Tag: Fiction

“A suspenseful, moving look at twisted maternal love and the limits of forgiveness.” —People “Not only a terrific, spellbinding read but a fascinating meditation on the choices we make and the way we love.” —Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it for twenty-one years.Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood. Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Aviator’s Wife returns with a triumphant new novel about New York’s “Swans” of the 1950s—and the scandalous, headline-making, and enthralling friendship between literary legend Truman Capote and peerless socialite Babe Paley.People’s Book of the Week • USA Today’s #1 “New and Noteworthy” Book • Entertainment Weekly’s Must List • LibraryReads Top Ten Pick Of all the glamorous stars of New York high society, none blazes brighter than Babe Paley. Her flawless face regularly graces the pages of Vogue, and she is celebrated and adored for her ineffable style and exquisite taste, especially among her friends—the alluring socialite Swans Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, and Pamela Churchill. By all appearances, Babe has it all: money, beauty, glamour, jewels, influential friends, a prestigious husband, and gorgeous homes. But beneath this elegantly composed exterior dwells a passionate woman—a woman desperately longing for true love and connection. Enter Truman Capote. This diminutive golden-haired genius with a larger-than-life personality explodes onto the scene, setting Babe and her circle of Swans aflutter. Through Babe, Truman gains an unlikely entrée into the enviable lives of Manhattan’s elite, along with unparalleled access to the scandal and gossip of Babe’s powerful circle. Sure of the loyalty of the man she calls “True Heart,” Babe never imagines the destruction Truman will leave in his wake. But once a storyteller, always a storyteller—even when the stories aren’t his to tell. Truman’s fame is at its peak when such notable celebrities as Frank and Mia Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, and Rose Kennedy converge on his glittering Black and White Ball. But all too soon, he’ll ignite a literary scandal whose repercussions echo through the years. The Swans of Fifth Avenue will seduce and startle readers as it opens the door onto one of America’s most sumptuous eras.Praise for The Swans of Fifth Avenue“Exceptional storytelling . . . teeming with scandal, gossip and excitement.”—Harper’s Bazaar “This moving fictionalization brings the whole cast of characters back to vivid life. Gossipy and fun, it’s also a nuanced look at the beauty and cruelty of a rarefied, bygone world.”—People“The era and the sordid details come back to life in this jewel of a novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“A lush mystery-within-a-coming-of-age-tale-within-a-Southern-Gothic . . . interesting, readable and beautifully written” (NPR). Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977. A time when teenagers roamed wild and free. When sons worshipped God, loved their mothers, and feared their fathers. And when eight-year-old Rocky still worshipped his older brother, Paul—sixteen and full of rebel cool—who was happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick, until one day things went terribly wrong and Paul disappeared. Seven years later, Rocky, now a teenager himself, must reckon with the past after a mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, and to their broken family. “Ed Tarkington’s pitch-perfect first novel pays tribute to music, love and growing up in small-town America . . . [It’s] a murder mystery wrapped in the cloak of Southern Gothic charm.” —Chicago Tribune “An engrossing and surprisingly comfortable read . . . that brings to mind both Harper Lee and Stephen King’s The Body . . . creating a story that is at once bizarre and utterly familiar.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books “I’ve heard it said that all good fiction is about blood, love or money. If that’s true, then Ed Tarkington has hit the trifecta with his soulful first novel.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Fans of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help will embrace debut author Tarkington’s depiction of Southern life at a time of changing social mores . . . Readers who can’t get enough of Wiley Cash, Ron Rash, and Brian Panowich will delight in discovering this fine new writer.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for FictionFinalist for the Baileys Prize for Women's FictionAn exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributorThe Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller!Katarina Bivald's The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a sweet, smart, and uplifting story about how books find us, change us, and connect us.Once you let a book into your life the most unexpected things can happen: Like the bestselling historical novel and Netflix film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a heartwarming reminder of why we love books.Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara: Sara traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal Amy, but when she arrives she finds Amy's funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor―there's not much else to do in a dying small town that's almost beyond repair. You certainly wouldn't open a bookstore. And definitely not with Sara the tourist in charge.You'd need a vacant storefront (Main Street is full of them), books (Amy's house is full of them), and...customers. The bookstore might be a little quirky. Then again, so is Sara. But Broken Wheel's own story might be funnier, more eccentric and surprising than she thought.If you liked big-hearted books like The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry or Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, you will love The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.Praise for The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend:"The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a warm and slyly funny look at small towns and romance..."―New York Journal of Books"A heartwarming tale about literature's power to transform."―People"What begins as an unlikely international friendship based on a mutual love of books becomes a sweet and soulful discovery of America. Quirky, unpredictable, funny, and fresh―a wonderful book."―Nickolas Butler, internationally bestselling author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Beneath the BonfireAmazon Best Book of the MonthInternational BestsellerIndie Regional BestsellerNational Indie Bestseller#1 Indie Next Pick

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.Soon to be a Broadway play starring Laura Linney produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and London Theatre Company • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE •NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The New York Times Book Review • NPR • BookPage • LibraryReads • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe“It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.”—San Francisco Chronicle“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”—Newsday“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King,The Washington Post “An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People

One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music. An extraordinary portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man, The Noise of Time is a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society.

The new novel from three times Orange Prize longlisted Leila AboulelaNatasha Wilson knows how difficult it is to fit in. Born to a Russian mother and a Muslim father, she feels adrift in Scotland and longs for a place which really feels like home.Then she meets Oz, a charismatic and passionate student at the university where Natasha teaches. As their bond deepens, stories from Natasha's research come to life - tales of forbidden love and intrigue in the court of the Tsar.But when Oz is suspected of radicalism, Natasha's own work and background suddenly come under the spotlight. As suspicions grow around her, and friends and colleagues back away, Natasha stands to lose the life she has fought to build.

"Raise a glass: The first great book-club novel of 2016 has arrived.” —USA Today, 4/4 stars“A female, funny Henry James in Asia, Janice Y. K. Lee is vividly good on the subject of Americans abroad.” —The New York Times Book Review “Sex and the City meets Lost in Translation.” —The Skimm Janice Y. K. Lee’s New York Times bestselling debut, The Piano Teacher, was called “immensely satisfying” by People, “intensely readable” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “a rare and exquisite story” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now, in her long-awaited new novel, Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong. Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives.

New York Times bestselling authors Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig present a masterful collaboration—a rich, multigenerational novel of love and loss that spans half a century.... 1945: When critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenel is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion. Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel’s miniature portrait who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother? In their pursuit of answers, they find themselves drawn into the turbulent stories of Olive Van Alan, driven in the Gilded Age from riches to rags, who hired out as a servant in the very house her father designed, and Lucy Young, who in the Jazz Age came from Brooklyn to Manhattan seeking the father she had never known. But are Kate and Cooper ready for the secrets that will be revealed in the Forgotten Room? READERS GUIDE INCLUDED

When a terrible accident claims the life of Eleanor’s twin, her family is left in tatters, and her reality begins to unravel, dropping her in and out of unfamiliar worlds. When she returns to her own time and place, hours and days have flown by without her. One fateful day, Eleanor leaps from a cliff...and vanishes. In a strange in-between place, she meets a mysterious stranger who understands the weight of her family history: Eleanor’s twin wasn’t the only tragic loss. And unless Eleanor can master her strange new abilities, she may not be the last.

Après de premiers échanges d’une cordialité toute bourgeoise, deux voisines en viennent à se livrer une véritable guerre (chantage, insultes, incitation au divorce…) pour une histoire de lambris que l'une veut repeindre dans le hall de l’immeuble et l'autre pas. L’une d'elles finira par disparaître dans de mystérieuses conditions.Une nouvelle recrue d'un club de lecture est reçue par sa présidente qui lui en présente les membres, une à une. A mesure qu'elle raconte leurs goûts littéraires (gore, romance coquine) ainsi que leurs histoires intimes (insémination de l'une, morts suspectes des maris successifs de l’autre), elle distille son venin...Voici quelques exemples tirés de ces douze nouvelles empreintes d’un humour féroce. Des portraits cruels de femmes toutes plus névrosées les unes que les autres, qui sont aussi les révélateurs d’une société américaine aisée, qui tient à tout prix à se montrer sous son masque de perfection. Helen Ellis fait éclater les apparences et décrit la solitude de ces femmes au foyer, mais aussi le pouvoir qu'elles ont sur leur petit royaume – leur appartement, leur club de lecture, leur immeuble, leur mari –, allant parfois jusqu’à la pulsion criminelle… Une satire de notre époque qui contraint au bonheur et à sa représentation en toute circonstance.