"A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture--a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of "the Gardens," a cloistered community in New York's Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the...

Bestselling author Helen Simonson returns with a splendid historical novel full of the same wit, romance, and insight into the manners and morals of small-town British life as her beloved "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand." It's the summer of 1914 and life in the sleepy village of Rye, England is about to take an interesting turn. Agatha Kent is expecting an unusual candidate to be the school's Latin teacher: Beatrice Nash, a young woman of good breeding...

FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media...

"An exhilarating, original novel, set in Brazil, Idaho, and outer space, about an obsessive librarian, a down-at-heel author, and a Mormon historian who go on the hunt for a mystical, life-changing book--and find it. The Infinite Future is a mindbending novel that melds two page-turning books in one. First, we meet three broken people, joined by an obsession with a forgotten Brazilian science-fiction author named Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. There's...

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

By the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, this novel foreshadows the Nigerian coups of 1966 and shows the color and vivacity as well as the violence and corruption of a society making its own way between the two worlds.

"A student at the Buenos Aires School of Philosophy attempts to put her life (academically and romantically) in the service of a professor whose nearly forgotten theories of violence she plans to popularize and radicalize--against his wishes. Meanwhile, a young couple--a documentary filmmaker and a blogger--engage in a series of cerebral and sexual misadventures. In a novel crammed with philosophy, group sex, revolutionary politics, and a fighting...