Born in Sweetwater, West Virginia, with a mop of flaming red hair and a map of the world rendered in port-wine stains on every surface of her body, Garnet Ferrari is used to being an outcast. With her sharp tongue, she has always known how to defend herself against bullies and aggressors, but she finds she is less adept at fending off the pilgrims who have set up a veritable tent city outside her hilltop home, convinced that she is Saint Garnet, healer of skin ailments and maker of miracles.
Her grandmother, the indelible Nonna Diamante, believes that Garnet’s mystical gift can be traced back to the family’s origins in the Nebrodi Mountains of Sicily,
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With humor and compassion, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb brilliantly captures human experience through vivid and unforgettable characters struggling to find hope and redemption in the aftermath of trauma and loss.
Annie Oh—wife, mother, and artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success. The two plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But this provokes mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs'
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Published in 1975 to great acclaim, Rock Island Line introduces a memorable character in American fiction: July Montgomery. Born and raised in the idyll of Sharon Center, Iowa—a life of four-leaf clovers, dogs, and fishing—the young boy is rocked by the tragic death of his parents, a blow that precipitates his bitter exile from Eden. Fleeing via the Rock Island Line, July lands in Philadelphia and fashions a ghostly and insulated existence in an underground train station.
When a young woman frees July from his malaise, they return together to the Iowa heartland, where the novel soars to its heartrending consummation.
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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,
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“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,
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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.
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