Literary Lives

The last thing FBI agent Will Brody remembers is the explosion - a thousand shards of glass surfing a lethal shock wave. He wakes without a scratch. The building is in ruins. His team is gone. Outside, Chicago is dark. Cars lie abandoned. No planes cross the sky. He's relieved to spot other people - until he sees they're carrying machetes.

The award-winning, “quick-witted and razor-sharp” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six) author of Limelight and Small Admissions returns with a funny and heartwarming summer novel about love, family drama, secrets, and second chances. “Poeppel...

En la Nochevieja de 1937, Katey Kontent, mecanógrafa en un bufete de abogados de Wall Street, y Eve Ross, su compañera de pensión, salen dispuestas a exprimir a fondo la libertad que promete Nueva York. Se dirigen a The Hotspot, un bar de tercera fila donde se toman el jazz lo bastante en serio como para que nadie moleste a dos chicas de buen ver, y donde la ginebra es suficientemente barata como para beber un dry martini cada hora.

Born into Edwardian England, Amory's first memory is of her father standing on his head. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional bond she needs, who, when he gives her a camera and some rudimentary lessons in photography, unleashes a passion that will irrevocably shape her future.

One of America's favorite African-American storytellers remembers her childhood in tender, unforgettable new stories. Jackie Torrence, a frequent headliner at the National Storytelling Festival, is known to audiences nationwide as The Story Lady.

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict—the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into dishevelled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change.

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...

When her father falls into a coma, Indian American photographer Sonya reluctantly returns to the family she'd fled years before. Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run, free of any ties, while her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay.

When Lacey O'Neill finally learns the shattering truth about the mother she's spent a decade emulating, the foundation of her life begins to crumble. Then her close childhood friend dies, leaving her teenage daughter, Mackenzie, in Lacey's care, and Lacey unwillingly finds herself in the role of mother.

Erica Tate wouldn't mind getting up in the morning if she enjoyed her children more. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. Erica's husband, Brian, is so deeply immersed in university life--and the legs of a half-literate flower child named Wendy--that he either doesn't notice his wife's misery or simply doesn't care. Worst of all their pleasant little neighborhood is transforming into a subdivision.

Dear Catherine, he began. Here I sit, making a meal out of asking you to dinner. I don’t really know how to do it. To have cultural integrity, I would have to send my aunt to speak, discreetly, to your aunt, who would then speak to your mother, who would speak to my mother, who would speak to my father, who would speak to me and then approach your mother, who would then approach you. Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination.

A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life - love, conception, gestation, birth - and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel's stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.

Wife. Mother. Breadwinner. Penelope Ruiz-Kar is doing it all - and barely keeping it together. Meanwhile, her best friend, Jenny Sweet, appears to be sailing through life. As close as the two women are, Jenny’s passionate marriage, pristine house, and ultra-polite child stand in stark contrast to Penelope’s underemployed husband, Sanjay, their unruly brood, and the daily grind she calls a career.

When Rosie's best friend has an affair with her husband, the consequences reverberate through the lives of the two families. Relationships are torn apart, friendships shattered, and childish innocence destroyed. Her daughter Daisy's fragile hold on reality begins to unravel when a letter arrives that opens old wounds. Rosie's son Max blames himself for everything that happened. And her ex-husband Nick has his own version of events. As long-repressed memories bubble to the surface, the past has never seemed more present and the truth more uncertain.

Istanbul, 1999. Nach dreißig Jahren in Deutschland erfüllt sich Hüseyin seinen Traum: Eine eigene Wohnung in Istanbul. Doch am Tag des Einzugs stirbt er an einem Herzinfarkt. Als seine Frau und die vier erwachsenen Kinder aus Deutschland zur Beerdigung anreisen, kommen jahrzehntelang verschwiegene Geheimnisse und unverheilte Wunden ans Licht. Vielschichtig und mutig spürt "Dschinns" der Frage nach, was Familie ausmacht. Können wir die Wahrheit ertragen? Oder wird sie am Ende alles zum Einsturz bringen?

Best-selling author Elizabeth Berg has published fiction and nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, and New Woman. She has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for her graceful, witty writing. In The Pull of the Moon, she alternates letters and journal entries to trace a middle-aged woman’s impulsive, and solitary, drive across country.

Meet the Pomeroys: a church-going family living in a too-red house in a Texas college town. Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively gone back to school, only to find his future ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present. His wife, Georgia, tries to keep things afloat at home, but she's been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months and never manages to confront its swelling contents. In an attempt to climb out of the holes they've dug, Roger and Georgia make a series of choices that have catastrophic consequences for their three children

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct the life of Rome’s greatest poet.

Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka's Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga.

Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his parents separated, and his mother, Sid, vanished entirely from his life. It is not until he is a grown man that Jonathan finally reconnects with his beloved lost parent, only to find, to his shock and dismay, that the woman he knew as "Sid" in Toronto has become an elegant man named Sydney living in his native Trinidad.