Literary Lives

The powerful forces of science and family collide when geneticist Paige Robson finds her world in upheaval: Her eight-year-old son Miles is struggling to fit in at his new school and begins asking questions about his biological father that Paige can’t answer - until fate thrusts the anonymous donor she used into their lives.

Named One of the Best Ten Books of 2025 by The Washington Post Book World Named a Best Book of the Year by Artforum Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her...

Zoe, a sometime artist from California, has recently lost her husband. Martin, an engineer from Yorkshire, is alone after a messy divorce. Both have ended up in Cluny, central France, on a separate journey to walk the Camino: 2,000 kilometres to Santiago, in northwestern Spain. The Camino changes you, it's said. It's a chance to find a new version of yourself. But can these two very different people find each other?

Con estas palabras empieza la novela ya legendaria en los anales de la literatura universal, una de las aventuras literarias más fascinantes de nuestro siglo. Millones de ejemplares de Cien años de soledad leídos en todas las lenguas y el Premio Nobel de Literatura coronando una obra que se había abierto paso «boca a boca» -como gusta decir al escritor- son la más palpable demostración de que la aventura fabulosa de la familia Buendía-Iguarán, con sus milagros, fantasías, obsesiones.

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity...

Things aren't going Milo's way. His acting career is floundering, he got dumped, his miserable father vanished, and people keep moving into his house. He finally decides to take action - to help the only person he really likes, the autistic boy next door who's being bullied. But, well, that doesn't really go his way either.

Honored with almost every conceivable award for literary merit, Salman Rushdie penned this richly imagined fable for his son—and for book lovers the world over. From Rashid’s fertile intellect spring bedazzling tales his son Luka devours with a child’s earnestness. But when Rashid succumbs to an unending sleep, Luka must enter a magical world ruled by video-game logic.

Jojo Harvey is a literary agent whose star is on the rise. In love with both her married boss and her burgeoning career, not much distracts her. Until she finds herself representing two women who used to be best friends. Used to be....

Told through the eyes of Tish, a 19-year-old girl in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and is imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions - affection, despair, and hope.

Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.

Highliners are the elite of the fishing world, the skippers and crews who make the biggest catches—salmon, king crab, halibut, shrimp—and deliver them first to the bustling canneries of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. For these men—and for their women—the safe eight-hour day does not exist. It never will. Some fishermen get rich, many die broke. But they find a special joy in their work that can never be matched by the easier world of the landsman.

Life is over in an instant for sixteen-year-old Finn Miller when a devastating car accident tumbles her and ten others over the side of a mountain. Suspended between worlds, she watches helplessly as those she loves struggle to survive. Impossible choices are made, decisions that leave the survivors tormented with grief and regret. Unable to let go, Finn keeps vigil as they struggle to reclaim their shattered lives.

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.

Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam.

The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a worksite cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. In searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, a novel that explores—with sharp humor and a fierce tenderness—the resilience of love and home, even in times of radical change. “A mother-son psychodrama with...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GILLER PRIZE Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken. In...

Elegant, secretive Sabina may be empress of Rome, but she still stands poised on a knife's edge. She must keep the peace between two deadly enemies: her husband, Hadrian, Rome's brilliant and sinister emperor; and battered warrior Vix, who is her first love. But Sabina is guardian of a deadly secret: Vix's beautiful son, Antinous, has become the emperor's latest obsession.

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can - visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous.