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Tags: fiction-novel

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  A Fraction of the Whole

  by Steve Toltz

  Meet the Deans “The fact is, the whole of Australia despises my father more than any other man, just as they adore my uncle more than any other man. I might as well set the story straight about both of them . . .” Heroes or Criminals? Crackpots or Visionaries? Families or Enemies? “. . . Anyway, you know how it is. Every family has a story like this one.” Most of his life, Jasper Dean couldn’t decide... (more)
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  2666

  by Roberto Bolaño

  Se diría que es la figura de Von Archimboldi, un enigmático escritor alemán, el hilo secreto que cosería entre sí las cinco «partes» de que se compone 2666, sin duda la obra maestra de Roberto Bolaño. Una fecha en cuya perspectiva tan remota debe ordenarse la impresionante maraña de destinos, de personajes, de líneas argumentales y genéricas, una vastísima constelación marcada por el signo de la pérdida y del... (more)
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  David Golder / The Ball / Snow in Autumn / The Courilof Affair

  by Irène Némirovsky

  (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française . But Suite Française was only the coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, magnificent novelist. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky’s other novels–all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra... (more)
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  The Enchantress of Florence

  by Salman Rushdie

  A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence. The... (more)
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  Zazie in the Metro

  by Raymond Queneau

  Text: French
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  Ransom

  by David Malouf

  A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature–Achilles’s slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s The Iliad –Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade from David Malouf, arguably Australia’s greatest living writer. A novel of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom tells the story of the relationship between two grieving men... (more)
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  The Sisters Brothers

  by Patrick deWitt

  Two notoriously vicious guns-for-hire pursue their target as gold fever sweeps the 1850s frontier. This darkly comic western follows the brothers' quirky misadventures as narrator Eli starts to doubt their gunslinging way of life. The style is a combination of magical realism, stream of consciousness and picaresque western adventure story. Many of the characters the brothers enconter are emblems of their own... (more)
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  The Third Reich

  by Roberto Bolaño

  On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war-game champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town. Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and... (more)
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  The Anthologist

  A Novel

  by Nicholson Baker

  The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also... (more)
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  A Gift for the Sultan

  by Geoffrey Fox

  In 1402, the Christian city of Constantinople is under attack by a Muslim army. With surrender in the wind, the spoils are to be the key to the city and the 14-year-old Princess Theodota. In the twists and turns of historical fact, Geoffrey Fox delivers A Gift for the Sultan, a dramatic, fact-based novel that probes the cultural and religious life of the early 15th century and the leaders-royals, military figures,... (more)
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  The Vagrants

  by Yiyun Li

  Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town... (more)
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  The Contemporary Art of the Novella

  Union Jack

  by Imre Kertész

  A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on "the absurd order of chance," he recalls his youthful... (more)
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  Nemeses: Short Novels

  Nemesis

  by Philip Roth

  In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, and even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.   At the... (more)
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  To the End of the Land

  by David Grossman

  From one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers comes a novel of extraordinary power about family life—the greatest human drama—and the cost of war. Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no... (more)
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  Open City

  by Teju Cole

  “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with outsize intensity.”Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from... (more)
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  Tomorrow

  by Graham Swift

  In his first novel since The Light of Day , the Booker Prize–winning author gives us a luminous tale about the closest of human bonds. On a midsummer’s night Paula Hook lies awake; Mike, her husband of twenty-five years, asleep beside her; her teenage twins, Nick and Kate, sleeping in nearby rooms. The next day, she knows, will redefine all of their lives. A revelation lies in store. Her children’s future lies... (more)
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  Fire in the Blood

  by Irène Némirovsky

  Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irène Némirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Française. Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted in pieces to family and a friend when the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz. The novel—only now assembled in its entirety—teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years... (more)
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  Darkmans

  by Nicola Barker

  Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all... If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde,... (more)
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  The Old Capital

  by Yasunari Kawabata

  The Old Capital is one of the three novels cited specifically by the Nobel Committee when they awarded Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. With the ethereal tone and aesthetic styling characteristic of Kawabata's prose, The Old Capital tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige. Set in the traditional city of Kyoto, Japan, this... (more)
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  The Spare Room

  by Helen Garner

  A powerful, witty, and taut novel about a complex friendship between two women—one dying, the other called to care for her—from an internationally acclaimed and award-winning author How much of ourselves must we give up to help a friend in need? Helen has little idea what lies ahead—and what strength she must muster—when she offers her spare room to an old friend, Nicola, who has arrived in the city for cancer... (more)