This
Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes
Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice until two incidents—an attack of intense pain that lands him in the emergency room, and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole outside his house—conspire to hurl him back into the world. On his way home from the hospital, Richard forms the first of many new relationships: He meets Anhil, the doughnut shop owner, an immigrant who dreams big. He finds a weeping housewife in the produce section of the supermarket, helps save a horse that has fallen into the sinkhole, daringly rescues a woman from the trunk of her kidnapper’s car, and, after the sinkhole claims his house and he has to relocate to a Malibu rental, he befriends a reluctant counterculture icon. In the end, Richard is also brought back in closer touch with his family—his aging parents, his brilliant brother, the beloved ex-wife whom he still desires, and finally, before the story’s breathtaking finale, with his estranged son Ben. The promised land of Los Angeles—a surreal city of earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, and feral Chihuahuas—is also very much a character in This Book Will Save Your Life. A vivid, revealing novel about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you. <buy now>
There
Will Never Be Another You by Carolyn See
Accomplished author Carolyn See triumphantly returns to fiction- seven years after her last novel was published- with this provocative, vibrantly written new novel. Set in a security-obsessed world that eerily mirrors our own, There Will Never Be Another You captures the paranoia and propaganda of a volatile time and place in which humanity's divisions run deep and society sits on edge- and one Southern California family faces profound crises from within and without. It is a moment in the near future when the global threat of terror has cultivated rage, apathy, and panic across the country. People fear that "anybody could be armed, or have a bomb. Or a disease. Or all three." For Phil, a dermatologist at the UCLA hospital, it is a time of unease and uncertainty, in stark contrast to the days when he coasted through life on his good looks, a modicum of charm, and only haphazard effort. Now Phil must deal with his mother, Edith, who's been grieving over the death of her husband for several years and only recently has thought to reconnect with a family that seems to have other priorities. Phil's energies are already divvied up among his belligerent children, his wayward wife, and his unreliable mistress. Then Phil's life takes a dramatic turn: He is recruited for a top-secret team whose task is to act quickly in the event of a biological or chemical attack. The assignment just may provide him with a renewed sense of purpose. Yet dire circumstances force Phil to make profound decisionsthat will affect not just himself and his loved ones but the entire country. It is a chance for an ordinary man to rise from mediocrity to heroism- and at which failure would prove to be catastrophic. Foreboding and all too plausible, There Will Never Be Another You is a cautionary novel of family and society, where a naïve past is replaced by a menacing future in which distinguishing between reality and imagination proves to be more challenging than ever. <buy now>
Birds
in Fall by Brad Kessler
One fall night off the coast of a remote island in Nova Scotia, an airplane plummets to the sea as an innkeeper watches from the shore. Miles away in New York City, ornithologist Ana Gathreaux works in a darkened room full of sparrows, testing their migratory instincts. Soon, Ana will be bound for Trachis Island, along with other relatives of victims who converge on the site of the tragedy. As the search for survivors envelops the island, the mourning families gather at the inn, waiting for news of those they have lost. Here among strangers, and watched over by innkeeper Kevin Gearns, they form an unusual community, struggling for comfort and consolation. A Taiwanese couple sets out fruit for their daughter's ghost. A Bulgarian man plays piano in the dark, sending the music to his lost wife, a cellist. Two Dutch teenagers, a brother and sister, rage against their parents' death. An Iranian exile, mourning his niece, recites the Persian tales that carry the wisdom of centuries. At the center of Birds in Fall lies Ana Gathreaux, whose story Brad Kessler tells with deep compassion: from her days in the field with her husband, observing and banding migratory birds, to her enduring grief and gradual reengagement with life. Kessler's knowledge of the natural world, music, and myth enriches every page of this hauntingly beautiful and moving novel about solitude, love, losing your way, and finding something like home. <buy now>
Adverbs
by Daniel Handler
Adverbs is a novel about love - a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David - or maybe it's Joe - who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, or in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name. So is Allison, who is married to Adrian in the middle of the novel, although in the middle of the ocean she considers a fling with Keith and also with Steve, whom she meets in an automobile, unless it's not the same Allison who meets the Snow Queen in a casino, or the same Steve who meets Eddie in the middle of the forest. It might sound confusing, but that's love, and as the author says, "It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done." This novel is about people trying to find love in the ways it is done before the volcano erupts and the miracle ends. Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. <buy now>
Time's
Arrow by Martin Amis
In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. <buy now>
A
Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber
A Theory of Everything is a concise, comprehensive overview of Ken Wilber's revolutionary thought and its application in today's world. In clear, nontechnical language, Wilber presents leading-edge models that integrate the realms of body, mind, soul, and spirit. Wilber then demonstrate how these theories can be applied to real-world problems in the fields of business, politics, medicine, and education. He also presents daily practices that readers can take up in order to apply this integrative vision to their own, everyday lives. <buy now>
A
Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber
An altogether friendly and accessible account of men and women's place in the universe of sex, soul and spirit, this vivid summary of the new and emerging American wisdom provides radical commentary on hot topics of the day, from political correctness to spiritual enlightenment.
