Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman’s sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer’s disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University.
Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment,
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Sing Them Home is a moving portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother’s disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician’s wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope’s three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother’s spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope’s absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger;
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On a windy September day, twenty-five-year-old Slater Brown stands in the back of a bicycle taxi hurtling the wrong way down the busiest street in San Francisco. Slater has come to “see the elephant,” to stake his claim to fame and become the greatest writer ever. But this city of gleaming water and infinite magic has other plans in this astounding first novel—at once a love story, a feast of literary imagination, and a dazzlingly original tale of passion, ambition, and genius in all their guises…
Slater Brown lays siege to San Francisco like Achilles circling Troy—until he crashes headlong into reality.
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In the basement of a Boston bookstore, Firmin is born in a shredded copy Finnegans Wake, nurtured on a diet of Zane Grey, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Jane Eyre (which tastes a lot like lettuce). While his twelve siblings gnaw these books obliviously, for Firmin the words, thoughts, deeds, and hopes—all the literature he consumes—soon consume him. Emboldened by reading, intoxicated by curiosity, foraging for food, Firmin ventures out of his bookstore sanctuary, carrying with him all the yearnings and failings of humanity itself. It’s a lot to ask of a rat—especially when his home is on the verge of annihilation.
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In the mid-twenty-first century, an elderly man named Hilary looks back through the decades to his days at St. Oswald’s, a dreary English boarding school. Though the school and much of the coastline around it have since slipped into the sea, Hilary’s memories of that time and place are vivid. A low-achiever kicked out of two previous schools, Hilary suspected that St. Oswald’s, like the others, would offer nothing more than bourgeois manners and gory lessons from the Dark Ages. Surviving its rigid routines and joyless days would be a matter of will. When he encounters a strange young boy named Finn,
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Michael Frame plays it safe – he’s a stay-at-home, suburban dad to stepdaughter Sam and a supportive husband to businesswoman Miranda. In fact, as far as Sam and Miranda are concerned, Michael’s past is a vague but uncomplicated territory – it’s almost as if he didn’t exist before he came into their lives.
This is almost the truth. Michael Frame is not who he says he is; he is not who he has been for the past two decades. He’s actually Chris Carver, a fugitive from the law and ex-member of one of the most volatile and infamous revolutionary groups of 1960s and 70s London.
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