Literary Lives

When Peter Pan flies through the Darling Children's nursery window one night, he is nearly captured and makes a hasty escape, leaving behind his shadow. Returning with the fairy Tinker Bell to reclaim it, he wakes up Wendy, John and Michael, and whisks them away to the magical shores of...

Shakur's protagonist is Lapeace, the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood and Lapeace's rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured. Lapeace becomes a fugitive and he must hide out in the home of his girlfriend Tashima, a hip-hop mogul, as a pair of crooked LA detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down.

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.

After a failed dig in Honduras, aspiring archaeologist Casper Christiansen heads home to Minnesota to face his unresolved feelings for Raina Beaumont, the woman of his dreams. But when he arrives unannounced on her doorstep, he receives the shock of a lifetime: Raina is pregnant with someone else's baby.

Three sisters reunite on Sullivan’s Island off the coast of South Carolina after years of separation in this heartwarming first novel in a new trilogy from a beloved author. 80-year-old Marietta Muir is a dowager of Charleston society who has retired to her historic summer home on Sullivan’s Island. At the onset of summer, Marietta - "Mamaw" - seeks to gather her three granddaughters - Carson, Eudora, and Harper - with the intent to reunite them after years apart.

"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...

When Clara Winter left her rural Adirondack Mountain town for college, she never looked back. Her mother, Tamar, a fiercely independent but loving woman who raised Clara on her own, all but pushed her out the door, forcing Clara to build a new life for herself, far from her roots, far from her high-school boyfriend, and far from the life she had known. Now more than a decade has passed, and Clara, a successful writer, has been summoned home.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book An Amazon Top 100 Editors' Pick of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by O, The Oprah Magazine Entertainment Weekly NPR Essence Men’s Journal Buzzfeed Bustle Time Out Denver Post Publishers...

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.

While carrying out historical research at an Ontario asylum, psychiatrist Harry Karlinsky comes across a familiar surname in the register. Could the "Thomas Darwin of Down, England" be a relative of the famous Charles Darwin?In a narrative woven from letters, photographs, historical documents, and illustrations, what emerges is a sketch of Thomas’s life - the last of 11 children born to Charles Darwin. It tells of his obsession with extending his father’s studies into the realm of inanimate objects - kitchen utensils, to be precise.

What do you say when you know you don’t have forever? Ruth has been Ann’s closest friend for years - her confidante, her solace, her comic relief, her tutor in life’s mysterious ways. So when Ruth becomes ill, Ann is there for her without question. After all, it is Ruth who encouraged Ann to become who she is, Ruth whose rebellious, eccentric spirit provided the perfect counterpoint to Ann’s conventional, safe outlook. And so the friends go on as they always have…gossiping, consoling, and sharing intimate secrets.

One of Time magazine’s top-five novels of the year and a New York Times bestseller, Leif Enger’s first novel, Peace Like a River, captured readers’ hearts around the nation. His new novel is a stunning successor–a touching, nimble, and rugged story of an aging train robber on a quest to...

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...

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep.

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation - the 25-year-olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Holding Still explores an unusual love triangle involving Billy, a former teen idol, now an anxiety-ridden agoraphobic; Josh, a shy transgendered paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a fashionable filmmaker coping with her first broken heart.

The Fields tells the story of Sayward as a wife and mother, working with her own brood on that hard frontier to create a durable home, and aspects of civilization in a region where life is still difficult and towns are just beginning to appear. It is a rich and human novel about personal conflicts and strife in the midst of a land that itself is striving. And it has an epic quality that perfectly reflects the sweeping conquest of the frontier.

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.

The recent death of her beloved husband, Rustom, has taken its toll on Tehmina Sethna. Now, while visiting her son, Sorab, in his suburban Ohio home, she is being asked to choose between continuing her old life in India and starting a new one in this unfamiliar country with her son, his American wife, and their child. Her destiny is uncertain, and soon the plight of two troubled young children next door will force the most difficult decision she has ever faced. Ultimately, the journey is one that Tehmina must travel alone.

By all accounts, Abby Holden has it all. She's the mother of a beautiful teenager and the wife of a beloved high school football coach. And all it took to achieve her charmed life was her greatest act of betrayal. Coach Ryan can coax his team to victory, but he can't seem to make his wife, Abby, happy. Her struggles with depression have marred their marriage and taken a toll on their daughter, Juliana. Although this isn't the life he's dreamed of, he's determined to heal the rifts in his family.

Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach - if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda's newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his living daughter's childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time.