later, Enrico has returned to the provincial town where Alice lived and died, to sell his family home.