A convention-defying novel by bestselling writer Walter Mosley, John Woman recounts the transformation of an unassuming boy named Cornelius Jones into John Woman, an unconventional history professor--while the legacy of a hideous crime lurks in the shadows. At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father's job at a silent film theater in New York's East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets about reinventing himself--as Professor John Woman, a man who will spread Herman's teachings into the classrooms of his unorthodox southwestern university and beyond. But there are other individuals who are attempting to influence the narrative of John Woman, and who might know something about the facts of his hidden past. Engaging with some of the most provocative ideas of recent intellectual history, John Woman is a compulsively readable, deliciously unexpected novel about the way we tell stories, and whether the stories we tell have the power to change the world.

“An astounding achievement.” —Megha Majumdar * “Her best book yet.” —Paul Yoon Set in midcentury America, At Last explores a rich family saga centered on two fierce and competitive matriarchs whose intertwined lives reflect the complexities of family, tradition, and personal ambition. “Whole lives course down the decades, and every minute is conveyed with Silver’s signature combination of toughness and grace,” (Laird Hunt). Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning, and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter. At Last paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them. Both intimate and expansive, and capturing the complexities of ambition and love with humor and insight, At Last is a testament to what happens when an unintended, even unwanted relationship turns out to be a central one that defines a life.

A story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. The story quickly circles back to Helene's childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. As we follow Helene into adulthood, we watch riveted as the costs of survival and ill-fated love turn her into a woman capable of the unforgivable.

'Francesa Segal is precise and funny, and The Awkward Age is brimming with keen observations of the highest order--the clever, the sore, and the sublime.' Emma Straub In a Victorian terraced house, in north-west London, two families have united in imperfect harmony. After five years of widowhood, Julia has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. James is everything she never knew she wanted - if only her beloved teenaged daughter, Gwen, didn't hate him so much. At the very least, Gwen could be civil to James's son, Nathan. Bringing together two households is never easy, but Gwen's struggle for independence will test her mother's loyalty, and her unexpected actions will threaten this fragile new happiness. The Awkward Age is about the new family; about starting over, about the attempt to build something beautiful amid the mess and complexity of what came before. It is a story about standing by the ones we love, even while they hurt us. We would do anything to make our children happy. But how much should we give?

When We Were Romans is a haunting psychological novel and another masterful work from the author of the prize–winning English Passengers . Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man of his family. He watches over his mother and his willful little sister Jemima. He is the one who keeps order, especially when his mother decides they must leave their life in England behind because of threats from Lawrence's father. But their new life in Rome does not go as planned. Short of money and living off of his mother's old friends—all who seem to doubt her story—Lawrence soon realizes that things are not what they seem.

An unforgettable story from one of Brazil's most accomplished and original new voices, this is a profoundly moving portrait of a young woman finding her way back into life. From one of Granta 's Best Young Brazilian Novelists comes a startling and powerful story about returning to one's origins in order to move forward. In Rio de Janeiro, a woman suffering from a mysterious illness, which is eroding her body and mind, decides to accept a challenge from her grandfather: to take the key to the house where he grew up--in the Turkish city of Smyrna--and open the door. As she embarks on this pilgrimage, she begins to write of her progress. The writing soon becomes an exploration of her family's legacy of displacement in Europe, told in several narrative strands. Sifting through family stories--her grandfather's migration from Turkey to Brazil, her parents' exile in Portugal under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her mother's death, and her own love affair with a violent man--she traces her family's history in a journey to make sense of the past and to understand her place in it. With an epic sweep of time and place--traversing Brazil, Turkey, and Portugal--this is a profoundly moving portrait of a young woman finding her way back into life. Spare, heartfelt, and evocative, The House in Smyrna is an unforgettable story from one of the most accomplished and original new voices in Brazil.

