Reviews of Fiction

Sergio De La Pava originally self-published A Naked Singularity, the story of Casi, a young public defender caught in a surrealistically bizarre justice system in a postmodern novel that is garnering comparisons to Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace.

The Sea is My Brother, described as Jack Kerouac's "lost novel" is the semi-autobiographical story of a young man's sea-faring with the Merchant Marine.

Written in 1998, The New Republic is a satirical novel that takes on the topic of terrorism in the form of a radical Portuguese organization that protagonist Edgar Kellogg happens upon in his search to locate another journalist in the terrorists' home turf.

Published in 1985, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango is reknown as the inspiration for filmaker Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half hour film adaptation, often considered a cinephile rite of passage. Translated now by George Szirtes, the novel is finally available to English language readers.

A gangster's son and an aging secret agent team up in Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker to stop a doomsday device and an evil villain from bringing about the end of the world.

Jodi Piccoult is known for centering her novels around issues of morality, and Lone Wolf is no exception. Using the behavior of wolves within their packs as a model, Piccoult confronts the difficult and painful decision faced by individuals and families with a loved one who is tethered only by the merest of tendrils to this life.

An entire pantheon of ridiculously-imagined and slightly hungover gods and goddesses roll into the universe on a bus blaring the Mister Softee jingle and take up residence in Dubai's Burj Khalifa, from which they gaze down upon their sole acolyte, an unemployed New Jersey butcher.

In The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus' dark and dystopic novel, children begin speaking a form of speech that is lethal to adults.

Alan Lightman presents us with a rather young and whimsical God in Mr. g, a being who lives alone in the Void with his aunt and uncle until one day, he decides to experiment with the act of creation. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Map and the Territory, winner of France's Prix Goncourt, is Michel Houellebecq's new postmodern novel about the art market and what it means to be creative in today's mundane society.

Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife is often hilarious, sometimes disturbing, and frequently challenging. While thematically mature, Blueprints of the Afterlife is a laugh riot of a book. There are miniature software development monks, a giant celestial head, and a marauding sentient glacier rampaging across North America.

The Third Reich, written by Roberto Bolano in 1989 and published posthumously, follows the German national champion of The Third Reich, a WWII-themed board game, and his girlfriend as they enjoy a vacation at a Spanish resort and become involved with a sinister collection of characters.

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding wraps a coming-of-age story within a baseball novel that you don't have to be a sports fan to love.

Naoyuki Ii's The Shadow of a Blue Cat is a novel of culture and generation in which a 51-year-old entrepreneur reflects on the watershed moments in his youth.

In Drago Jancar's The Galley Slave, the madness of plague-ridden Europe has spread its sickly tentacles. Can picaresque anti-hero Johannes Ot flee from illness, inquisition, and his own dark identity?

In The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo collects nine stories that he wrote between 1979 and 2011. Individually taken, these nine narratives are tightly-woven masterpieces, but ordered chronologically, they tell a global tale that is simultaneously about how far we've come and how bad it's gotten.

John Jacobs takes a DNA test that shows he's part Inuit, and - in flight from his depressingly mild middle class life - sets off to join "his people" in the annual whale hunt.

What if you could go back in time? Back to a November day in Dallas in 1963 to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy - that's the goal of English teacher Jake Epping, the protagonist in Stephen King's time travel novel, 11/22/63.

It's the early 1960s, and young Luce is living a carefree life in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, until her sister Lily is murdered and Luce finds herself caring for Lily's troubled, mute children. From Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain, comes Nightwoods, yet another literary masterpiece.

Mr. Fox can't stop killing off the heroines of his novels. That is, not until his muse comes to life and changes everything. Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox is at once a love story and fairy tale in nine iterations.

A sexy assassin steps out of a traffic jam and into an alternative world which is seemingly being crafted by a young ghost writer in love with this shadowy heroine. Dual moons fille the sky, little people emerge from the mouth of a goat, and time and space bend altogether in Haruki Murakami's opus 1Q84.

Neal Stephenson's Reamde begins with a computer virus engineered to squeeze gold pieces from players in a virtual world but soon morphs into a action thriller with Russian mobsters, British operatives, and al-Qaeda terrorists.

Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) emerges with his long-awaited third novel exploring the realities of love and marriage.

Paulo Coelho, the protagonist of this novel, sets out for a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But the journey is much larger than even Coelho at first perceives.

In Simon Toyne's Sanctus, an ancient order of monks guards a Sacrament so secret that they will die, and even kill, to protect it.

The characters in Kazushi Hosaka' Plainsong seem immune to the dramatic upheavals suffered by many literary figures. Their lives move along steadily, almost listlessly in a manner that seems less like literature and more like life.

John Shors' Cross Currents is set on a small island west of Thailand, where the combined dramas of two families are dwarfed by the 2004 tsunami.

When Cecil Valance visits the country home of his Cambridge boyfriend George, he pens a poem in George's younger sister's diary, an act that becomes the subject of speculation over the ensuing decades.

A peculiar character named Miles Garth locks himself in a stranger's extra room during a dinner party.

Nuri, who has fallen for the same 26-year-old woman as his widower father, wishes the old man would disappear. Until he does.

A circus that arrives unannounced and only at night, a duel between two young magicians, a love afair like no other - a magical debut from Erin Morgenstern.

J.G. Ballard's satire opens with the bombing of Heathrow Airport by a disaffected middle class.

When millions of people suddenly vanish from the Earth, the affluent residents of suburban Mapleton try to figure out what happened.

In Animalinside, Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai and German artist Max Neumann collaborate to create a slim collection of pieces addressing the animal inside us all.

In Harstad's debut novel of intentional obscurity, Mattias, a Norwegian gardener, loses his job and his girlfriend before disappearing to the Faroe Islands to find himself accidentally rescued by an enigmatic cast of characters in a most unxpected place.

In Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance, a lexicagrapher moves to Durban, South Africa to preserve the Afrikaans language and has a cherished collection of shells stolen from her, an intrusion that leads her into a deeper understanding of life and happenstance.

A missing medical researcher, an obsessed professor, and a drug that keeps an obscure tribe of Amazonian woman fertile into their 70s are the key ingredients in Ann Patchett's State of Wonder.

It's 1963 in a rural North Carolina town where Dwayne Hallston, a white teenager, emulates James Brown and Larry Lime Nolan, his black friend, strives to play piano like Thelonious Monk. With impossible dreams and a forbidden friendship, Dwayne and Larry help each other navigate their racially divided world in Clyde Edgerton's The Night Train.

In Jesse Ball's The Curfew, William, an epitaphorist employed by the dystopic city of C. carries on with his daughter, Molly. They're good citizens, keeping their heads down until an old acquaintance who claims knowledge of what became his wife, moves William to action, after dark, during the curfew.

A Moment in the Sun traces the opportunistic era around the turn of the twentieth century with impeccable research and captivating grace.

Julian Barnes' Pulse is a well-tempered anthology of subtle dramatics. By dividing the stories in Pulse between two distinctly different sections, Barnes reminds readers that a short story collection can have a remarkable amount of craft in its structuring.

Chris Adrian's The Great Night fuses the heavy weight of the mortal coil with the mischiefs of the faerie kingdom when three individuals crossing San Francisco's Buena Vista Park en route to a party find their world intermingled with that of Titania, Oberon and Puck, fairies from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

T.C. Boyle chooses controversial topics and then weaves chatty novels around them; his characters are modern and the language in his writing feels instantly familiar. When the Killing's Done is no exception: the topic is how humans interact with the environment, and while the scenarios feel a bit stale, they do represent both sides of this...

Following a 15-year hiatus, Tim Sandlin returns to the fictional town of GroVont, Wyoming with Lydia, a comical dive back into the wonderfully-flawed and colorful characters Sandlin explored in his GroVont Trilogy.

The Pale King, like its progenitor Infinite Jest, is a puzzle - a bit like one of those 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that consumes the family's attention for weeks - and before emptying the pieces onto the table, Wallace shows us the cover on the box in a chapter that luminously sets the stage in the pastoral Midwest, instantly reminding the reader...

Jennifer Egan extracts episodes from the lives of a colorful array of characters to weave an atemporal tapestry of narrative that extends into both past and future.

Tea Obreht's outstanding debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, captivates with both awe and understanding. With a flawless synthesis of politics, folklore, and tradition, Obreht has created such a perfectly private book that readers will feel grateful for her exquisite prose.

Not only does Stephen Elliott and Eric Martin's novella Donald make a resounding partisan statement, the premise of their book allows them to showcase their skills as storytellers through the use of their political-minded fantasy.

Hilola Bigtree, matriarch of the Bigtree Clan and star of the alligator wrestling show at the family-operated Swamplandia! alligator park, has passed away. "We lost our headliner," explains thirteen-year-old narrator Ava Bigtree to a group of tourists. In the wake of their mother's death, the children - Ava, Osceola, and Kiwi - must find their...

Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination is a deftly constructed literary meditation built that opens with the onset of a worldwide paranormal phenomenon: without any known origin, mankind's physical pain is suddenly manifested with a peculiar luminescence.

Jodi Picoult's Sing You Home will bring tears to your eyes from both anger and sympathy as it presents both sides of three of America's most polarizing, hot-button issues: gay rights, reproductive science, and the Christian right.

In David Vann's Caribou Island, a retired couple sets off to chase the ultimate homesteader's dream: a cabin, on an island, in Alaska. But the project will have consequences more far-reaching than anyone originally intended.

Jonathan Safran Foer's latest effort, Tree of Codes, is simultaneously a paean to his favorite book, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and a bold artistic experiment with the form of the physical book. What it delivers from a literary perspective is less obvious.

Originally published in Turkish in 1998, My Name is Red won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003. The novel was burned publicly in Turkey when Orhan Pamuk was accused of "insulting Turkishness" in 2005.

Luka and the Fire of Life is the second children's novel by Salman Rushdie, coming twenty years after the publication of Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990. Although set in the same World of Magic and with the same cast of characters, those who have read Haroun will find Luka a wildly different sort of novel.

A literary master, his family, an assistant and her all-seeing camera are the components that make up Gunter Grass's great literary experiment, The Box: Tales from the Darkroom. In this work of fiction, Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they sit around the tables in their various households to record memories of their...

Poor dialogue and poor pacing make Sunset Park a difficult story to believe and a difficult book to trust. The characters in Paul Auster's latest all speak with a strained dramatic flair that is better left for the author's meta-noir novels.

In Tom McCarthy's C - the current favorite for the 2010 Man Booker Prize - young Serge Carrefax comes of age in pre-World War I England on the campus of a school for deaf children where his father experiments with machines and chemicals and his mother weaves tapestries from homegrown silkworms and self-medicates with opium.

Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall features a a middle-aged SoHo art dealer whose world is shaken by the arrival of his wife's younger brother, a recovering drug addict who wants to pursue a career in the arts.

Nicholas Sparks is a brand as surely as Kellogg, Chevrolet, or Apple. As surely as you know those cornflakes/car/computer will be of a certain quality, the reader knows that Sparks will deliver a competent, predictable story. Geared toward a female audience, the story will feature certain elements. A "lost" boy/man and girl/woman will meet by...

In Great House, Nicole Krauss has built a monument to the art of the novel. She reminds readers of the limitless restraints of a novelist, and in...

Ape House by Sara Gruen Spiegel and Grau, September 2010 4.5 stars John M. Formy-Duval Having read Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s previous,...

Khaled Hosseini calls Red Hook Road "thoroughly gripping and elegantly written." I had my doubts. The writing felt serviceable but not inspired....

Rose Tremain's Trespass is a cautionary tale of sorts. At once about boundaries both emotional and familial, Trespass tells the story of five aging characters as they struggle balancing independence with imposition.

Richard Yates takes place in the year 2006 and centers on a character named Haley Joel Osment and his obsession with a sixteen-year-old New Jersey...

Seven years ago, Jack's mother was kidnapped and held captive in a man's soundproof garden shed. Equipped with little more than an analog television, the room, measuring eleven feet square, is her prison - but to Jack, her son (now five years old), it is the whole world. Told from the perspective of precocious Jack, Emma Donoghue's Room tells the story of him and his mother as they try to cope and grow in a room that seems to shrink further as they continue to age.

Part literary fiction, Zen koan, and philosophical discussion, Scarlett Thomas' Our Tragic Universe will appeal to readers who can detach from expectations of traditional narrative and enjoy a thoughtful and wide-ranging philosophical meander through a "storyless story."

Skippy is a complicated kid. He’s a got a good heart but is growing increasingly bored with his successes in both the classroom and on the swim team. Skippy looks to be a Nintendo-fueled recast of the classic Russian hero — laced with an enigmatic malaise - but as Skippy Dies progresses, we learn in a perfectly plotted series of hints that there’s a lot more trouble behind Skippy’s silent face.

In Freedom, the mom is an ex-athelete who still carries a torch for her husband's rock star best friend, the dad is a corporate progressive who fights Big Coal, the son actually moves out of the house and into the neighbor's, and the author, Jonathan Franzen, once again proves mastery at mining the suburban experience for both comedy and tragedy.

David Mitchell is known for writing brilliant concept novels, but The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet doesn't fit that bill. Here, the author forgoes the stylistic wizardry of Cloud Atlas in writing a straightforward work of literature set in early nineteenth century Japan.

Paul Chowder may have met with some early successes, but of late he's been stalled in his career as a poet. Admittedly poor with rhyme, he writes free verse, but these days Chowder finds it difficult to pen even a single "flying spoon poem," much less the daunting poetry anthology introduction that will net him the big check from his publisher that he so desperately needs to pay his bills.

Tom Rachman's subject is "the paper," an English language newspaper in Rome that we follow from its inception in the 1950's through to its present-day decline. Its story is told through a series of short vignettes, each of which is a pivotal moment in a single character's life. The imperfectionists are the staffers at the paper - reporters, editors, publishers - and each of their tales build upo…

An accidental death, a never-mailed postcard, and a long-kept secret set the stage for a sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking novel about loss, love, and life.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers is the story of George and Howard, of fathers and sons, of existence and the end of existence. It is a poetic meditation in which Harding, with rich and evocative language, weaves the lives of three generations of Crosby men into a tapestry of life and death.

Anne Lamott employs her characteristically laugh-out-loud writing style to explore teenage drug abuse and its consequences. Full of quirky insights and funny moments, Lamott's latest book profiles a husband, a mother and a daughter in the midst of domestic distress. But even this author's humor can't soften the blow of this family's tragedy.

Yann Martel, winner of the Man Booker Prize for 'Life of Pi' (2001), is back with a story of a novelist named Henry whose animal-filled novel meets with similar success. The novelist meets with a taxidermist, also named Henry and a novel in which a donkey and a monkey are the main characters.

Jodi Picoult places us squarely in the life of a boy with Asperger's Syndrome so that we can see the painful effects this condition has on him, his family, and those around them.

Sam Lipsyte's 'The Ask' is the sad yet hilarious story of Milo Burke, a disheveled, semi-bitter failed artist whose mediocre job as a development officer at a mediocre New York university comes to hinge upon the whim of a single person, a millionaire entrepreneur with whom Milo shared numerous alcoholic drinks while purportedly pursuing higher education himself.

Cross the visionary philosophies of Buckminster Fuller with the raw energy of punk rock music, and the result is Iowa Writer's workshop graduate Peter Bognanni's debut novel.

Don DeLillo's 'Point Omega' is about Richard Elster, a secret defense intellectual who has retreated to solace in the desert southwest. Elster is sought out by a young filmmaker and then by his daughter Jessie. The three proceed to train discussion on points philosophical.

If you are at all disposed to dystopian and decidedly satirical coming-of-age steampunk, with a healthy dose of Monty Pythonesque laughs, you may skip to the end of the review where I recommend buying this book immediately.

Margaret Atwood's latest explores environmental and Biblical themes. The plot follows a religious group called the Gardeners who are waiting for what their scripture calls the Waterless Flood.

Ida Maclaird has come to the icy archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land seeking a man – one she’d met while in the mysterious islands six months prior, before the glass.

Joshua Ferris uses his considerable talents with dialogue and character to render what is at once a story of love and family and a thoughtful reflection upon the fragility of life.

Nick Hornby's latest novel explores the nature of love and meaning in life with the backdrop of popular music that High Fidelity fans will relish.

Drawing on the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters, John Irving delivers an entertaining history of logging in the wilds of New Hampshire in the early 1950s and a remarkable tale of the emergence of a writer.

Gregory Maguire's refreshing twist on the Hans Christian Andersen classic, "The Little Match Girl."

Chicago twins, Julia and Valentina Poole, inherit their deceased aunt's estate, on the condition that they live in her London flat - overlooking Highgate Cemetary - for a year.

Geoff Dyer has always blurred the edges between fiction and nonfiction, but his celebration of the sublime in both the mundane and the exotic is made palatable if not delicious by his facile hand. The best parts of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi are beautifully written and incisive.

The novelized version of Maurice Sendak's wonderfully captivating children's book about a young boy who sails off into the world of imagination to a jungle island populated with a small cast of monsters who proclaim him their king.

The Last Song explores the aspects of familial love and the storm and stress that come with having a teenager in the family.

Paulo Coelho's latest novel is like his bestselling 'The Alchemist,' except with a murderer on the loose.

Each of John Shors' novels have been set in some corner of Asia. Each has deftly caught the milieu and language of its setting.

James A. Levine's standout debut novel is the kind of fiction that convinces you of a disturbing reality that exists beyond the story itself, even though you wish it didn't.

A Barcelona youth survives his troubled childhood by taking refuge in stories until — at the age of seventeen — he gets the chance to begin writing his own. Under the patronage of Pedro Vidal, he makes a quick rise to fame by telling tales of Barcelona's gritty underworld.

In Overqualified, Joey Comeau spins a narrative of love and loss via a most unusual vehicle: a series of letters of application for employment - cover letters.

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel of addiction and recovery, is a long and complex work bearing the labyrinthine threads of plot and stylistic intricacies for which Wallace was famous, and certainly one of the most engrossing novels I have ever read.

'Little Bee' is the story of a tenuous friendship that emerges between a Nigerian refuge girl and a white British magazine editor.

The story of a 12-year-old Divide, Montana cartographer and his Smithsonian-bound adventures, bursting with the youthful progagonist's maps and illustrations.

The Caspers are a family in decline, each member watching helplessly as the ties that bind them unravel despite utter devotion to the simple tenets they believe will save them.

'The Ten-Year Nap' includes both deliciously pointed observations and annoying, too-clever remarks. Despite the promise of this unflinching and sharp-eyed look at career women who return home to raise their children, I ended up disappointed.

In 'Out of My Skin' John Haskell's narrator-protagonist moves to Los Angeles to write movie reviews and, in an act of self-transformation, ends up a Steve Martin impersonator.

John Wray's novel 'Lowboy' is about a schizophrenic teenager who has stopped taking his medication and escaped the asylum into the New York subway.

A departure for Shreve in more ways than one, Testimony's plot is uncovered through a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards.

The Indian family that Mahajan so succinctly chronicles is a disaster before it even becomes a family. Hilarious.

J.M. Coetzee designs a fictional autobiography in Summertime in which an unnamed biographer lifts illustrative passages from Coetzee's diaries and interviews significant persons from the Nobel Laureate's past, now that Coetzee (in the novel, though not in real life) has passed away.

A criminal picks up a young Bible salesman and cons him into believing he is working as an FBI agent.

In 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle' (2008), far and away the best debut novel of the year, David Wroblewski creates a beautifully imagined world filled with people who grapple with real issues. There is even a dog, Almondine, who shares her thoughts with us. This may be fiction, but it has the feel and punch of Life.

A young Jewish man from New Jersey seeks to improve his social status to avoid being drafted by the armed forces for service in the Korean War.

Tom Brodzinski is vacationing in a tropical land when he sets off an absurd and horrible chain of events by carelessly flicking a cigarette butt from his hotel terrace.

Paul Auster creates an alternate universe in which the twin towers never toppled, the war in Iraq never began, and instead the United States wages against itself, divided in civil war.

God, while inhabiting the body of a young Dinka woman, is killed, and word of his death soon begins to spread. Faced with the hard proof that there is no supreme being in charge, the world is irrevocably transformed, yet remains oddly recognizable.

Ross Raisin's stunning debut is a tale of obsession with a dark turn, as told through a teenage farmer's own Yorkshire dialect and disturbed inner life.

Instantly interesting and engaging, 'The Garden of Last Days' grabs one's attention and holds it to the last page.

Rivka Galchen dishes up an amalgam of psychiatry, meteorology, and poetic prose in a story about a psychiatrist who finds his lovely young wife has disappeared and been replaced by an exact replicate at the same time that his patient, who believes that he is secretly employed to control the weather, has also gone missing.

Sensuous, languid, filled with images, both sublime and earthy. It is a story of separation, division, that feeling of not belonging quite any place or to any relationship.

The third installation of Paul West's hilarious mis-adventures in merde.

The almost-true account of Stephen Clarke's adventures as an expat in Paris, based loosely on his own experiences and with names changed to avoid embarrassment and possible legal action.

Winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. The story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing intellectual who moves to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

A revolutionary past catches up with a former radical anti-war activist in Hari Kunzru's latest novel.

Following his spectacular debut novel, "The Death of Vishnu," Manil Suri returns with a mesmerizing story of modern India.

A protagonist's odyssey through Germany and Europe to the United States in an effort to reconnect and find "home."

Toby Barlow's free verse novel takes the werewolf myth to L.A., where werewolves form packs and vie for power.

After Toru Okada loses his cat, his job, and his wife, things go from bad to weird. Surreal visitations from beautiful women, gruesome stories from wartime Japan, and an entryway into a different world deep at the bottom of a well combine with the usual lost cats, jazz music and enigmatic characters in Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's depiction of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Diaz's novel traces Oscar de Leon's family history from 1940s Dominican Republic to 1980s Patterson, NJ of Oscar's nerd youth.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "March," the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war.

Through a hilarious series of events, two strangers find themselves railroaded into an anger-management class, where they soon become fast friends.

Lamb is Christopher Moore's irreverent, iconoclastic, and hilarious tale of the early life of Jesus Christ as witnessed by his boyhood pal, Biff.

As she did in her bestselling novel "Bel Canto," Patchett weaves together seemingly disparate lives to show how intimately humans can connect.

A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this unforgettable work by the author of "The Lovely Bones" and "Lucky."

What The Office brought to television, what Office Space brought to the movies, and what Dilbert brought to comics, Then We Came to the End brings to literature.

Lewis Miner is the 30-something graduate of a New Jersey high school who uses his time sending updates to his alumni newsletter.

Nicholas Sparks turns his talents to a tale about love found and lost, and the choices we hope we'll never have to make.

Something about Mike Engleby is not quite right. When he becomes fixated on a classmate and she goes missing, we are left with the looming question: Is Mike Engleby involved?

In William Gibson's follow-up to Pattern Recognition virtual art and international espionage collide.

In The Entitled, six-time National Sportswriter of the Year and NPR commentator Frank Deford takes the reader deep inside the game of baseball and evokes the roles of the players as well as the one man who can make or break a team and a season.

Free Food for Millionaires is a fresh take on the immigrant experience and a worthwhile treatment of intergenerational and cultural issues.

From the author of Big Fish comes this haunting, tender story that weaves a tragic secret, a mysterious meeting with the Devil, and a family of charming circus freaks recounting the extraordinary adventures of their friend Henry Walker, the Negro Magician.

Comic-book auteur Warren Ellis' very funny first novel combines a mystery, a road trip, a romance, and extensive research into the darker corners of the Internet, and purports to be a descent into the Inferno of contemporary America.

At the age of 29, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Now she has answered an ad to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do couple as they spend a sultry summer in their oceanfront New Hampshire cottage.

In Cassandra King's fictional town of Fairhope, hearts and personalities collide.

By Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story of the unconquerable spirit of a people seen through the eyes of two indomitable women.

The Kite Runner is Afghanistani-American novelist, Khaled Hosseini's best-selling debut novel, a tale of betrayal and redemption that rises above time and place while simultaneously remaining firmly anchored against the tumultuous backdrop of modern Afghanistan.

In Traveler, his beautifully written follow up to The Memory of Running, Ron McLarty has created a character who returns home to an awakened sense of responsibility after a note arrives telling him of the death of his first love.

Cormac McCarthy traces the progress of a father and son through a postapocalyptic landscape in what is perhaps the author's most powerful novel to date.

A feel-good chick-lit at the top of its game, Isabel Sharpe's latest novel is a story about three women on the verge of self-discovery.

When Dave Rudman's wife deserts him for another man, Dave pens a memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, part handbook of "the Knowledge" learned by all London cab drivers. Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet.

Once in a Promised Land is the story of a couple, Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing their own dreams of opportunity and freedom.

Thomas Pynchon devotees have waited a long time for the author's sixth novel, Against the Day, and want to know - is it brilliant, or just complex?

Never Let Me Go is speculative, set in an alternate England whose dystopic elements aren't immediately apparent to the reader.

Only Revolutions surrounds a 200 year road journey taken by two teenage lovers, more experimentalist literature from the author of House of Leaves.

From the author of White Oleander: a self-destructive teen runaway in the 1980's L.A. punk music scene struggles after her enigmatic artist-dropout-boyfriend commits suicide.

Black Swan Green is divided into 13 chapters, each a month in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, each revealing a bit more about the sweet torture that is his life in sleepy Worcestershire.

Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company.

A "Dear John" letter and minibar's worth of alcohol send a trend-spotting Futurist on a global mid-life crisis in this satirical first novel.

John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, who becomes involved with a fundamentalist jihadist and a terrorist plot.

Roth's Everyman is a hero whose youthful sense of independence and confidence begins to be challenged when illness commences its attack in middle age.

Walter Mosley's novel about two boys, one ensconced in a life of privilege and the other in a life of hardship, explores the true meaning of fortune.

Kevin Brockmeier's fascinating novel of a City whose deceased inhabitants exist only so long as they are remembered by those alive on Earth.

Gautam Malkani's extraordinary comic novel portrays the lives of young Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men in the ethnically charged enclave of one of the biggest western cities, London.

Adverbs is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love.

Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman and functionally dead until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world.

On a September 2001 morning in New York, brightness falls horribly from the sky. What happens when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What is the good life?

A smart send-up of corporate culture that will make you laugh your action items right off your plate.

Utterly Monkey is an entertaining page-turner, a work of lad-lit that will nonetheless appeal to a broad audience.

The absurdly funny author of Fluke and The Stupidest Angel strikes again.

Nathan Glass returns to Brooklyn to die. Instead, despair is swept away in favor of discovery, in Brooklynite, Paul Auster's "hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life."

Nicholas Sparks brings back two characters from his bestseller, True Believer.

Zadie Smith made a literary splash as a twenty-five-year-old with her debut novel White Teeth. Smith's latest is On Beauty, a modern twist on E. M. Forster's Howard's End.

Amidst disillusioned saints hiding in wrestling rings, mothers burnt by glowing halos, and a Baby Nostradamus who sees only blackness, a gang of flower pickers heads off to war, led by a lonely man who cannot help but wet his bed in sadness.

Lunar Park, is a feat of literary sleight-of-hand, a bait and switch game that finds Ellis addressing his controversial work and his relationship to it in a fictionalized confession.

The narrator of Benjamin Kunkel's comic novel is encouraged by one of his roommates to try an experimental pharmaceutical meant to banish indecision and finds himself on the brink of a new life.

Ali Smith's Booker-nominated novel, The Accidental, is about how people break down and the terrifying possibilities of who they might become.

John Irving's eleventh novel is the story of the actor Jack Burns, son of a Toronto tattoo artist and a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed.

When Fat Charlie's father dies, Charlie discovers that his old man, heretofore merely embarrassing, was actually Anansi, the West African spider trickster god.

If you've not read Helprin before, start with Winter's Tale or A Soldier of the Great War. If you're familiar with Helprin's epic odysseys and have been waiting for his next, wait no longer.

From Sue Monk Kidd, author of "The Secret Life of Bees." Jessie Sullivan returns to Egret Island,off the coast of South Carolina, to care for her mother and finds herself attracted to a young monk at a Benedictine Monastery.

Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen; a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother; encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.

Walter Mosely, author of the Easy Rawlins detective novels, weaves a more philosophical story in The Man in My Basement.

A hilariously engaging first-novel, Sex and Sunsets garnered Tim Sandlin comparisons to Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins at its publication in 1987.

Max Tivoli is born with the external physical appearance of an old, dying person. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward.

A group of racing fans sets off on a bus tour of Southern speedways in tribute to NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt in this road novel modeled after the Canterbury Tales.

Oskar Schell is nine years old and on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Themes of friendship, redemption, and grace under pressure are examined in the context of Paris, Arkansas.

Nani Power's otherworldly novel delves into the tangled relationships and hidden worlds of people brought together-and torn apart-under extraordinary circumstances.

Characteristically engaging in its humor and surrealism - true to form for Haruki Murakami.

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" ricochets it's way through time, space, and literary genres and characters in an extremely compelling "puzzle book" novel.

Alan Blair is a young writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. Luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet, a wondrously helpful fellow named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his young master.

A smart girl from a dull town is thrust into the excesses of college life in Tom Wolfe's satirical take on the undergraduate experience.

Actor and playwritght, Ron McLarty, delivers a character-driven epic journey.

Cintra Wilson has fused a hilarious yet strangely touching coming-of-age story with a blistering satire of our celebrity-debased culture.

Booker finalist Astonishing Splashes of Colour takes its title from J. M. Barrie's description of Peter Pan's Neverland. It follows the life of Kitty, a woman who, in a sense, has never grown up.

It is the return of America's favorite chronicler of absurdity, Christopher Moore, with shovel-wielding murderesses, stoned officers of the law, one half-witted agent of The Lord, a flock of undead zombies fed up with the living, and oh, don't forget the illustrious reemergence of Roberto The Fruit Bat.

Tom Langdon, a weary and cash-strapped journalist, must take the train if he has any chance of arriving in Los Angeles in time for Christmas.

Marc Acito, hailed as the "gay Dave Barry" for his humor column, "The Gospel According to Marc" delivers on this fun-filled romp through adolescence.

A political radical and former member of the Weather Underground becomes a friend and colleague of ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor, a relationship that triggers a momentous series of events.

Jonathan Rosen's Eve's Apple on the surface appears to be a story about a man obsessed with his girlfriends' eating disorder. What it turns out to be is something much more intriguing.

In a time when every Western country is facing off with its Muslim populations, this book provides its readers a look at a community that, frankly, frightens them.

Billy Schine, a debt-ridden and disillusioned Harvard grad, signs up for a medical research trial of a new antipsychotic.

When a young graduate of the Israeli army decides to moonlight as an assistant nurse at a mental institution in Jerusalem, he finds himself trapped in a hilarious yet terrifying freak show.

Nick Guest, finds his life dramatically altered when he takes up residence with conservative Parliament member, in Hollinghurst's winner of the 2004 Booker Prize.

Miriam Toews' darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist Mennonites.

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, and confusing notes --such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel.

In Daniel Hayes' darkly humorous debut novel, Evan Ulmer takes matters into his own hands after his writerly dreams of fame and recognition have stalled. He kidnaps renowned editor Robert Partnow and cages him in a basement.

Two months after her 30th birthday, celebrated journalist, Stephanie Williams, was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Enter Sandman, is a largely biographical account of her struggle. Stephanie Williams died on July 3, 2004, just weeks after the book's publication.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind.

Narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, Mark Haddon's novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

Winner of 2001's National Book Award, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" is a modern portrait of the family in decline.

The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

Transmission, Hari Kunzru’s new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.

Andrew Lewis Conn has chosen to embrace rather then deny his predecessors and create a work of ultimate reference. He has taken James Joyce's "Ulysses" as his model and created his own single day in the late 20th century over which the action of his story takes place.

The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a uniquely-themed anthology in that it's theme is the reader. This compendium offers reading material to fill those moments of waiting for something to happen.

Samaritan by Richard Price tells the story of Ray Mitchell, who after a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him.

In Andrew Fox's first novel Fat White Vampire Blues, he has created an Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) of the undead and as in John Kennedy Toole's famous novel, Fox takes full advantage of the exotic and eccentric nature of New Orleans.

Paul Auster is one author who likes to write novels about novelists, and continues to be consistently entertaining and provocative in doing so. Auster's latest novel, Oracle Night, is another exploration on why we write, and what kind of power that writing actually holds.

Martin Amis is no stranger to the nittier and grittier walks of life. Amis's novels are filled with sex, drugs, and violence, and is an expert at creating despicable characters for whom you can't help but feeling a little bit sympathetic. His latest novel, Yellow Dog, should please fans of his morbid sense of humor, layered storytelling, and uniquely descriptive language.

Compelled by his book club to choke down The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, this reviewer finds his patience in the face of sophomoric and choppy prose rewarded generously with gripping plot and intriguing characters.

It is 1970, and a California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier—the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other homesteaders.

In Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson, seven familiar narrators recall the last century. The Skipper shares his memories of fellow skipper Jack Kennedy. The millionaire gets Alger Hiss a job. Mrs. Howell reveals her friendship with The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. Ginger dishes up the scoop on the Rat Pack. The professor confesses to his part in every event from Los Alamos to Watergate. And Mary-Ann finds romance in Paris. And then Gilligan, inventing this comic collage for reasons of his own.

The characters of Tom Perrotta's latest novel, Little Children, are a surprising bunch: Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out. Written with all the fluency of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes adult dramas amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.

In a remote mountain village, the beautiful Dikosha lives for dancing and for song. Her twin brother, Radisene, works in the lowland capital of Maseru, struggling amid political upheaval. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging. And through it all, the community watches, comments, and passes judgment.

In writing The Bride Stripped Bare, the author decided to remain anonymous so she would feel absolutely free to explore a woman's inner world. As she writes in her afterword, "That doesn't mean this book is a memoir; it's many things to me, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt pieced together not only from my stories but those of my friends."

Volume I of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, is history, adventure, science, truth, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death, and alchemy. It sweeps across continents and decades with the power of a roaring tornado, upending kings, armies, religious beliefs, and all expectations.

The Confusion, the second book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy does not disappoint as he picks up his characters where he abruptly dropped them at the end of Quicksilver. Join Stephenson amidst a vast and intricate historical backdrop in Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle.

Tom Robbins has been dishing out metaphor-rich and metaphysically-playful novels since 1971 when he delivered Another Roadside Attraction. His latest work, Villa Incognito, begins with 3 American MIAs who choose to remain missing after the Vietnam war, but as is always the case with a Tom Robbins' work, careens gleefully into untold realms of myth and imagination.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind seems born of a different time. An ode to its own genre, a love song to itself, the story of a boy who is shown the power of a book, one so powerful that it threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves.

Kurt Wenzel's quick moving new novel Gotham Tragic is the sequel to his debut Lit Life. Wenzel's novel is an amusing look at the New York publishing hi-life in which a group of militant Muslims declare a fatwa against an arrogant author.

From Cornelia Funke, the author of the international best-selling novel THE THIEF LORD: One night Meggie's father, Mo, reads aloud from a book called INKHEART, and an evil ruler named Capricorn escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books.

To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and...

In "The Secret Life of Bees," Sue Monk Kidd wraps a coming-of-age tale around a search for one's mother, plunks it down into the racially-charged South Carolina of the civil rights movement and sets it all alight with a dose of feminine spirituality.

