I'll Let You Go by Bruce Wagner
In I'll Let You Go, a boy seeks his lost father and a woman finds her lost love; and a family of unimaginable wealth learns its fate is tied to those of a street orphan and the courtly, homeless, schizophrenic giant who protects her.
The
Horned Man by James Lasdun
Lawrence Miller, English expatriate and professor of gender studies, tells the story of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to frame him for a series of brutal killings. We descend into a world of subtly deceptive appearances where paranoia assumes an air of calm rationality and enlightenment itself casts a darkness in which the most nightmarish acts occur. Written with sinuous grace and intellectual acuity. The Horned Man is an unforgettable excursion into the lethal battleground of desire and repression. <buy now>
The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Narrated by a 15-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions. <buy now>
Dogs of
Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
When his wife dies in a fall from a tree in their backyard, linguist Paul Iverson is wild with despair. In the days that follow, Paul becomes certain that Lexy's death was no accident. Strange clues have been left behind: unique, personal messages that only she could have left and that he is determined to decipher. So beigns Paul's fantastic and even perilous search for the truth, as he abandons his everyday life to embark on a series of experiments designed to teach his dog Lorelei to communicate. Is this the project of a madman? Or does Lorelei really have something to tell him about the last afternoon of a woman he only thought he knew? At the same time, Paul obsessively recalls the early days of his love for Lexy and the ups and downs of life with the brilliant, sometimes unsettling woman who became his wife. THE DOGS OF BABEL is a surprising and thoroughly winning novel about grief, love, secrets, and the unconditional devotion of the truest hearts of all--including those who have no words with which to express it. <buy now>
Angel
Rock by Darren Williams
From a young Australian writer whose first novel received the prestigious Australian/ Vogel Literary Award -- a gripping, moving, superbly rendered new novel that marks his American debut. Angel Rock is a hard-scrabble town in the Australian outback, invaded on all sides by the wilderness. So it's not hard for 12-year-old Tom and his 4-year-old brother, Flynn, to find themselves lost, on an unfamiliar road leading to nowhere, night falling, no one in sight. And in the instant that Tom's attention is caught by a kangaroo lying at the side of the road, Flynn is gone. The little boy's inexplicable disappearance weighs heavily on a community already burdened with a hidden past of deep-rooted family feuds and dark, unshakable obsessions. And it is only with the arrival of Gibson -- a Sydney detective given to frequent spells of drunkenness and despair -- that the highly charged questions surrounding the disappearance, the silence of the townsfolk, and the mysteries of the land itself begin to be answered. Menacing and mesmerizing, dazzling in its evocation of terrain -- both physical and psychological -- Angel Rock is a brilliant combination of the literary and the entertaining, the work of a fiercely talented new voice in fiction. <buy now>
Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant
Anna, a self-sufficient and reliable single mother, packs her bags one day for a short vacation to Italy. She leaves her beloved daughter at home in London with good friends. When Anna doesn't return, everyone begins to make excuses, until the likelihood that she might not come back becomes chillingly clear. And the people who thought they knew Anna best realize they don't know her at all. <buy now>
The
Romantic by Barbara Gowdy
From the author of "The White Bone, a piercing novel of
passionate attachment and of the fear and freedom of letting go
Louise Kirk learns about love and loss at an early age. When she is nine years
old, her former beauty queen mother disappears, leaving a note that reads
only--and incorrectly--"Louise knows how to work the washing machine." Soon
after, the Richters and their adopted son, Abel, move in across the street.
Louise's immediate devotion to the exotic, motherly Mrs. Richter is quickly
transferred to her nature-loving, precociously intelligent son. From this
childhood friendship evolves a love that will bind Louise and Abel forever.
Though Abel moves away, Louise's attachment becomes ever more fixed as she grows
up. Separations are followed by reunions, but with every turn of their fractured
relationship, Louise discovers that Abel cannot love her as fiercely and
exclusively as she loves him. Only when she faces another great loss is Louise
finally forced to confront the costs of abandoning herself to another.
Skillfully interweaving the stories of Louise and Abel at different ages,
Barbara Gowdy produces a powerful exploration of love's many incarnations: a
motherless daughter who yearns to be adopted, a husband eternally linked to a
wife who has left him, a girl bewitched by the boy next door, a woman who
refuses to let go of a magnetic, elusive man. Haunting and profound, "The
Romantic is a story about love in all its exquisite variations.
<buy now>
Spontaneous
by Diana Wagman
Spontaneous begins when sisters Amy and Gwendolyn -- who are closer than close -- move into a Los Angeles bungalow they've inherited from an eccentric "aunt". What's left of that aunt? -- a closet full of housedresses, a freezer full of meat, and a charred hole in the kitchen linoleum. To Amy, these are sure signs of Auntie Ned's spontaneous demise. Amy's appetites -- for meat, for sex, for having her way -- are ferocious, while Gwendolyn longs for a more normal existence but can't refuse her big sister anything at all. Wagman's plot is as combustible as Auntie Ned, adding a troubled carpenter to a mix that includes tantric sex, elaborate cake decoration, and a learned dwarf. <buy now>
I'll
Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates
"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetratingintelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive blackphilosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out ofher past she'd long believed dead. Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, "I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks -- and curious rewards -- of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual. <buy now>