As spring break begins, 17-year-old loner Araragi makes his only friend – and loses his humanity. Araragi is befuddled by class president Hanekawa's sudden attention, and his conversation with her about a vampire sighting doesn't sink in until he helps a dying limbless woman, only...
While Pamela Erens might not yet be a household-name author, she’s hardly a stranger to literary recognition. Her 2007 debut, The Understory – about a solitary, unemployed lawyer who’s about to lose his home – was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the...
*STARRED REVIEW When a bomb explodes in a Delhi market in May 1996, the 11- and 13-year-old Khurana brothers, who were sent to pick up the family's repaired television, are killed, while their friend Mansoor Ahmed, 12, somehow survives. The senseless tragedy inextricably binds the two...
Four best friends are on the Cape Cod coast when a storm blows in, and suddenly one of them, Lorna, is gone. Lorna was Jackie's best friend, Finn's girlfriend, and Lucas's dream girl. Her body is never found, but a memorial is organized, and life...
Kate has always been a liar – out of necessity rather than malice. She's smart and savvy and knows how to be a good friend. She's also the best scholarship student Manhattan's tony Waverly School has ever had. Olivia, by contrast, has grown up with every...
Some time, somewhere, Little Town and Old Country are separated by borders and bombs. If Little Town is said to be filthy, broke, and run by ragtag criminals, Old Country is conformist, rich, and militaristic. Almost 15, cautious Little Towner Charlie Law stays relatively safe...
*STARRED REVIEW Samuel, almost 13, and his younger brother Joshua are orphans but born free and growing up educated. During the Civil War’s final year, Samuel takes the blame for mischief that he’s convinced that Joshua committed, and finds himself betrayed by the priest who has...
*STARRED REVIEW In a Manhattan hospital, two women are each pregnant – one obviously, the other not yet visibly. Lore arrives with no partner, no friends, and no support, but she is armed with a several-page birth plan with which she expects to control the...
While the titular widow is the character around which all others circle, she’s certainly not alone in holding secrets. Jean Taylor (read with unnerving control by Hannah Curtis) stood by her husband, Glen, through the heinous accusations leveled against him, until a week ago when...
Journalist Vanessa Hua’s debut in fiction is an intriguing collection of 10 stories with personal resonance from being the child of Chinese immigrants and a two-decade, continent-hopping career. Each of her protagonists is never quite grounded, caught between multiple cultures and countries. Each hides beneath layers...
*STARRED REVIEW When Fen Danlin first landed in New York to join his wife, Yan Haili, she delivered him to a "seedy" Chinatown inn with $500 and instructions to stay – alone – within walking distance of an arranged restaurant job. She returned the next day...
Gifted artist Hannah was supposed to die of lung cancer, Congressman-for-sale David of brain cancer, has-been actor Connie of AIDS, and housewife and mother Linda trapped by immobility forever. Yet this quartet comprise the first SUBlife cases, and some of their brains – the parts...
*STARRED REVIEW After the brutal murder of his father and the wrenching separation from his mother and sister, Yongju must survive a new life of deprivation after his privileged upbringing as the only son of one of North Korea’s power elite. Danny, a misfit immigrant teen...
One Monday in January, 63-year-old Britt-Marie enters an unemployment office, having last worked as a waitress in 1978. After decades of fastidious living – perfect cutlery drawers, coasters under every drink, dinner at six, beds disinfected with baking soda – Britt-Marie needs a job. She's left...
'The Bones of Grace': Anam's ‘Bengal trilogy’ comes to a graceful close First, a warning: The Bones of Grace is the final installment in Bangladeshi-born, London-domiciled Tahmima Anam’s “Bengal trilogy.” If the trilogy’s publication history is any indication – A Golden Age in 2008, The Good...
*STARRED REVIEW Tanya Dubois, as she's initially introduced, is not the woman her husband believed her to be. He's dead – she didn't do it – but Tanya runs anyway, shedding her name and recent past yet again and taking on another identity. In another town, another...
*STARRED REVIEW O. Henry Prize winner (2009) and first-time novelist Dinh drops four fictional characters into the tragic aftermath of the real-life January 2001 cataclysmic earthquake in Gujarat, India, as they travel from New York, London, and Delhi to attempt to save lives, including their own. The...