For the first time since his first novel, Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk is writing in a woman's voice, albeit the obsessed and borderline deranged voice of Diary's "heroine." However, the urgency and broken speech are so reminiscent of his earlier work that it could very well be the fantasy of Fight Club's truly psychotic narrator.

"The Bay of Noon" is Shirley Hazzard's 1970 classic story about a friendship between two women; Jenny, an English diplomatic assistant on assignment in post-WWII Italy. And Gioconda, the sole mistress of a decaying ancestral home rooted in the heart of Naples.

Appleby House-the true story of a house rented out in 1984 London that involves such exciting things as cooking, cleaning, rearranging furniture, paying for bath water, secretarial work…and well, not too much else...

“Nine is a much funnier number than eleven,” explained Sherman Alexie in a recent book signing for Ten Little Indians, a collection of nine contemporary Native American tales.

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, "Kavalier and Clay" is the story of two young Jewish cousins whose meeting in 1939 ignites a luminous career in comic books at a time in history when the art form exploded in American popular culture.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Daniel Pecan resides in his Santa Monica apartment, living much of his life as a bystander: He watches from his window as the world goes by, and his only relationships seem to be with people who barely know he exists. He passes the time idly filling out contest applications, counting ceiling tiles, and estimating the wattage of light bulbs.

After reading Timothy Schaffert's latest work, "The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters," there is no doubt that Schaffert is a fantastic short story writer and the fact that he won one of the highest honors for his genre...

Glenn Gaslin's first novel, Beemer (TM) is a fresh, though perhaps too non-confrontational exploration of the media cultural landscape seeping into our collective mindscapes...

"To Live" is an epic and heartbreaking journey spanning four decades of recent Chinese history. It begins in the 1930s around the time of China’s second war with Japan and continues into the late 1970s reform era. In between, Hua weaves great sorrow and struggle for Fugui and his family through the tempestuous Chinese Civil War, The Great Leap Forward, and The Cultural Revolution.

A chance encounter with a whale with peculiar markings on its flukes sets four mismatched companions on an increasingly bizarre adventure that can only culminate in a showdown with the origins of life on earth itself.

The planet is run by huge American corporations; the government has been marginalized to such an extent that it is unable to quell the war stirring between rival corporate loyalty programs; and elementary schools are sponsored by the likes of Mattel and McDonalds.

In the beginning there was Amy. Amy Henderson, who recalled seeing The Clash of the Titans with her father and made monster movies with her childhood friend; who at the age of 16 got on a bus to Los Angeles to become a special effects artist, who swept quickly into Arthur Rook's world and disappeared as suddenly when the touch of a loose wire sent thousands of volts into her finger, killing her i…

Matt Prior is on a late-night milk run at the 7/11 when he meets with destiny in the form of Skeet and Jamie, two stoned, twenty-something gangbangers with unfortunate tattoos and uncertain futures. Despite the trappings of upper-middle class, Matt's future is equally uncertain. A former journalist, he quit his job at the newspaper to pursue...

In Nemesis, Philip Roth's thirty-first novel, a Jewish community in Newark is crippled with paranoia surrounding the polio outbreak during the summer of 1944. Yet, twenty-three year old Bucky Cantor, the summer's playground director for the Weequahic neighborhood, is afflicted with a different sort of inaction: unable to enlist due to his bad...

Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is a brilliantly written, literary elegy that holds the reader's close attention from the first paragraph until the end. Mengestu's facility with language is reflected on every page; his ability to astound with a turn of phrase, a metaphor is usual. Yet, in its elegiac exploration of how the bonds between...

Gregory Maguire's newest novel, The Next Queen of Heaven, packs in some of the cleverest wit and one-liners since Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame (1955). Sure the story itself drags like a plus-sized snail through wet cement, but the snark is too precious to toss aside.

In over one thousand pages, Adam Levin's The Instructions follows four days in the life of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a fifth grader in Aptakisic Junior High's "Cage Program," a severely monitored schooling system for children with behavioral disorders. Some of Gurion's classmates are handicapped, many are prone to violence, but Gurion is...

Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori) stands out among Haruki Murakami’s novels not only because it was the novel that launched Murakami into the literary stratosphere, but because it is a straightforward love-story / bildungsroman devoid of the elements of magical realism typical of a Haruki Murakami novel.

As both editor Paul Slovak and rocker Patti Smith note in their forewords to Jim Carroll's posthumously published novel The Petting Zoo, Carroll died of a heart attack at his writing desk on September 11, 2009 while putting the finishing touches to this swan song, which he'd been working on since the 1990s. Smith says Carroll wrote The Petting...

Consider that you are very old and beginning to sink into the abyss of dementia, but you are still at a point that you know that something is happening to you. You have a choice. You can continue along your current path and slowly become more disoriented, perhaps over a few weeks or years. Or, you can take an experimental new drug that will...

Men in Space is Tom McCarthy's (C, Remainder) first novel, a cinematicaly-inclined story set in the 1990s whose characters range from a Bulgarian football referee to a stranded astronaut, all of whom are chasing after an elusive MacGuffin, a stolen painting making its way from Sofia to Prague.