Books – Detail

A transportive work of historical fiction chronicling the life, loves, and iconic successes of Rafael Guastavino, the influential yet largely forgotten Spanish architect of New York's Gilded Age.

In 1934, a young Jose Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers' strike in Estacion Camaron, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents' journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas's life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

David Trent is an aspiring novelist hoping to make a name for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place where ambitious writers lurk around every corner. He lives in an apartment above a Very Famous Author named Silas Hale who, beneath his celebrated image, is . . . haughty and disdainful, definitely not of the mentor variety. Until young David wins a prestigious award for his new book. Silas is at last interested . . . and jealous. But soon the administrator of the award comes to David with alarming news, which forces the writer into a set of desperate choices. Then fate intervenes--and nothing can ever go back to normal

Mira's days are filled with duty and light on freedom. In a new country, living with a husband she barely knows--and who she fears she'll never love--Mira is desperate to discover all that her new life in England might offer. And then there's Tahliil. The quiet, beautiful man she sees at work each day.

From New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes a page-turning drama that explores the beauty of female friendship; the relationship between money, power, and sex; and the very human desire to protect the ones we love most.

Set in Oxford and London at the beginning of the 20th century, this novel follows Lilian Delaney, an apprentice bookbinder working in a traditionally male trade. While assisting with a private collection, she encounters a damaged book containing a concealed letter dating back fifty years that references a past relationship and a violent crime. As Lilian searches for additional books containing hidden documents, she uncovers a story of forbidden love and unresolved wrongdoing.

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region--from New England to Florida to California--these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels.

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes--a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you're hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.

Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.

In this story of intense friendship and grit, two down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock climbing.

Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story--or a story within the story--but not just yet." Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it.

The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation--the possibility of starting over--but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them ... In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality.

Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Her short stories have appeared in various journals and magazines, many of them in The New Yorker. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala's powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India's middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background.

Alone and adrift in Barcelona, an unnamed narrator is haunted by the death of her teenage brother, Diego. Diego, the little boy she helped raise in Mexico while their mother struggled to make a living in Spain.

Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time.

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father's death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.

Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician–turned–schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that’s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were—and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island.

In this sly, darkly funny novel, a young woman becomes increasingly obsessed with tales of love and death, and begins subconsciously plotting to murder her abusive husband.

After a postgraduation drive from Iowa City to NYC, Teddy and Marin have both had enough of each other to last the rest of their lives. But that doesn't stop their paths from crossing over eight rocky years, punctuated by chance encounters and transatlantic visits, on a journey that eventually brings them right back to where it all started.

Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these seven stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life - ourselves. Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection - but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful.

The tense and emotional saga of a young woman's survival in the lawlessness of post-World War II France, by the New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc series.

In his final novel, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa returns to his native Peru.

A radiant, highly anticipated debut from the Well-Read Black Girl books series, delving into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

Thornwalk, a once-stately English manor, is on the brink of transformation. Its keys are being handed over to a luxury hotelier who will undertake a complete renovation, but in doing so, what will they erase? Through the keen eyes of an enigmatic neighbor, the listener is taken on a guided tour into rooms filled with secrets and memories, each revealing the story of the five Gilbert siblings.

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.

An unforgettable novel about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Most of us are poets, she said. It's just a question of how it comes out. When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague - the poet - it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants.

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. But her mother has taught her that if you're not too bound by the Big Man's rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. Now her ma is dead in a trick gone wrong and young Tibb is orphaned and alone. As she wends her way across the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb will discover there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything.

Lost Lambs follows a suburban family of five unspooling at the seams, navigating a disastrous open marriage, teenage rebellion, and an unexpected human trafficking/body-hacking crime conspiracy.

One night after a party, old grievances surface between married couple Aliya and Sam and the night ends badly with a heated argument. Sam goes for a run early the next morning to clear her head--and doesn't come back. Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay, Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can't escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they've become her closest friends and, along with the support of her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her private school students, her fraught relationship with mother, her struggles with IVF-Polly's book club friends have heard it all. But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. Despite it seeming clear that this match is a mistake, Polly cannot help combing through her own family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it.

How do you mend a broken heart? Write a letter to the woman who left you - and post it to an imaginary address? Buy a new watch, to reset your life? Or walk the streets of Paris, mapping the landmarks of a love affair? Combining the wry musings of a rejected lover with soulful drawings in red, black and white, bestselling author Antoine Laurain and renowned street artist Le Sonneur have created a striking addition to the literature of unrequited love.

The year is 1963. Raped by a supposedly respectable older man, graduate student Mabel Gorne flees New England for Manhattan. She's unaware that the perpetrator died in a murder-suicide. If she reveals the truth, will she be blamed for the crime? Mabel carries another dark secret. She's pregnant. Her rapist is the father. With abortion confined to shady doctors, back alleys, and coat-hangers, how will she endure her unwanted pregnancy? In this sequel to They Believed They Were Safe, Mabel vacillates between hope and fear, struggling to find equilibrium in the midst of a huge, uncaring city

For fans of Colm Tóibín and Claire Keegan, Saoirse is a propulsive story set in the US and Ireland about one woman and the lies she has told in order to survive.

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success--and how far we are willing to fall.

Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the protagonist's fraught attempts to write his novel and such scenes of service work as wrapping children's books for Silver Lake moms and being 'pilloried by dunces' on Yelp. As his writing process stalls in a 'stale ceremony' of indolence and self-doubt, these unfamiliar humiliations become a toxic wellspring for his irascible observations.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'

1664. Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpãetriáere asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. 1939. Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

Six Friends. Five Parties. Twenty Years... How did we get So Old, So Young? From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a novel of impending millennial middleage that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of two decades bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we can run from and cling to our friends in love, life,and death.

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins is back with a thrilling new gothic suspense set in a Gulf Coast beach motel where hurricane season can be murder.

Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar--it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina's sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive.

One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from ... or why ... His name is Theo. Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.

Following a number of moves from one shabby rental to another, they--the mother and daughter of this elusive, strangely riveting novel set in 1980s Denmark--now reside in an apartment over the hairdresser shop in the same island town where they've always lived. It's only the two of them, and they are so enmeshed that it can be hard to tell them apart: they share the same manners, habits, and opinions to an almost comic degree.

Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved older sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into decades of stubborn silence.

The most unusual tennis tournament in history is about to start. Einstein's seeded fourth. Chaplin, Freud and van Gogh are also in the top rankings. World number one is Tony Chekhov. In all, 128 of the world's most creative players--everyone from Louis Armstrong to George Orwell, Gertrude Stein to Coco Chanel--are going to fight it out until the exhilarating final on centre court. First published in 2002, John Clarke's The Tournament is a brilliant, bizarre comic novel.

Not for the first time, Jill 'Doll' Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this one, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it?"

In an Italian monastery, a sculptor named Mimo lays on his deathbed. For decades, he has lived among the monks who watch over his masterpiece, an arresting statue that haunts all who see it. During his final hours, he reveals his life story: his impoverished childhood, brutal apprenticeship, and, most important, his meeting with Viola Orsini, the only daughter of a powerful and dangerous aristocratic family.

When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin's Kastanienallee, the meeting sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that have made a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations.

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together-of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease.