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Tags: isolation

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  Italian Shoes

  by Henning Mankell

  From the prizewinning "master of atmosphere" ( Boston Globe ) comes the surprising and affecting story of a man well past middle age who suddenly finds himself on the threshold of renewal. Living on a tiny island entirely surrounded by ice during the long winter months, Fredrik Welin is so lost to the world that he cuts a hole in the ice every morning and lowers himself into the freezing water to remind... (more)
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  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  by Haruki Murakami

  Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat.  Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in... (more)
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  After Dark

  by Haruki Murakami

  A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are... (more)
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  The Grass Is Singing

  by Doris Lessing

  Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the... (more)
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  We Have Always Lived in the Castle

  by Shirley Jackson

  Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
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  Kings of the Earth

  by Jon Clinch

  The edge of civilization is closer than we think. It’s as close as a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, where the three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis. They linger like creatures from an older, wilder, and far less forgiving world—until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder. Told in a chorus of voices that span a generation, ... (more)
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  A Brief History of Montmaray

  by Michelle Cooper

  “There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.” Sophie Fitzosborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray with her eccentric and impoverished royal family. When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in from the mainland reveals a... (more)
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  Notes From Underground

  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Notes from Underground (Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapiski iz podpol'ya), also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, though Notes from Underground is the most literal translation (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Although Søren Kierkegaard is considered the father of existentialism, he mostly wrote non-fictional philosophical and theological treatises,... (more)
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  The New York Trilogy

  The New York Trilogy

  by Paul Auster

  Combining dark humor, Hitchcock-like suspense, and film-noir prose, these three unique novels--united--form a powerful and thought-provoking puzzle.The New York Trilogy is composed of three stories: "City of Glass," "Ghosts" and "The Locked Room"
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  Await Your Reply

  by Dan Chaon

  The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing... (more)
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  The Outlander

  by Gil Adamson

  In 1903 a mysterious young woman flees alone across the West, one heart-pounding step ahead of the law. At nineteen, Mary Boulton has just become a widow — and her husband's killer. As bloodhounds track her frantic race toward the mountains, she is tormented by mad visions and by the knowledge that her two ruthless brothers-in-law are in pursuit, determined to avenge their younger brother's death. Responding to... (more)
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  Madapple

  by Christina Meldrum

  THE SECRETS OF the past meet the shocks of the present. Aslaug is an unusual young woman. Her mother has brought her up in near isolation, teaching her about plants and nature and language—but not about life. Especially not how she came to have her own life, and who her father might be. When Aslaug’s mother dies unexpectedly, everything changes. For Aslaug is a suspect in her mother’s death. And the more her... (more)
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  Speak

  by Laurie Halse Anderson

  Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to... (more)
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  Just Listen

  by Sarah Dessen

  Last year, Annabel was "the girl who has everything"—at least, that’s the part she played in the television commercial for Kopf’s Department Store. This year, she’s the girl who has nothing: no best friend because mean-but-exciting Sophie dropped her, no peace at home since her older sister became anorexic, and no one to sit with at lunch. Until she meets Owen Armstrong. Tall, dark, and music-obsessed, Owen is... (more)
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  Island of the Blue Dolphins

  by Scott O'Dell

  Left alone on a beautiful but isolated island off the coast of California, a young Indian girl spends eighteen years, not only merely surviving through her enormous courage and self-reliance, but also finding a measure of happiness in her solitary life.
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  Cold Skin: A Novel

  by Albert Sánchez Piñol

  Shortly after World War I, a troubled man accepts a solitary assignment as a “weather official” on a tiny, remote island on the edges of the Antarctic. When he arrives, the predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way they survive the unspeakably... (more)
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  Keeper

  by Mal Peet

  "This stirring adventure — a soccer story? a ghost story? — defies expectations. . . . Both lyrical and gripping." — KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review) When Paul Faustino of LA NACION flips on his tape recorder for an exclusive interview with El Gato — the phenomenal goalkeeper who single-handedly brought his team the World Cup — the seasoned reporter quickly learns that this will be no ordinary story. Instead,... (more)
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  Room

  by Emma Donoghue

  Told in Jack's voice, "Room" is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, "Room" is a novel like no other. 'Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. "Room" is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are... (more)
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  Even the Dogs

  by Jon McGregor

  They break down the door at the end of December and carry his body away. On a still and frozen day between Christmas and New Year, a man's body is found lying in his ruined flat. Found, and then taken away, examined, investigated and cremated. As the state begins its detailed, dispassionate inquest, the man embarks on his last journey through a world he has not ventured into, alive, for years. In his wake, a... (more)
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  Those That Wake

  by Jesse Karp, Jesse Karp

  New York City, once vibrant and alive, has had its spirit crushed by a terrorist attack. People walk the streets with their heads down and their eyes averted, withdrawing from each other and into the cold comfort of technology. Teenagers Mal and Laura have grown up in this new reality: Mal in the city, part of the foster care system; Laura in the suburbs, loved and protected. They've never met. Seemingly, they... (more)