Recommended

A Confederacy of Dunces is a satirical novel set in New Orleans, following the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a pompous, self-proclaimed genius living with his mother.  Ignatius, a slob extraordinaire, embarks on a series of chaotic jobs and schemes, clashing with the modern world and its perceived flaws.  The novel, known for its dark humour and unforgettable characters, explores themes of societal critique and the absurdities of human behaviour.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India.  It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.”  Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen.  Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters.  Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.

From Graham Norton—the BAFTA Award-winning Irish television host and author of the “charming debut novel” (New York Journal of Books) Holding—a masterly and haunting tale of secrets and ill-fated love follows a young woman as she returns to Ireland after her mother’s death and unravels the identity of her father.

When Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death, she’s focused only on saying goodbye to that dark and dismal part of her life.  Her childhood home is packed solid with useless junk, her mother’s presence already fading.  But within this mess, she discovers a small stash of letters—and ultimately, the truth.

Forty years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet except for the constant wind that encircles her as she hurries deeper into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea.  She has no sense of where she is going, only that she must keep on.

Meet Ove.  He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window.  He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse.  People call him “the bitter neighbour from hell.”  But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?

Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.  So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul.  All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

Fredrik Backman’s beloved first novel about the angry old man next door is a thoughtful exploration of the profound impact one life has on countless others.

A unique and eerily convincing masterwork, American War takes a scalpel to American politics, precisely dissecting it to see what would happen if their own policies were turned against them. The answer: inevitable, endless bloodshed.

In a disturbingly believable near future, the need for sustainable energy has torn the United States apart. The South wants to maintain the use of fossil fuels, even though the government in The North has outlawed them. Now, unmanned drones patrol the skies, and future martyrs walk the markets. For the first time in three hundred years, America is caught up in a civil war. Out of this turmoil comes Sarat Chestnut, a southern girl born into the ongoing conflict. At a displaced persons camp, a mysterious older man takes her under his wing, and while her family tries to survive, Sarat is made into a deadly instrument of war, with consequences for the entire nation.

For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God.  The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993.  Flor would be thirteen years old.  The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her.  Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex.  Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped.  Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as found in that comfortable home.  To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home."  The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade.  Bryson shows how each has shaped the evolution of private life.  Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

On a foggy summer night, eleven people–ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter–depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.  Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges into the ocean.  The only survivors are the painter Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.

Was it by chance that so many influential people perished?  Or was something more sinister at work?  A storm of media attention brings Scott fame that quickly morphs into notoriety and accusations, and he scrambles to salvage truth from the wreckage.  Amid trauma and chaos, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy grows and glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, morality, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.

Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel and the 2017 International Thriller Writers Award For Best Novel

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness.  An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.  A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.

The English-language debut of one of Japan's most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura.

Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life.  In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less.  Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…

A brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures we all feel to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

A queer Syrian refugee reckons with a life spent out of place.

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.

Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.

What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative — a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalence. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist.  With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.  It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage.  Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Dancing Girls is Margaret Atwood’s highly praised first collection of short fiction.  In it she explores the dark intricacies of the mind, the complexities of human relationships, and the clashes between cultures.  In the stories, the mundane and the bizarre intersect in unexpected ways: ex-wives indulge in an odd feast at a psychiatrist’s funeral; a young student is pursued by an obsessed immigrant; an old woman stores up supplies against an impending cataclysm.  The fourteen stories range in setting from Canada to England, from Mexico to the United States, and portray characters who touch us and arouse in us compassion and understanding.  In this astonishing collection, Margaret Atwood maps human motivation we scarcely know we have.

A speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy

“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves?

From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.

The CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage novel about disgraced MI5 agents who inadvertently uncover a deadly Cold War-era legacy of sleeper cells and mythic super spies.

The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts.

But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity.

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

When Doug Raymer, chief of police of the forlornly depressed town of North Bath, N.Y., falls into an open grave during a funeral service, it is only the first of many farcical and grisly incidents in Russo's shaggy dog story of revenge and redemption.  Among the comical set pieces that propel the narrative are a poisonous snakebite, a falling brick wall, and a stigmatalike hand injury.  Filled with humor, heart, and hard-luck characters you can’t help but love, Everybody’s Fool is a crowning achievement from one of the great storytellers of our time.

The breathtaking new novel set during the Blitz by the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of the reader and bookseller favourite, Little Bee.