Night
Watch by Sarah Waters
A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith. Sarah Waters, whose works set in Victorian England have awards and acclaim and have reinvigorated the genres of both historical and lesbian fiction, returns with novel that marks a departure from nineteenth century and a spectacular leap forward in the career of this masterful storyteller. Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liasons, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of Londoners: three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in ways that are surprising not always known to them. In wartime London, the women work-as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal, but the emotional interiors of her characters that Waters captures with absolute and intimacy. Waters describes with perfect knowingness the taut composure of a rescue worker in the aftermath of a bombing, the idle longing of a young woman her soldier lover, the peculiar thrill convict watching the sky ignite through the bars on his window, the hunger a woman stalking the streets for encounter, and the panic of another who sees her love affair coming end. At the same time, Waters is absolute control of a narrative that offers up subtle surprises and exquisite twists, even as it depicts the impact grand historical event on individual lives. <buy now>
Brooklyn
Follies by Paul Auster
Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore—a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York." Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances—not to mention a stray relative or two—and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man." But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster's warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life. <buy now>
Where
the Truth Lies by Rupert Holmes
This novel of intrigue speeds from one vivid setting to another, all of them factually real even as they are fantastically surreal: a clandestine club in Disneyland with a dazzlingly well stocked bar; a dizzying Shangri-La of a castle hidden away in Burbank; a drive-in movie theater nestled below the most chic streets of midtown Manhattan; an elegant table for four perched thirty thousand feet above the earth. The tale is told by O'Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews and bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death that may have cast one of them as a murderer. As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O'Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less than she might like, but increasingly fearful that she now knows far too much. <buy now>
The
Children's Hour by Nancy Willett
Nest and Mina, an immensely likable pair of no-longer-young sisters, still live at Ottercombe, the beautiful rambling home of their childhood in the depths of Devon. With echoes of carefree and idyllic days before the war, all around them are reminders of endless holidays playing in the gardens or on the beach, their mother reading them stories in front of the fire and their father driving up from London to visit for the weekend. Tragedy seemed so far away. So much is different. When their elder sister, Georgie, now frail and forgetful, comes to stay, she brings with her secrets that her sisters would prefer to keep hidden. The threat of Georgie's ramblings upsets the peaceful equilibrium of their lives and forces the sisters to address the issues that they had tried so hard to leave in the past. Although reluctant to face up to these revelations, they gradually realize that they can finally put to rest the ghosts from their past and allow themselves and Ottercombe to embrace new lives and look to the future. <buy now>
Everyman
by Philip Roth
"I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five." Philip Roth's new novel is a fiercely intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong confrontation with mortality. Roth's everyman is a hero whose youthful sense of independence and confidence begins to be challenged when illness commences its attack in middle age. A successful commercial advertising artist, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him. He is the brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy. He is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he has made a mess of marriage. Inevitably, he discovers that he has become what he does not want to be. In Everyman, Roth once again displays his hallmark incisiveness. From his first glimpse of death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through his vigorous, seemingly invincible prime, Roth's hero is a man bewildered not only by his own decline but by the unimaginable deaths of his contemporaries and those he has loved. The terrain of this haunting novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. <buy now>
Transparent
Things by Vladimir Nabokov
"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero—sullen, gawky Hugh Person—to Switzerland . . . As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later—following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment—Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects." —Martin Amis <buy now>