Bestselling memoirist Deborah Copaken Kogan (Shutterbabe) pens a haunting literary murder mystery; Between Here and April is the story of Elizabeth Burns, a former journalist turned urban mom, who goes looking for answers about the disappearance of a childhood friend and winds up tangled in questions she hoped never to answer.
In her ambitious first novel, Saher Alam uses the conflicted feelings of the groom, Nasr, for Jameela (his long-time friend) and Farath (his beautiful intended) —a triangle conscious of its debt to The Age of Innocence—to paint a nuanced picture of Muslim communities in North America.
In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.
The title of Krasikov’s stunning debut collection, One More Year, suggests both despondency and hope, both reluctance and anticipation—wonderfully fitting for a book about immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Ever wonder how someone could wake up every morning next to George W. Bush and think, “Hey, I love that guy!”? Yeah, me too. Which is exactly why I couldn’t wait to read American Wife, in which Curtis Sittenfeld imagines the life of Laura Bush.
In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.
Cashore’s debut is an engaging, action-driven fantasy that will please young adult and adult readers alike. In a genre populated with Gossip Girls and A-Listers, Graceling‘s heroine Katsa–who struggles with a terrible gift–stands out for her strength, intelligence, and will to live life on her own terms.
From its beginning The Flying Troutmans evokes Tolstoy’s famous line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Troutmans take top honors for truly unique dysfunction, and Miriam Toews writes their road trip saga brilliantly; here is one hot mess of a family in a book so enchanting it’s hard to tear your eyes away.
Published posthumously, this international bestseller is the first novel in a trilogy of crime thrillers by Swedish activist-journalist Stieg Larsson. A publisher struggles to clear his name and save his magazine by helping a rich businessman investigate the mystery of his missing niece.
Without the need for description, and with the supposed thousand words per illustration, graphic novelists are allowed quiet moments of focus that might be dull or ponderous–or even nigh-impossible–to convey with straight prose. In Bottomless Belly Button, cartoonist Dash Shaw takes this technique to an extreme, decompressing what might typically, in prose form, be material for a short story or a novella into 700 pages of evocative panels: three grown siblings reunite at their childhood home after learning that their elderly parents have decided to split up.
