Literary Lives

The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End. Through the fate of the estate - as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it - Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.

Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives, but his language and memory are altered, and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town.

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.

Dan Ainslie, a brilliant doctor working with the miners of his native Cape Breton Island, is forty-two and deeply in love with his wife. Longing for the son he can never have, he comes to love the young Alan MacNeil, whose father deserted him and his mother several years before. Alan's father's return brings tragedy to those around him.

It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night. Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

Set on the eve of America's involvement in World War II, Kim Brooks's debut novel, The Houseguest, examines a little-known aspect of the war - namely, the network of organizations that sought to help Jews abroad by aiding in their escape to Europe and the United States.

En el Chile del siglo XIX, Aurora del Valle sufre un trauma brutal que borra de su mente los primeros cinco años de su vida. Criada por su ambiciosa abuela, Paulina del Valle, crece en un ambiente privilegiado, libre de muchas de las limitaciones que oprimen a las mujeres de su época pero atormentada por horribles pesadillas. Cuando debe afrontar la traición del hombre al que ama y la soledad, Aurora decide explorar el misterio de su pasado.

Where is Pradeep S. Mathew - spin bowler extraordinaire and 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'? Retired sportswriter W. G. Karunasena is dying, and he wants to know. W. G. will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down the mysterious Pradeep. On his quest he will also uncover a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

"Il me reste quelques rêves à réaliser et le moment est venu de m'y atteler. Je vous aime très fort. À très bientôt ! Maman." Léna n'en revient pas. Comment sa mère, qui l'a convoquée pour passer Noël dans la maison de son enfance, a-t-elle pu disparaître en ne lui laissant que ce message sibyllin ? La voilà donc coincée dans le petit village de Vallenot au cœur des Alpes de Haute-Provence et condamnée à passer la fête qu'elle hait plus que tout, entourée de sa famille pour le moins... haute en couleur ! Mais les fêtes de famille ont le don de faire rejaillir les secrets enfouis.

Twelve-year-old Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West” (Entertainment Weekly), from the celebrated author of The Tiger’s Wife and The Morningside “Obreht’s simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West’s beauty and...

Cam McHugh died in a tragic farming accident. He has a message for his son and only his dog can hear him. Halo is no ordinary dog. Not only can she see ghosts, she can talk to them, too. If only she could tell Hunter that death doesn't mean an end to being around the ones we love, maybe she could help him find his voice again. Unfortunately, she may never have the chance. Dognapped by the man who threatens to destroy the only family she has ever known, Halo must escape and find her way home - hundreds of miles away.

Until John Wilson met the warm, wise woman who became his fourth wife, the object of his most intense devotion had always been the work of William Shakespeare. From his feat of memorizing Romeo and Juliet and half a dozen other plays as a student to his evangelical zeal as a professor, John's faith in the Bard has shaped his life. But now his mental powers have been diminished by dementia, and his wife has reluctantly moved him to a residential care facility.

Seduced by Slim's stories of the privations of a cross-country trek that ended in the violence of an historic riot and tales of Depression-era work camps, Edie MacDonald has followed him from mine to mine, where he finds work and she cares for their son, Belly, in the thin shelter of canvas tents. Until now. Edie has left Slim behind, passed out in an unheated apartment on the coldest day of the year. Boarding a train with Belly, she travels westward. When the train struggles through a snowstorm and possible calamity, the lens shifts between Belly's perspective and Edie's.

Frustrated 35-year-old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father's plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac's dreams of attending the University of Michigan fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn't stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical textbook and journal available to him. For practical experience, Isaac performs surgeries on the wildlife around his house, preparing for the day he attends Michigan.

This is the real world of modern Karachi as seen through the eyes of a young woman in an elite family. Here are the hidden dramatic realities of the upper class, the undertow of religion, revealing the truth sometimes spoken in hushed whispers, more often swept away by the flourish of silk saris at extravagant dinner parties...or perhaps never mentioned at all.

In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement.

Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

Rachel has an unusual problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles - widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son - are only the latest. She's already put up with scores of marriages and hundreds of children, over 2,000 years - ever since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. There's only one other person in the world who understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever.

Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Windsor behind. But it's impossible to escape the echoes of tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble. When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Windsor High library when the shooter came in. But he won't talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes.