WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 - A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
**New York Times Book Review February Book Club Pick**
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
Ravishingly beautiful. -- Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 - INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize
A prophetic masterpiece. -- Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what--or who--is she willing to leave behind?
The winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed national bestseller, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
Alice Austen uses her considerable gifts to remind us that the past and the present are more connected than we wish to believe, and that vigilance, loyalty and art hold the key to survival. This is a beautiful and deeply engaging novel. -- Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake
An outstanding debut novel--a love story, mystery, and philosophical puzzle, told in the singular voices of the residents of a Beaux Arts apartment house in Belgium during World War II.
On the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever.
Charlotte Sauvin, an art student raised by her beloved architect father in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls on wood floors and voices echo off the marble staircase, the distinct knock of her dear friend, Julian Raphaël, the son of the art dealer's family across the hall. Then the Raphaëls disappear, leaving everything behind but their priceless art collection, which has simply vanished.
All else that's familiar fractures when whispers of German occupation become reality, and the lives of the residents grow increasingly intertwined. Charlotte's godmother Masha, a beautiful seamstress living upstairs, deepens her risky affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3L--a man far more calculating than his neighbors believe. When a Nazi functionary with an interest in the Raphaëls moves into the building, knowing who can and cannot be trusted becomes a matter of life and death.
In the face of their perilous new reality, every member of this accidental community will discover they are not the person they believed themself to be. When confronted with a cruel choice--submit to the regime or risk their lives to save one another--each learns the truth about what, and who, matters to them the most.
A propulsive and exquisitely written tour de force, 33 Place Brugmann champions the restorative power of love, courage, and art in times of great threat.
Beautifully told with humor and tenderness, a Norwegian Christmas tale of sisterhood, financial hardship, and far-off dreams, acclaimed by reviewers and beloved by readers across Europe, where it has been a major bestseller
Christmas is just around the corner, and Ronja and Melissa's dreamer of a father is out of work again. When ten-year-old Ronja hears about a job at a Christmas tree stand near where the family lives in central Oslo, she thinks it might be the stroke of luck they all need. Soon, the fridge fills with food, and their father returns home with money in his pocket and a smile on his face. But one evening he disappears into the night under the pretense of buying Christmas gifts--and the daughters know he has gone to his favorite local pub, Stargate, and they come to terms with the fact that he may lose his wonderful new job.
Melissa decides to take his place at the Christmas tree stand, working before and after school in the December afternoon dark, and brings along Ronja, who quickly charms all the middle-class customers. On rare breaks the sisters dream of a brighter place of kindness and plenty, and find help from some of those around them--but both understand that their family structure is a precarious one, and that they are going to need luck and strength to transcend their circumstances.
Skillfully told, evoking the delight, misunderstandings, and innocence of a child's voice, Brightly Shining is small in stature but with an outsize impact on the reader, and has all the markings of a magical modern classic.
Now an HBO Limited Series from Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., Streaming Exclusively on Max
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
One of TIME's 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time
[A] remarkable debut novel.--Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a man of two minds, a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.
The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck. -- Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train
From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters
It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place--first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships--every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
Now an original Netflix film, directed by Rodrigo Prieto, cinematographer of Killers of the Flower Moon
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
One of the best novels in Hispanic literature, and in literature as a whole. --Jorge Luis Borges
The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez
A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man's quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met--Pedro Páramo--but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.
A new edition of the now iconic fiction writer Claire Keegan's debut story collection featuring a fresh cover to tie in with her current bestselling trio: the Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, Foster, and So Late in the Day
These stories are diamonds. --Esquire
First published in 1999 and proclaimed an impressive debut by William Trevor, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan, whose short fiction has since captured readers worldwide and established her as among the form's most masterful practitioners (New York Times). Now with a revised titular story, this iridescent first collection of stories draws readers into a world of obsession and betrayal in Keegan's singular, commanding and award-winning prose.
In Antarctica, a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. In Love in the Tall Grass, Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In Passport Soup, Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his young daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan's writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.
The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world's best short story writers.
A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.--The New York Times Book Review
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fé at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless public burning.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.
Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.
Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War.
On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily-armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded.
Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden's minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written--a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.
Ms. Yoshimoto's writing is lucid, earnest and disarming. ... [It] seizes hold of the reader's sympathy and refuses to let go. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.
From the beloved author of cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, which has now sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been translated into thirty-three languages, comes a spellbinding and otherworldly novel about a woman who believes she is an alien
Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel.
As a child, Natsuki doesn't fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents' ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can't seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the baby factory of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe--answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.
Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata's status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.
From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination
Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata's universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.
As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents copulated in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange system by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage--sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest--Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only Kodomo-chan. Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human discover the pain and beauty of being alive (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A BARNES & NOBLE BOOK CLUB PICK - A career defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning and formidably gifted (Chicago Tribune) author of Peace Like a River Leif Enger.
A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread--for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope. -- Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune
A storyteller of great humanity and huge heart (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers' hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author's accomplished, resonant body of work. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking
under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.
I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.
Performed across the globe by some of the world's most iconic performers, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece remains an unwavering testament of what it means to be human.
From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, Time catches up with genius ... Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.