Jim Harrison is a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force,
one of the exalted few. He spends his days cheating
death in the skies above the Mojave Desert and his
nights at his friend Pancho’s bar, often with his wife,
Grace. She and Harrison are secretly desperate for
a child-and when, against all odds, Grace learns
that she is pregnant, the two are overcome with joy.
While America becomes swept up in the fervor of
the Space Race, Harrison turns his attention home,
National Book Award Nominee
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage
1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five. Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children. With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s,
Douglas Petersen may be mild mannered, but
behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that,
against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into
a second date . . . and eventually into marriage.
Now, almost three decades after their relationship
first blossomed in London, they live more or
less happily in the suburbs with their moody
seventeen-year-old son, Albie.
Then Connie tells Douglas that she thinks she wants a divorce.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Hoping to encourage her son’s artistic
interests,
Catherine and Zoe are sisters, but even their mother, Eve, admits her daughters are nothing alike. Catherine is calm and responsible. Zoe is passionate and rebellious. Nobody is surprised when Zoe gets pregnant, drops out of college, and spirals into drug addiction.
One night Catherine gets a call from Zoe’s terrified daughter, Willow, saying her mother has abandoned her in a bus station and disappeared. Eve blames herself, while Catherine, unable to have children, is delighted to raise Willow as her own.
Now, five years later, Eve is grieving her husband’s death and making reluctant plans to sell the family’s beloved summer home on Prince Edward Island.
Katherine Carlyle is Rupert Thomson’s breakthrough novel. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, it uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved.
Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world.
Sigal Samuel’s debut novel, in the vein of Nicole Krauss’s bestselling
The History of Love, is an imaginative story that delves into the heart of Jewish mysticism, faith, and family.
“This is not an ordinary tree I am making.
“This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.”
In the half-Hasidic, half-hipster Montreal neighborhood of Mile End, eleven-year-old Lev Meyer is discovering that there may be a place for Judaism in his life. As he learns about science in his day school, Lev begins his own extracurricular study of the Bible’s Tree of Knowledge with neighbor Mr.
