Literary Lives

"That actor bloke Martin Javis has helped me rekord this audio. He thinks he can tork like me, but he can't. I sound better. So pay no attenshun to him. Jus' listen to me tellin' you 'bout the most important things in life!"

Jack Kerouac wrote The Haunted Life in 1944 when he was 22 years old and attending Columbia University. Originally intended as a three-part novel, only this first 20,000-word section was ever finished. Upon its completion, Kerouac promptly lost his only hand-written final draft in a New York taxi cab, remaining unknown to the public until its appearance at Christies about ten years ago. Kerouac’s family has now decided to share this manuscript with the world.

""The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about...

An irresistible comedy of manners about three generations of a Chicago restaurant family and the deep-fried, beer-battered, cream cheese-frosted love that feeds them all—from the best-selling author of Girls in White Dresses “Laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply resonant to our times. I was...

1977, Ohio. Lydia Lee, seize ans, est une élève et une fille modèle. Elle est le grand espoir de son père, d'origine chinoise, qui projette sur elle ses rêves d'intégration, et de sa mère qui espère à travers elle accomplir ses ambitions professionnelles déçues. Mais à quoi rêve Lydia en secret ? Lorsque la police découvre son corps au fond d'un lac, la famille Lee, en apparence si soudée, va affronter ses secrets les mieux gardés, car plus rien ne sera pareil. La disparition de Lydia vire soudainement à l'autopsie familiale.

Clare, one of the oldest women in Rhode Island, believes that all the painful secrets of her long life have been laid to rest, until an unexpected encounter with a piece of her past forces her to realize the time has come to tell her story. Ben, a shy, precocious six-year-old being gently raised by a devoted mom, witnesses a terrible crime and is taken to the hospital, bewildered and alone. Lucy, an overworked resident physician in Providence, meets Ben when he's brought into the ER. But between all-night shifts and trying to pick up the pieces of her failing marriage, she doesn't know how to help.

After soldiers vacate the Sicilian hillside town of Melilli in the summer of 1943, the locals celebrate, giving thanks to their patron saint, Sebastian. Amid the revelry, all it takes is one fateful moment for the destiny of nine-year-old Salvatore Vassallo to change forever. When his twin brothers are killed playing with an unexploded mortar shell, Salvatore’s faith is destroyed. As the family unravels, and fear ignites among their neighbors that the Vassallo name is cursed, one tragedy begets another.

Nora and Fern's relationship as mother and daughter is a tumble of love and distrust. To Nora, her daughter is an enigma - at the same time wonderful and unfindable. Fern sees her mother as treacherous - for busting up their family to move in with her lover, Jeanne. As their lives become complicated by the arrivals of a skateboarding boyfriend for Fern, a shadowy affair for Nora, a baby in need of a family, and by the failing health of Lucky, their beloved dog, this mother and daughter find their way onto a fresh footing with each other.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.

“Viscerally vivid…half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism.” —The Guardian, Named a Best Book of 2024 * “Unfolds with a pleasurable, slow-burn assurance.” —The New York Times Book Review A stunning and “spiky debut” (The Times, London) novel set in the rugged, rural...

A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. In a sad and singular era, they are unique among women of their time. For radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy and brilliant daughter Margaret possess powerful charms to ward off...

Brimming with charm and whimsy, this exquisite novel set in the Tower of London has the transportive qualities and delightful magic of the contemporary classics Chocolat and Amélie. Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise...

Sam is 28, Swedish and spending the summer in London, working for a top marketing agency. Over the course of the sticky summer months, she falls hard for Lucas, a man she first met as a teenager. Lucas is working at a boutique clothing store whilst trying to get a foot on the corporate ladder, and struggling to hold the pieces of his life together. Sam is a gorgeous distraction. But you can only avoid reality for so long, and both Sam and Lucas know their relationship can't last. Nobody can be this happy forever, surely?

Emily Morris got her happily-ever-after earlier than most. Married at a young age to a man she loved passionately, she was building the life she always wanted. But when enormous stress threatened her marriage, Emily made some rash decisions. That’s when she fell in love with someone else. That’s when she got pregnant. Resolved to tell her husband of the affair and to leave him for the father of her child, Emily’s plans are thwarted when the world is suddenly split open on 9/11. It’s amid terrible tragedy that she finds her freedom, leaving New York City to start a new life.

It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father's deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway's thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all.

It is 1970. The evergreens are thick with snow despite it being the month of April. In an Ottawa hospital, another daughter is born to the Azar family. The parents are from Kfarmichki, a village in Lebanon but their daughters were born in Canada. Four daughters, to be precise. No sons. Youssef is the domineering father. Samira is the quiescent mother. Rima, Katrina and Mona are the traditional daughters. Then there is Adele, the newest member. “You should’ve been born a boy,” Samira whispers to Adele shortly after her entrance into the world.

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society.

Commissioned to set up a museum on a remote island in the north of Scotland and to write the biography of the island's celebrated poet and chronicler, Mhairi McPhail is slowly drawn in by the complicated life she is uncovering and writing about - the bard of Fascaray - as she finds herself being transformed, awakened by the ferocity and power of the island.

On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother's belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement she makes a shocking discovery - two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother's chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng - troubled, beautiful, and wild teenage sisters from Vancouver's Chinatown.

Yoshie's much-loved musician father died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents, that they can finally start to put their painful past behind them. However, despite their attempts to move forward, Yoshie is haunted by nightmares in which her father is looking for the phone he left behind on the day he died, or on which she is trying—unsuccessfully—to call him. Is her dead father trying to communicate a message through these dreams?