Literary Life

In nine poignant stories spiked with humor and intelligence, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni captures lives at crossroad moments - caught between past and present, home and abroad, tradition, and fresh experience. A widow in California, recently arrived from India, struggles to adapt to a world in which neighbors are strangers and her domestic skills are deemed superfluous in the award-winning "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter".

Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson...

National Bestseller A Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize A Finalist for the Goldsmiths Prize Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award One of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Named a Best Book of the...

“A mesmerizing, head-spinning—and sometimes madcap-hilarious—take of have and have-nots.”—People (Book of the Week) NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE AND KIRKUS REVIEWS “In the smart, breezy, sweet spot between Meg Wolitzer and Elin Hilderbrand...

Quand le voile des apparences ne peut être déchiré, il faut parfois y mettre le feu. À Shaker Heights, banlieue riche et tranquille de Cleveland, tout est soigneusement planifié pour le bonheur des résidents. Rien ne dépasse, rien ne déborde, à l'image de l'existence parfaitement réglée d'Elena Richardson, femme au foyer exemplaire. Lorsque Mia Warren, une mère célibataire et bohème, vient s'installer dans cette bulle idyllique avec sa fille Pearl, les relations avec la famille Richardson sont d'abord chaleureuses.

"A thriller for fans of The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl...[with] a striking, original voice all Berry’s own.” —The New York Times Book Review The riveting, Edgar Award-winning first novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy and A Double Life When Nora takes the...

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

The charming international bestseller about an unlikely friendship between an elderly door-to-door bookseller and a nine-year-old girl that changes his life. Small-town German bookseller Carl Kollhoff delivers his books to special customers in the evening hours after closing time, walking...

A HelloGiggles Best New Release A PopSugar Best Book of July A BookBub Editor's Pick A SheReads Best Book of Summer A GoodReads Buzzy New Release A Mind Body Green Best Book of July A PureWow Best Beach Read of Summer 2018 "An effortless page-turner, almost a movie treatment more than a novel...

Euridice is bright and ambitious. But this is Brazil in the 1940s, and society expects her to be a loving wife and mother. While Antenor is busy congratulating himself on his excellent catch, Euridice spends her spends her humdrum days ironing his shirts and removing the lumps of onion from his food, dreaming of the success she could have made of herself - as a writer, dressmaker or culinary whiz - in another life.

The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.

For readers of The Tiger’s Wife and All the Light We Cannot See comes a powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE, BOOKLIST, AND...

Hawaii was the last place Grace Christiansen ever imagined she'd vacation, much less fall in love. But when her family surprises her with a cooking retreat in paradise, she is pulled - or maybe yanked - away from her predictable, safe life and thrown headfirst into the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1971, 19 citizens of Excelsior, a farming community in South Africa’s rural Free States, were charged with breaking apartheid’s Immorality Act, which forbade sexual relations between blacks and whites on the pretext of avoiding miscegenation. The women were jailed as they awaited trial and their white counterparts were released on bail. In the end, the state withdrew the charges, but the accused women’s lives, already complicated, became harder than ever.

When we last saw Albert Schmidt Esq. (“Schmidtie” to all near and dear), he had been expelled from paradise: his love Carrie, the Puerto Rican waitress 40 years his junior, had taken up with a blond giant nearer her age and possibly the father of her baby - assuming it isn’t Schmidt. Meanwhile, his only confirmed child, Charlotte, had proposed a truce in their perennially strained relations, which Schmidt accepted, despite its obliging him to resume dealings with her repulsive husband and her mother-in-law-cum-psychiatrist, whose life’s work has been turning Charlotte decisively against Schmidt.

1975. In the town of Rexburg, Idaho, aspiring artist Aran Rigby, his younger sister, Tamsin, and their two brothers are locked in orbit around their emotionally abusive father. Gad is the kind of man who soothes the failures of his own life by controlling the lives of others. But Aran and Tamsin are united in rebellion against their father. They understand each other. They have dreams beyond their small town.

A "wild west" tale of two brothers who battle both the state and a mafia empire in 1920s Italy, from famed Italian author Andrea Camilleri. Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the state. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don't know what to do.

As a small boy hunting in the deep Florida swamps, C.E. “Kid” Miller had to become a crack shot, or his five sisters would go hungry. Now, in the summer of 1946, Miller hunts Georgia moonshiners instead of game, and packs a Smith and Wesson instead of a double barrel.

October Light is one of John Gardner's masterworks. The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist, Sally Abbot now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother, 72-year-old James Page. Polar opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute James takes a shotgun to his sister's color television set. After he locks Sally up in her room with the trashy "blockbuster" novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people.

In Hysteria, we meet a young woman an hour into yet another alcohol-fueled, masochistic, sexual bender at her local bar. There is a new bartender working this time, one she hasn't seen before, but who can properly make a drink. He looks familiar, and as she is consumed by shame from her behavior the previous week - hooking up with her parents' colleague and her roommate's brother - she also becomes convinced that her Brooklyn bartender is actually Sigmund Freud. They embark on a relationship, and she is forced to confront her past.