Fifteen years ago, Krista Bremer was a surfer and an aspiring journalist who dreamed of a comfortable American life of adventure, romance, and opportunity. Then, on a running trail in North Carolina, she met Ismail, sincere, passionate, kind, yet from a very different world. Raised a Muslim—one of eight siblings born in an impoverished fishing village in Libya—his faith informed his life. When she and Ismail made the decision to become a family, Krista embarked on a journey she never could have imagined, an accidental jihad: a quest for spiritual and intellectual growth that would open her mind,
read more
Sailing to Shanghai in 1936 to lead a black jazz orchestra, Thomas Greene goes from being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, and from the classical piano pieces he was trained to play to the toe-tapping swing of the big band era.
Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage, longs for escape, and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.
With Shanghai shattered by the Japanese invasion,
read more
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013
In Local Souls, Allan Gurganus offers us three linked novellas, set in legendary Falls, North Carolina—site of his beloved Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. We find the small town revolutionized by freer sexuality, loosened family ties, and secular worship. Gurganus celebrates those citizens who stayed home but uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—very much alive in this “Winesburg, Ohio” with high-speed Internet. Writing about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain’s knife-edged glee, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town America.
read more
Fifteen-year-old Jess is on a road trip to the end of the world. Her evangelical father has packed up the family and left their Alabama home behind to drive west in anticipation of the rapture, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious older sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop and gas station along the way. But as doomsday approaches, Jess can’t seem to work up any real fear about the apocalypse when her family’s troubles loom so much larger.
Sporting a “King Jesus Returns!” t-shirt,
read more
“Outstanding…Every page is alive and surprising, proof of [Sharma’s] huge, unique talent.”—David Sedaris
Hailed as a “supreme storyteller” (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his “cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived” fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice “as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky” (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets,
read more
From the best-selling author of The Obituary Writer, the stirring multigenerational story of an Italian-American family.
An Italian Wife is the extraordinary story of Josephine Rimaldi—her joys, sorrows, and passions, spanning more than seven decades. The novel begins in turn-of-the-century Italy, when fourteen-year-old Josephine, sheltered and naive, is forced into an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know or love who is about to depart for America, where she later joins him. Bound by tradition, Josephine gives birth to seven children. The last, Valentina, is conceived in passion, born in secret, and given up for adoption.
read more