As World War Two begins, Mary, a young socialite, is determined to shock her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort. She is assigned as a teacher to children who were evacuated from London and have been rejected by the countryside because they are infirm, mentally disabled, or—like Mary’s favorite student, Zachary—have colored skin.

Tom, an education administrator, is distraught when his best friend, Alastair, enlists. Alastair, an art restorer, has always seemed far removed from the violent life to which he has now condemned himself. But Tom finds distraction in Mary, first as her employer and then as their relationship quickly develops in the emotionally charged times. When Mary meets Alastair, the three are drawn into a tragic love triangle and—while war escalates and bombs begin falling around them—further into a new world unlike any they’ve ever known.

Moving from Blitz-torn London to the Siege of Malta, this is an epic story of love, loss, prejudice and incredible courage.

Set in Bombay in the mid-1990s, Family Matters tells a story of familial love and obligation, of personal and political corruption, of the demands of tradition and the possibilities for compassion. Nariman Vakeel, the patriarch of a small discordant family, is beset by Parkinson’s and haunted by memories of his past. He lives with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her brother, Jal, mild-mannered and acquiescent. But the burden of the illness worsens the already strained family relationships. Soon, their sweet-tempered half-sister, Roxana, is forced to assume sole responsibility for her bedridden father. And Roxana’s husband, besieged by financial worries, devises a scheme of deception involving his eccentric employer at a sporting goods store, setting in motion a series of events that leads to the narrative’s moving outcome. Family Matters has all the richness, the gentle humour, and the narrative sweep that have earned Mistry the highest of accolades around the world.

With meditations on youth and age, love and marriage, peace, solitude, and contentment, here is an inimitable classic that guides us to find a space for contemplation and creativity in our own lives.

“Gift from the Sea is like a shell itself in its small and perfect form … It tells of light and life and love and the security that lies at the heart.” —New York Times Book Review

Drawing inspiration from the the shells on the shore, Lindbergh’s musings on the shape of a woman’s life will bring new understanding to readers, male and family, at any stage of life. A mother of five and professional writer, she casts an unsentimental eye at the trappings of modern life that threaten to overwhelm us—the timesaving gadgets that complicate our lives, the overcommitments that take us from our families.

With great wisdom and insight she describes the shifting shapes of relationships and marriage, presenting a vision of a life lived in enduring and evolving partnership. A groundbreaking work when it was first published, this book has retained its freshness as it has been rediscovered by generations of readers and is no less current today.

In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy's life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six.  The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident.  Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband, and horrible grandmother into her own house—then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.

What, exactly, does it mean to be good?  When is sacrifice merely selfishness?  What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve?  Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

In this “compelling, bighearted, emotionally precise page-turner” (Sunday Times), the New York Times bestselling writer and acclaimed television host explores the aftermath of a tragedy on a small-town to illuminate the shame and longing that can flow through generations—and how the secrets of the heart cannot stay be buried forever.

It is 1987 and a small Irish community is preparing for a wedding.  The day before the ceremony, a group of young friends, including the bride and groom, are involved in an accident.  Three survive.  Three are killed.

The lives of the families are shattered and the rifts between them ripple throughout the small town.  Connor survived, but living among the angry and the mourning is almost as hard as carrying the shame of having been the driver.  He leaves the only place he knows for another life, taking his secrets with him.  Travelling first to Liverpool, then London, he eventually makes a home—of sorts—for himself in New York, where he finds shelter and the possibility of forging a new life.

But the secrets—the unspoken longings and regrets that have come to haunt those left behind—will not be silenced.  Before long, Connor will have to confront his past.

A powerful and timely novel of emigration and return, Home Stretch demonstrates Norton’s keen understanding of the power of stigma and secrecy—and their devastating effect on ordinary lives.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.  Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, & Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years.  Now their talents are considered old-school & no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.  When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses-paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own.  Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, & the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience & each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival.  They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman - and a killer - of a certain age.

Emily Carr’s first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck ("Laughing One"), in honour of the name that the Native people of the west coast gave to her.  This collection of twenty-one word sketches about Native people describes her visits and travels as she painted their totem poles and villages.  Vital and direct, aware and poignant, it is as well regarded today as when it was first published in 1941 to instant and wide acclaim, winning the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction.  In print ever since, it has been read and loved by several generations of Canadians, and has also been translated into French and Japanese.

NOTE: This Penguin Classics edition of Klee Wyck has been reset from the original edition, published by Oxford University Press in 1941.  Quite a few passages in the first edition were expurgated by the editor of the 1951 educational edition published by Clarke, Irwin and Company and have only now been restored in their entirety, fifty-five years later.  In each case, Carr’s sentiments lay with the Native.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

What if there were second chances? And third chances?  In fact, an infinite number of chances to live your life?  Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny?  And would you even want to?

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again.  With wit and compassion, she finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past.  Here is Kate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

Like Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, Eva Wylie, introduced in Bucket Nut, is a character of such convincing reality, it's hard to believe she doesn't exist somewhere.  She also, like them, inhabits a fully believable world, but hers revolves around a gym--she's a villainous female wrestler--and two vicious watch dogs in the toughest part of London.  Nicknamed the "London Lassassin", the deeply moral Eva finds her personal code put to the test when the diminutive, monkey-faced Crystal, the closest thing to a friend Eva will allow herself, asks for help in finding and punishing her prostitute sister's killer.  Eva reluctantly agrees--and ends up paying a high personal price.  What propels this unconventional mystery (in which Cody's other series heroine, Anna Lee, briefly appears) is less the need to discover whodunit than the power of Eva's voice as she tells her story: menacing, barely in control of her rage, but also vulnerable, funny and on the side of the angels.  The pace is breathless and jittery, much like the London Lassassin herself, who is a singular treasure.

A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark.  Cut off, people become passive and confused.  Panic builds as the food supply dwindles.  While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south.  Soon after, others follow.

The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve.  Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair.  Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again.  Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

A literary adventure story for the 21st century:

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a web-design drone, and serendipity, sheer curiosity and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey have landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  But Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than its name suggests.  There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything.  Instead they “check out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra.  The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he has embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behaviour and roped his friends into helping him figure out just what’s going on.  But once they take their findings to Mr. Penumbra, they discover the secrets extend far beyond the walls of the bookstore.

Evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or Umberto Eco, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave.

1996 Minnesota Book Award winner — A Native American book

The heart of the Native American experience: In this 1996 Minnesota Book Award winner, Kent Nerburn draws the reader deep into the world of an Indian elder known only as Dan.  It's a world of Indian towns, white roadside cafes, and abandoned roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Readers meet vivid characters like Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, and Annie, an 80-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin.  Threading through the book is the story of two men struggling to find a common voice.  Neither Wolf nor Dog takes readers to the heart of the Native American experience.  As the story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently on the difference between land and property, the power of silence, and the selling of sacred ceremonies.  This edition features a new introduction by the author, Kent Nerburn.

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster

“Exhilarating . . . a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer-detective who’s never satisfied with just the facts.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written.

Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black.  From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window.

The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems.  What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe’s boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life?

Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as “post-existential private eye. . . . It’s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.”

It's late one night at the Spanish port of Algeciras and two fading Irish gangsters are waiting on the boat from Tangier.  A lover has been lost, a daughter has gone missing, their world has come asunder - can it be put together again?

Night Boat to Tangier is a novel drenched in sex and death and narcotics, in sudden violence and old magic, but it is obsessed, above all, with the mysteries of love.  A tragicomic masterwork from a multi-award-winning writer, Night Boat to Tangier is both mordant and hilarious, lyrical yet laden with menace.

Caught up in the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, Cea Person's grandfather traded the suburban comforts of California for a pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional life under a canvas tipi in the Canadian wilderness.

As a child, Cea knew little about the world beyond her eccentric, hand-to-mouth existence, but her teenage mother, Michelle, found something lacking: a man.  With Cea in tow, she hits the road for an insane journey full of ill-fated adventures and the company of spectacularly unsuitable men.

Craving stability and safety, all Cea wants is to be normal.  Left to practically raise herself, she promises to find a different life from her usual and dysfunctional upbringing.  Determined and resilient, Cea reinvents herself through her successful international modelling career, but her new life brings its own challenges.

Warm and vibrant, Cea's voice transports readers through a rivetingly dysfunctional childhood in the Canadian wilderness, adolescent modeling success, motherhood and her struggle to confront-and come to terms with-the past.

Nevil Shute’s most powerful novel—a bestseller for decades after its 1957 publication—is an unforgettable vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

After a nuclear World War III has destroyed most of the globe, the few remaining survivors in southern Australia await the radioactive cloud that is heading their way and bringing certain death to everyone in its path.  Among them is an American submarine captain struggling to resist the knowledge that his wife and children in the United States must be dead.  Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from somewhere near Seattle, and Captain Towers must lead his submarine crew on a bleak tour of the ruined world in a desperate search for signs of life.  Both terrifying and intensely moving, On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell.  As a boy, he lives to decipher the odours of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs.  But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood.  Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin.  Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

100,000 years ago, at least six species of human inhabited the earth.  Today there is just one. Us.  Homo Sapiens.

How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance?  Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms?  How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?  And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical — and sometimes devastating — breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions.  Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology, and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities.  Have we become happier as history has unfolded?  Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors?  And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power...and our future.

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing examines the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power – and limitations – of family bonds.

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man.  His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her.  She is black and her children's father is white.  Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use.

When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary.  At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering.  He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America.

Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre fled to Canada with her family following General Augusto Pinochet's violent 1973 coup in Chile.  Five years later, when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean resistance members, Carmen and her sister went with them, quickly assuming double lives of their own.  At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.

Something Fierce takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictator-ruled Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile in the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989.  Dramatic, suspenseful and darkly comic, it is a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life and a passionate argument against forgetting.

When Anne Morrow, a shy college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family, she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic.  Enthralled by Charles’s assurance and fame, Anne is certain the aviator has scarcely noticed her.  But she is wrong.  Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever.  The two marry in a headline-making wedding.  In the years that follow, Anne becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States.  But despite this and other major achievements, she is viewed merely as the aviator’s wife.  The fairy-tale life she once longed for will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life’s infinite possibilities for change and happiness.

What if our homes could tell the stories of others who lived there before us?  Set in a small village near Paris, The Balcony follows the inhabitants of a single estate-including a manor and a servants’ cottage-over the course of several generations, from the Belle époque to the present day, introducing us to a fascinating cast of characters.  A young American au pair develops a crush on her brilliant employer.  An ex-courtesan shocks the servants, a Jewish couple in hiding from the Gestapo attract the curiosity of the neighbors, and a housewife begins an affair while renovating her downstairs.  Rich and poor, young and old, powerful and persecuted, all of these people are seeking something: meaning, love, a new beginning, or merely survival.

Throughout, cross-generational connections and troubled legacies haunt the same spaces, so that the rose garden, the forest pond, and the balcony off the manor’s third floor bedroom become silent witnesses to a century of human drama.

In her debut, Jane Delury writes with masterful economy and profound wisdom about growing up, growing old, marriage, infidelity, motherhood – in other words, about life – weaving a gorgeous tapestry of relationships, life-altering choices, and fleeting moments across the frame of the twentieth century.  A sumptuous narrative of place that burrows deep into individual lives to reveal hidden regrets, resentments, and desires, The Balcony is brimming with compassion, natural beauty, and unmistakable humanity.

Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil.

Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring. And indeed, misfortune begins to stalk the village.

But Vasya’s stepmother only grows harsher, determined to remake the village to her liking and to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for marriage or a convent. As the village’s defenses weaken and evil from the forest creeps nearer, Vasilisa must call upon dangerous gifts she has long concealed—to protect her family from a threat sprung to life from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful so that people will look at her so that her world will be different.  This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfilment.

Because of its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfilment, The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels - and a significant work of American fiction.

A debut novel full of magic, adventure, and romance, The Book of Doors opens up a thrilling world of contemporary fantasy for readers of The Midnight Library, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, The Night Circus, and any modern story that mixes the wonder of the unknown with just a tinge of darkness.

Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life.  Until the day one of her favorite customers—a lonely yet charming old man—dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by.  Nothing but the last book he was reading.

But this is no ordinary book…

It is the Book of Doors.

Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door.  You just need to know how to open them.

Then she’s approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox.  He’s a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes.  The tome now in Cassie’s possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.

Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books.  With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil.  Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there.

But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets.  And a dark force—in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman—is at the very top of that list.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.

In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased.  Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven’t seen in years.  And, because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him.  As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share.

By turns savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving, The Buried Giant is a luminous meditation on the act of forgetting and the power of memory.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad.  To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbour, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma.  But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen.  With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighbouring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one.  As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives.  What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up as a girl in Iran during the revolution has for twenty years been a classroom staple, a feminist manifesto, and one of the most popular and widely known graphic novels of all time.

