Books

In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, "What if History plays jokes?"  This politically charged question, coupled with...

Mystic River, a passionate, ambitious novel of crime, punishment, and misplaced revenge, Lehane fulfills his early promise and takes his place as an important American writer. When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car...

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know...

Landscapes #4. For years now, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has been collecting place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles.  In this, his fifth book, Macfarlane brilliantly explores the linguistic and...

Tokyo, 1984—but not quite the one we know. When Aomame steps out of a taxi after a cryptic suggestion from the driver, she begins to notice strange distortions in reality. She calls this new world 1Q84—the “Q” for question mark—a place where logic falters...

From the bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as...

A darkly comic, razor-sharp exploration of modern life, media saturation and the fear of death in a world overwhelmed by information. At the heart of the novel is Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies" at a small liberal arts college, who lives with...

Thirteen-year-old Noboru is a member of a gang of highly philosophical teenage boys who reject the tenets of the adult world - to them, adult life is illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental. When Noboru's widowed mother is romanced by Ryuji, a sailor, Noboru is thrilled....

The Sea of Fertility #3. Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early...

Daphne always adored the way her fiancé, Peter, recounted their love story—how they met on a windy day, how an errant hat brought them together, and how they settled in his picturesque lakeside hometown to build a future. He told it perfectly… until the...

Etaf Rum weaves a powerful, multigenerational story of Palestinian-American women navigating the weight of tradition, silence, and shame.  Seventeen-year-old Isra is forced into marriage and brought from Palestine to Brooklyn in 1990, where she faces a life of confinement under her domineering mother-in-law Fareeda...

With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic...

At twenty-two, San is adrift and alone when she stumbles into a job at a modest flower shop in the heart of Seoul. Shaped by a childhood marked by rejection, she moves through life quietly and invisibly—fragile, stifled, and largely unseen in a society...

Bennie Salazar is a jaded music executive with a punk rock past. Sasha is his impulsive, enigmatic assistant, grappling with her own tangled history. In this inventive and deeply human novel, Jennifer Egan moves back and forth in time to trace the lives of...

From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun comes a powerful, sweeping novel about love, identity, and the complex realities of race in a globalized world. As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall deeply in love. Their Nigeria is ruled by...

We live surrounded by light, sound, scent, and sensation—but each creature on Earth experiences these things differently. Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Ed Yong invites us into the hidden realms of animal senses, revealing how every species navigates life within its own unique sensory bubble....

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of to figure out the...

Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard...

Severe climate change has ravaged the country, leaving behind a charred wasteland. Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable if solitary life on one of the last remaining farms. Their private existence is disturbed the day a stranger comes to the door with alarming news....

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her life is lived to the predictable rhythms of the often funny, always moving confidences that casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues share with her. Violette’s routine is disrupted...

The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the drugs upending weight loss as we knew it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to what these drugs mean for our society’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our...

September 1943: German forces have Rome under their control. Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann rules over the Eternal City with vicious efficiency. Hunger is widespread. Rumors fester. The war’s outcome is far from certain. Diplomats, refugees, Jews, and escaped Allied prisoners flee for protection into...

A fiendishly imaginative book that features Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous. In this book, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone...

From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues , a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection. Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these twelve stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of...

The Owl Cries is a treat for fans of Stephen King, David Lynch, and the nightmare dystopias of Franz Kafka. A lawyer asking questions. A disappearance. And a vast forest in the mountains—the western woods—where the trees huddle close together, emanating a crushing darkness,...

The Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together explore the enduring power of Rumi's work.  Ella Rubenstein is...

Maya was a high school senior when her best friend, Aubrey, dropped dead in front of the enigmatic man named Frank whom they’d been spending time with all summer. Seven years later, Maya lives in Boston with a loving boyfriend and is kicking the secret...

One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.  With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a...

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by...

A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of...

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens...

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to 1964. It is an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential nomination and his decision to offer Johnson the vice...

Quill has spent her entire life on the Red Pine Reservation in Minnesota. She knows what happens to girls who look like her. She was just a kid when Jimmy Sky jumped from the railway bridge—and though she ran for help that day, Quill...

A deeply human debut novel that spans generations, cultures and ideologies in the heart of contemporary London. Zadie Smith tells the story of two unlikely friends—Archie Jones, a bumbling Englishman with a quiet past, and Samad Iqbal, a fiercely proud Bengali Muslim—who meet as...

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories,...

Laura van den Berg’s gorgeous new book, The Isle of Youth , explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who...

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business.  Ryle...

Lily and her ex-husband, Ryle, have just settled into a civil coparenting rhythm when she suddenly bumps into her first love, Atlas, again. After nearly two years separated, she is elated that for once, time is on their side, and she immediately says yes...

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Together, this dynamic pair began a journey...

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature...

A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time,...

Turning the envelope over, his hand trembling, Harry saw a purple wax seal bearing a coat of arms; a lion, an eagle, a badger and a snake surrounding a large letter 'H'. Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start...

Harry Potter can’t wait for his holidays with the dire Dursleys to end. But a small, self-punishing house-elf warns Harry of mortal danger awaiting him at Hogwarts. Returning to the castle nevertheless, Harry hears a rumour about a Chamber of Secrets, holding unknown horrors...

When the Knight Bus crashes through the darkness and screeches to a halt in front of him, it's the start of another far from ordinary year at Hogwarts for Harry Potter. Sirius Black, escaped mass-murderer and follower of Lord Voldemort, is on the run...

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost...

Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's. In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape—her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue...

Considered by many to be the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. An interweaving of the effects of life and memory, tradition and heritage, upon art, the book tells of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished poet seeking fame in the phantasmic world of Berlin...

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides...

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th.  Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and...

Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west...