When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.
For the Oliviera family - mum Carol, daughters Angel and Marie - autumn 2009 in the once-prosperous beach town of Ashaway, Rhode Island is the worst of times. Money is tight, Carol can't stay away from unsuitable men, Angel's world is shattered when she learns her long-time boyfriend Myles has been cheating on her with classmate Birdy, and Marie is left to fend for herself. As Angel and Birdy, both consumed by the intensity of their feelings for Myles, careen towards a collision both tragic and inevitable, the loyalties of Carol and Marie will be tested in ways they could never have foreseen.
Stewart O'Nan's expert hand has crafted a crushing and propulsive novel about sisters, mothers and daughters, and the desperate ecstasies of love and the terrible things we do for it. Both swoony and haunting, Ocean State is a masterful work by one of the great storytellers of everyday American life.
The international-bestelling saga of a large and colourful Jewish family buffeted from quiet respectability-of-sorts in 1871 to the Nazi death camps of 1945
When Anita Naakka jumps in front of an oncoming train, her daughter, Norma, is left alone with the secret they have spent their lives hiding: Norma has supernatural hair, sensitive to the slightest changes in her mood--and the moods of those around her--moving of its own accord, corkscrewing when danger is near. And so it is her hair that alerts her, while she talks with a strange man at her mother's funeral, that her mother may not have taken her own life. Setting out to reconstruct Anita's final months--sifting through puzzling cell phone records, bank statements, video files--Norma begins to realise that her mother knew more about her hair's powers than she let on: a sinister truth beyond Norma's imagining.
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith and medicine, set in Kerala, South India.
A thrilling novel that explores private fears, public hysteria and the art of music, by one of America's most important living writers. 'Orfeo' is inspired by the fascinating real-life account of Steve Kurts, the bio-artist wrongly arrested for terrorism by the FBI and prosecuted by the American Government for four years. In a story of one man running for his life, Richard Powers shows how all of us are perilously close to crossing the blurred boundary that separates state security and state persecution. Longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize.
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
'Utterly compelling' The Times, Books of the Year
'Profound and thrilling' New Statesman, Books of the Year
'A far-reaching epic' Financial Times, Books of the Year
Sunday Times bestseller and The Times #1 bestseller
A Between The Covers Book Club Pick 2023
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019
Winner of the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller
Capital Crime Debut Author of the Year 2019
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'A literary sensation'
Guardian
'A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious'
New York Times
'Glittering and funny... A stiletto slipped between the ribs and through the left ventricle of the heart' Financial Times
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When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...
'Such a fun read... Original and sexy and sensitive.' Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, on The Kiss Quotient
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From the bestselling author of The Kiss Quotient
Khai Diep has no feelings. Well, not big, important emotions - like grief. And love. He thinks he's defective. His family knows better - that his autism means he just processes emotions differently. When he steadfastly refuses to consider a relationship, his mother takes matters into her own hands and returns to Vietnam to find him the perfect bride.
As a mixed-race girl living in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City, Esme Tran has always felt out of place. So when the opportunity arises to go to America and meet a potential husband, she can't turn it down. This could be the break her family needs. Seducing Khai, however, doesn't go quite as planned. Esme's lessons in love seem to be working... but only on herself. She's hopelessly smitten with a man who's convinced he can never return her affection.
As Esme's time in the United States dwindles, will Khai let his head catch up with his heart? Will he find the strength to let go, and let love in?
'Refreshingly real.' Marie Claire on The Bride Test
'A wise and witty drama of small-town life . . . delivering the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity's foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades' Publishers Weekly
Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.
Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend.
When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, struggles to understand her granddaughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.
Brimming with warmth, wisdom and Russo's signature wry humour, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master of storytelling.
'Vividly conjures the excitement of Paris' RUTH HOGAN, bestselling author of THE KEEPER OF LOST THINGS
'Beguiling' The Times
Can she escape the darkness of her past in the City of Light?
It's 1959 and time for eighteen-year-old Sophie's real life to start. Her existence in the village of Poynsdean, Sussex, with her austere foster-father and his frustrated wife is suffocating.
She dreams of escape to Paris, the wartime home her French mother fled before her birth. Getting there will take spirit and ingenuity, but it will be her chance to uncover the mystery of her family background, and, perhaps, to find a place where she can finally belong.
When Sophie eventually arrives in the Paris arising from the ashes of the war, it's both everything she imagined, and not at all what she expected...
'Original, page turning, wonderful. I loved it.' KATIE FFORDE
'A delightful, funny, poignant story suffused with the atmosphere of Paris on the cusp of the Sixties' RACHEL HORE
1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends square up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977 a white kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guy's windscreen. And so it goes.
On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change but the patterns remain the same: sex; boredom; friendship; violence; a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. But the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents; cops; renovators; landlords; gentrifiers; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighbourhood its name and control its shifting demographics. Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all...
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made
A big-hearted, captivating, modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice, with hijabs instead of top hats and kurtas instead of corsets. Ayesha has a lot going on, balancing her life and her teaching job and managing her boisterous family. And then she meets Khalid. How could a man so conservative and judgmental (and, yes, smart and annoyingly handsome) have wormed his way into her thoughts so quickly?