"A stunning graphic memoir...a wholly original achievement in the form." —The New York Times

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming—both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom—Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

A bestselling modern classic—both poignant and funny—narrated by a fifteen year old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbour’s dog Wellington impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing.

Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer, and turns to his favourite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. As Christopher tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, the narrative draws readers into the workings of Christopher’s mind.

And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotions. The effect is dazzling, making for one of the freshest debut in years: a comedy, a tearjerker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read.

A page-turning late-Victorian mystery by a master, The Glass of Time is for fans of The Meaning of Night and for readers new to Michael Cox alike.

Picking up the lives of characters from the first novel some twenty years later, The Glass of Time begins in 1876.  Nineteen-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives from Paris at the great country house of Evenwood to become lady’s maid to the 26th Baroness Tansor, the former Miss Emily Carteret.  But Esperanza is no ordinary servant.  She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious “Madame,” to uncover the secrets that her new mistress has concealed for decades, and to set right a past injustice which — although Esperanza does not know it — is intimately linked with her own future as well as her past.

Gradually, those secrets are revealed, and with them the true identities of nearly every character — for it seems that no one in Esperanza’s world is who she believes them to be.  She finds herself enmeshed in a complicated web of intrigue, deceit, and murder that culminates in a devastating betrayal by those she trusted most.

Richly textured and elegantly told, The Glass of Time is a completely enveloping tale of identity, of the unexpected consequences of hidden truths, and of what can happen when past obsessions impose themselves on an unwilling present.

A marvelous and absorbing debut novel about a chance meeting between two supernatural creatures in turn-of-the-century immigrant New York.

Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay by a disgraced rabbi knowledgeable in the ways of dark Kabbalistic magic. She serves as the wife to a Polish merchant who dies at sea on the voyage to America.  As the ship arrives in New York in 1899, Chava is unmoored and adrift until a rabbi on the Lower East Side recognizes her for the creature she is and takes her in.

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert and trapped centuries ago in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard.  Released by a Syrian tinsmith in a Manhattan shop, Ahmad appears in human form but is still not free.  An iron band around his wrist binds him to the wizard and to the physical world.

Chava and Ahmad meet accidentally and become friends and soul mates despite their opposing natures.  But when the golem’s violent nature overtakes her one evening, their bond is challenged.  An even more powerful threat will emerge, however, and bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their very existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.

Compulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, in a wondrously inventive tale that is mesmerizing and unforgettable.

• Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017
• Selected one of New York Times Readers’ Favorite Books of 2017
• Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland.

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him.  And he never will be.  But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.  At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man.  The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

Before winning recognition for her painting and writing, Emily Carr built a small apartment building with four suites that she hoped would earn her a living.  But things turned out worse than expected, and in her forties, the gifted artist found herself shoveling coal and cleaning up other people's messes.  The House of All Sorts is a collection of forty-one stories of those hard-working days and the parade of tenants — young couples, widows, sad bachelors and rent evaders.  Carr is at her most rueful, but filled with energy and an inextinguishable hope.  Carr also ran a small kennel and bred bobtails to help out her meagre income.  In an additional twenty-five stories, she lovingly describes the mutual bonds of affection and companionship between her and her dogs.  Her writing is vital and direct, aware and poignant, and as well regarded today as when The House of All Sorts was first published in 1944 to critical and popular acclaim.

In this moving story about losing and finding love again, a woman sets out to find the perfect matches for those closest to her.

Forty-eight-year-old Nantucketer Dabney Kimball Beech has always had a gift for matchmaking.  Some call her ability mystical, while others, her husband, celebrated economist John Boxmiller Beech, and her daughter, Agnes, who is clearly engaged to the wrong man, call it meddlesome.  But there’s no arguing with her results:  With 42 happy couples to her credit and all of them still together, Dabney has never been wrong about romance.

Never, that is, except in the case of herself and Clendenin Hughes, the green-eyed boy who took her heart with him long ago when he left the island to pursue his dream of becoming a journalist.  Now, after spending twenty-seven years on the other side of the world, Clen is back on Nantucket, and Dabney has never felt so confused, or so alive.

But when tragedy threatens her own second chance, Dabney must face the choices she’s made and share painful secrets with her family.  Determined to make use of her gift before it’s too late, she sets out to find perfect matches for those she loves most.