From the author of "Comeback Love," a sweeping, panoramic tale of twentieth-century America, chronicling the decades-long love affair between a Jewish immigrant and the granddaughter of a slave. Julian Rose is only fifteen when he leaves his family and Germany for a new life in 1920s America. Lonely at first, he eventually finds his way first by joining up with Longy Zwillman and becoming one of the preeminent bootleggers on the East Coast, and later by amassing a fortune in real estate. Kendall Wakefield is a free-spirited college senior who longs to become a painter. Her mother, the daughter of a slave and founder of an African-American college in South Florida, is determined to find a suitable match for her only daughter. One evening in 1938, Mrs. Wakefield hosts a dinner that reunites Julian with his parents who have been rescued from Hitler s Germany by the college and brings him together with Kendall for the first time. From that encounter begins a thirty-year affair that will take the lovers from the beaches of Miami to the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to postwar life in Paris, where they will mingle with Sartre, Picasso, and a host of other artists and intellectuals. Through his years serving in American intelligence and as an interrogator at the Nuremberg trials, what Julian wants most is to marry and find the joy that eluded his parents. Kendall craves her freedom, and after trading her oil paints for a Leica camera, becomes a celebrated photographer, among the first American journalists to photograph the survivors of a liberated concentration camp. Yet despite distance, their competing desires, and the rapidly changing world, their longing for each other remains a constant in the ceaseless sweep of time. Captivating and infused with historical detail, this is the epic tale of three generations, two different but intertwined families, and one unforgettable love story."

"We have here, then a novelistic document of life, of the inferno of a marriage. ... --a marriage that should never have been contracted nor would have been save for the man's weakness and youthful inexperience."--Preface, p. vii.

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter's only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs -- young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.

“Elegantly unnerving.” — New York Times Book Review A year has passed since Catherine and Michael Hall lost their teenage daughter in a car accident, leaving them and their sixteen-year-old son, Rowan, reeling in the aftermath of the tragedy. Catherine withdraws to Hamdean, the family’s apartment in a Georgian country manor, where the mysteries of the past begin to collide with the truth of the present.

"1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha'ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren't supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man. 1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida's daughter, has been living in New York City-a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother's Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn't looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni's childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket. Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family-including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future"--

A profoundly unsettling collection of tales of Americans caught up in the ethnic, religious, social, economic, and political conflicts of modern day Israel, by an astonishing new voice. In a land where sudden death is an everyday fact of life, a boy dodges bullets and searches through rubble for news of his soldier father. An aging rabbi?s faith is tested by a crippling, seemingly supernatural affliction. A middle-aged man comforts his Holocaust-survivor mother as she faces senility, convinced that Nazis are conspiring against her. And the mysterious biblical red heifer makes a startling appearance in the midst of a decidedly contemporary struggle. In these unsettling tales, the remarkable Jon Papernick transports us to modern-day Israel, a country torn by war, strife, and controversy throughout the history of its statehood. Giving voice to striking characters--Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans; Arabs, Christians, and Jews--caught in the ethnic, religious, social, and political conflicts of a dangerous region, Papernick brings the images we glimpse from afar, in newspapers and on television, chillingly to life. By turns starkly realistic and allegorically fantastic, these tales chronicle the conflict from the inside and illuminate the suffering and anger experienced by those on all sides. In?An Unwelcome Guest,? a young Jewish settler from New York plays a deadly game of backgammon with a ghostly old Arab while his pregnant wife sleeps unaware. In?The King of the King of Falafel,? a restaurant rivalry ends in apocalyptic violence. In "Lucky Eighteen," two young Americans living in Jerusalem as the Oslo accords collapse juggle political activism and a devastating love triangle--under the dark specter of suicide bombings. And in the brilliant, horrifying title story, a lonely shepherd wanders a broken no-man's-land, carrying with him the burden of an unspeakable act. In these haunting and strangely beautiful stories, the tragic carnage of the Middle East is rendered in unforgettable form. Suffused with rage, violence, humor, magic, and religion, this gripping collection leaves a profound impact. Evenhanded yet passionate, shocking yet hopeful, The Ascent of Eli Israelheralds the arrival of a masterful storyteller. Please visit.

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are they completely out of control and ready to explode?

Critics in Britain are already raving about Charlotte Mendelson’s excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart. The Rubins are the perfect family. They’re wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish a powerful rabbi known for her charm, brains, and determination. Now this dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off the perfect eldest son. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom -- one minute before exchanging vows -- bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones. Mendelson’s astonishing eye for detail, as well as her just-right balance of plot and character, makes the unfolding of this story an uncommon treat. In a marvelously compressed style that also bursts with life, she reveals how all four adult Rubin children, and their parents, struggle with huge secrets, sexual frustration and sexual experimentation, and many betrayals. Charlotte Mendelson opens a window on a realm rarely explored in British the complicated world of English Jewry. But to watch this seemingly blessed family drastically, disastrously fall apart before regaining balance is to understand that their struggles -- like all of ours -- are universal ones.

Ben Seidel wasn't sure how serious they were when he and his wife, Shira, discussed having an open marriage. But when Shira announces that she is going on a date with Liz, any ambiguity evaporates. Suddenly, every day is new terrain for Ben, navigating between keeping things together with Shira and exploring new partners. And when one of those new partners begins to matter to him more than he ever anticipated, he discovers that the complexities of this new life are only just beginning. Bracingly honest, refreshingly sexy, and deeply empathetic, I Am My Beloveds is the work of a superior storyteller, making real a lifestyle that might be as close as your own bedroom door.

Elisa - orphaned as a child, raised by a 'fallen woman', fed by fairy tales - has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family's tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. First published in 1948, Elsa Morante's debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. Translated by Jenny McPhee

From a small, bogside cabin in rural New England, 38-year-old Aimee Slater unravels the story of her life, attempting to make sense of the tangled thread that leads from her mother's house-a short, unbridgeable distance away-to the world she now inhabits. It is soon after the Civil War; Aimee lives alone, but is graced with visits from two friends, a crippled man and a troubled eleven-year-old girl. She is perpetually caught between the sensual world she so desires and the divine retribution passed down to her by her mother's scorn. How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story of love and loss. Told in a voice of spare New England lyricism, Unravelling is a remarkably haunting account of the power of redemption.

A story about love and death in Chicago during the age of prohibition, this novel was originally published in 1928 and out of print for nearly 50 years. Set in a boarding house on the north side of Chicago, the novel follows Marry Javlyn, a newspaperman who has just arrived from Iowa; Jo Ruska, a switchboard operator; and Abe Wise, a gangster on the lam. Marry and Jo fall in love, but when Marry is lured away by a glamorous newspaper culture critic, he descends into a Gomorrah of speakeasies, patronage jobs, and dingy art studios. Despite family secrets revealed, betrayed loyalties, and a violent climax, Marry still has a chance in the end for redemption. With an original, rollicking plot and memorable characters, the story stands as an authentic and invaluable artifact of an era long distorted beyond recognition by sensationalism and stereotype.

A decent, ordinary life jeopardized by a catastrophically extraordinary event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy--author of two New York Times Notable Books and Whiting award winner--tells in From the Black Hills. In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike finds himself nearly overwhelmed by his present circumstances--not only the emotional damage inflicted by his father's awful crime but also his mother's dismay, the insinuating methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, and his longing for an older woman who lives nearby--and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what will happen if he does. As imposing as the landscape that forms its setting, From the Black Hills conveys with compassionate power the drama of a young man who must try to overcome his father's dark legacy. "From the Hardcover edition.

From the award-winning author of Minor Characters comes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in "lucky and unlucky convergences," a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her. "Why do you hang back?" he asks. Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love each had longed to find. But it's undermined by Tom's harrowing past--his fatherless childhood, his wartime experiences, and most of all, the loss of the two children he left behind in Florida, along with the powerful red, white, and black paintings he will never set eyes on again. Tom, both tender and volatile, draws Joanna into the unwinnable struggle against the forces that drive him toward death. Once again, Joyce Johnson brings to life a mythic bohemian world where art is everything and life is as full of intensity and risk as the bold sweep of a painter's brush across a canvas. A New York Times Notable Book Excerpted in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine