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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini |
| Another searing epic of Afghanistan in turmoil covering three decades of anti-soviet jihad, civil war, and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. |
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The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolano |
| Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati, this is a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and the desert of northern Mexico. It's the first of Bolan's two giant masterpieces to be translated into English. |
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Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo |
| Small town story rife with all the cares and crises of people everywhere. The tannery's slow demise forces many to leave but all-around nice guy "Lucy" Lynch now set to retire. |
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The Gathering
by Anne Enright |
| Middle-aged Veronica Hergarty has a secret which she reveals at her brother Liam's wake. |
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Falling Man
by Don DeLillo |
| An electrifying photograph of a man who jumps from the North Tower on 9/11 and artist who recreates the picture startles a passersby as he hangs in the pose of a "falling man". |
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Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson |
| CIA Officer "Skip" Sands goes to Vietnam in 1967 as part of a nightmarish counter-insurgency effort. This is a story about all wars, craziness and survival. |
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Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz |
| A wild, beautiful, dangerous and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich , revolving around several generations of one Dominican family. |
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On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan |
| The wedding suite dinner of Edward and Florence on the Dorset Coast brings a dramatic crisis for the marriage's impending consummation. |
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After Dark
by Haruki Murakami |
| Loneliness and alienation, carefully crafted characters, magical-realist twists of fate, Western references - all classic Haruki Murakami. |
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Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
by Dinaw Mengestu |
| Despair and black wit infuse this 1970's Washington D.C. story of Sepha and Judith, he an Ethiopian grocery story owner, and she a white academic. |
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A Free Life
by Ha Jin |
| Aspiring poet Nan Wu settles for a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta with wife Pingping but still hopes for a literary career despite the family tensions that it brings. |
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Maytrees
by Annie Dillard |
| The story of the small, Cape Cod, fractured Maytree family unfolds finally in a spirit of acceptance and embrace. |
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Edith Wharton
by Hermione Lee |
| Delving into heretofore untapped sources, we learn about a new Edith Wharton - tough, startling modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. |
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The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman |
| If a virulent virus - or even the Rapture - depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanishes. |
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