Literary Lives

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.

Three men search for some version of home; their lives move inexorably toward a reckoning that will draw them all together. For Farouk, family is all. He has protected his wife and daughter as best he can from the war and hatred that has torn Syria apart. If they stay, they will lose their freedom. Lampy is distracted; he has too much going on in his small town life in Ireland. He has the city girl for a bit of fun, but she's not Chloe. The game was always the lifeblood coursing through John's veins: manipulating people for his enjoyment. But it was never enough.

Williston Bibb Barrett is a rather unusual and inquisitive young Southerner with a special gift for cultivating the possibilities of life. He suffers from occasional bouts of amnesia and disconcerting attacks of déjà vu. He clings to certain old-fashioned notions of behavior, and yet he finds himself constantly impelled to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. And he lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.

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".

In the summer of 1969, 14-year-old Lucas Painter carries a huge weight on his shoulders. His brother is fighting in Vietnam. His embattled parents are locked in a never-ending war. And his best friend, Connor, is struggling with his own family issues. To find relief from the chaos, Lucas takes long, meandering walks, and one day he veers into the woods.

Literary legend James A. Michener was “a Renaissance man, adventurous, inquisitive, unpretentious and unassuming, with an encyclopedic mind and a generous heart” (The New York Times Book Review). In this exceptional memoir, the man himself tells the story of his remarkable life and describes...

En el año 1933, Berlín es un foco de agitación política y social. Lady Maud, ahora la esposa de Walter von Ulrich y madre de dos hijos, publica en una revista semanal artículos que ridiculizan al Partido Nazi, mientras que Walter manifiesta su oposición en el Parlamento. Sin embargo, parece que nada podrá frenar el poder ascendente del canciller Adolf Hitler.

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man. An independent Jewish bachelor, he lives in a Hackney boarding house: reading Zola, betting on the dogs at the track, womanising, philosophising, and repressing his tortured wartime past. Until, that is, a new family moves in. As his life dramatically unravels—financially, emotionally, and existentially—Harryboy descends into a murky criminal underworld where debts, violence, gangsters and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't pay up ...

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Three men in their late sixties—old friends from college, each with a secret—come together on Martha’s Vineyard in this “gripping, wise, and wonderful summer treat.” (The Boston Globe). “A cascade of...

Mormon bishop's wife Linda Wallheim fears for the safety of the people in her community when Karl Ashby, the ward's second counselor (the bishop's right-hand man), is found dead in an elaborately staged murder. Linda tries to console Karl's grieving children and wife, but matters are complicated when the autopsy reveals that Karl was a biological woman.

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother, Emma Jean, tells her bewildered daughter, "You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while." From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

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.

The Story of My Life by Jay McInerney is a hilarious, sobering portrait of 1980s New York City featuring 20-something actress Alison Poole and her coterie of club-hopping, coke-addicted friends. In this breathlessly paced novel, McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people's credit cards.

After another relationship disaster Alice Littleton returns home to spend summer in Dublin’s Sandycove with her Mum, Ciara and beloved grandmother Eva at their family deli and grocers. As Alice settles back into her old life with best friend Becca and her new boyfriend Conal Blake, she begins to fall in love with the comings and goings of their family shop and once more enjoying the rhythms of Irish life.

In this spellbinding and provocative novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles, a young mother is struck by sudden and puzzling psychological symptoms that illuminate the mysterious dimensions of the human mind—and of love. A Belletrist Book Club Pick A year after...

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.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable...

A cautionary tale of social climbing by Agatha Christie, written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Agatha Christie, famous for her ingenious crime novels, also wrote about crimes of the heart. Written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, Christie’s tales of romantic suspense further explore...

The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism...

“Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post “Instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely...