David Szalay's debut novel is set in the alcohol-sodden, materialistic, insecure and increasingly sham world of a telephone salesman. The salesman in question is Paul Rainey, a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who commutes into London every day from Hove.

"A propulsive debut political thriller set in the aftermath of a global nuclear weapons crisis -- from the acclaimed filmmaker of The Fugitive and an award-winning journalist A plot to disrupt a global peace summit in Chicago collides with a civil rights case breakthrough at a mysterious archaeological site "Andrew Davis is a cinematic master, and Jeff Biggers is a brilliant scribe of wild places. Together, they have created a thriller that will keep you up all night." --Luis Urrea, NY Times bestselling author of Good Night, Irene. Chicago detective Randall Jenkins has not been back home to the historic Civil Rights hotspot of Cairo, Illinois since the disappearance of his mother, a well-known journalist, several decades ago. That all changes the day Dr. Molly Moore, an ambitious young archaeologist in the national spotlight for her groundbreaking high-tech discoveries, uncovers a set of strange bones at a huge 12,000-year-old site at a highway construction project. With retired military general and contractor William Alexander breathing down her neck to cover up the dig, Molly and Randall soon find themselves in the middle of a wild military conspiracy. The detective and archaeologist's entwined family mysteries suddenly thrust them into the central position as the only people who can ensure the safety of the ongoing Chicago global peace summit. They must take on the rogue general who views any disarmament agreement as a clear and present danger to the United States. The fate of global peace and the lives of Molly and Randall hang in the balance"--

-- Brimming with Elkin's comic brilliance and singular wordplay, The Magic Kingdom tells the story of Eddy Bale, who, determined to learn from the ghastly experience of his son's long, drawn-out death, decides to raise enough money to take seven terminally ill children to Disney World in order to give them a dream vacation before they die. -- Stanley Elkin, a two-timer winner of the National Book Critics Award and three-time nominee for the National Book Award, is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of the contemporary period. Author of over a dozen novels and short story collections, his works include The Franchiser, George Mills, and Mrs. Ted Bliss. -- First published by Dutton (1985), most recent paperback by Thunder's Mouth (1991).

When a group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau, an English woman is murdered. Tatiana, 'the unloved child', declares she knows who did it. The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of love, insatiable rage and sadistic desire, framed within an unfolding narrative of colonial violence which will change the tourists' version of history for ever. The Unloved is a pivotal novel in Levy's career, first published in 1994 and reissued now for a new generation of readers.

"A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices. Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself? The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he likes, not even bothering to salt them--the quantity is what matters. If only he could stop looking over his shoulder, and flinching on the street in the fear that some stranger will step forward, smack his face, and say in a loud voice, "Here's one!" If only he could stop worrying about Helena Lifka, who turned out to be Yugoslav too, and Jewish too, one of the women he made come naked into the toolshed where he hid the gold, and sit on his lap in exchange for bread and butter and a little warm milk. She could turn up any day, an old woman now, and point an accusing finger. In this masterful novel, Aleksandar Tišma shows step by step how fear can turn an ordinary human being into a monster"--

Ziff: A Life? is the latest tour de force by an extraordinary novelist with explosive verbal energy and intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive, who has been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Wallace Stegner. Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or an impertinent provocateur? A true literary master or a clever tactician who seduces the reading public? It is narrator Danny Levitan’s job to find out who Ziff really is, in a compelling novel about the writing life that is at once comic and provocative, producing a memorable reading experience. Sensational publishing and serious literature collide when Levitan, a has-been writer, is offered a hefty advance to write a biography of Ziff, the scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world’s literary giants. For years, Ziff has been sharing secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime and less successful friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff hardly welcomes an incendiary study of his life, and is determined to thwart Danny, with legal roadblocks and personal humiliation. Danny must decide whether to accept the advance and risk the rollercoaster of recriminations that will surely follow. He recounts with humor and often wrenching anguish his journey of discovery into the land of Ziff, and the hard-won truths he finds there—original insights into a man who has crafted his novels, often savagely, from the lives of his friends, including Danny’s life. An unabashed look at the ruthless forging of literary careers and a heady brew of books within a book, Ziff: A Life? will enthrall readers of great fiction everywhere and anyone eager for a peek through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.

They're pregnant. They're glamorous. They're blissfully balanced. Or maybe that's all just a pose... Laura is pregnant. She is stressed. She is exhausted. So she takes a deep, yogic breath, forgets about her husband, leaves her cramped apartment...and joins the Prada-clad celebrities and socialites at the most elite yoga center in the city. She figures she is a few tax brackets too short of fitting in. But she finds herself befriended by four huge-hearted, fabulously pregnant women who prove her wrong. Soon they are exchanging birthing plans and baby names and dirty secrets about their significant others. Everything is falling into place. Until she discovers one of them has a secret so big it just might burst their blissful yoga bubble. From The Yoga Mamas : Gigi led the way to the restaurant with her belly. At her side, Isla, too, thrust her bare mid-section defiantly out to the front, as if daring anyone to comment. Susan, Margaret, and I followed behind them, and the sidewalks opened up before us like the parting of the Red Sea. Five pregnant women in SoHo are an arresting sight. People scuttled out of our way. Across the street they stopped to look. We were loud, large, and in charge. I felt a surge of power. With my new, super-sized pals, I no longer viewed the streets as an obstacle course of aggressive shoppers and dog walkers. SoHo is ours, I thought with glee, as we approached the corner of West Broadway and Prince and burst through the doors of the Healthy Harvest.

Amidst the lights and glamour of the New York theater district during the 1950s, two Holocaust survivors confront each other in order to reckon with a common past - one that hides an awful secret. Jud Kramer, a successful stage director, is in the midst of mounting his most painful and personal play while trying to enjoy the happiness he has found with his beautiful actress wife and baby daughter. Into his life comes Carl Walkowitz, a brooding, charismatic drifter who displays the scars of his concentration camp past in his wounded leg and half-closed eye. It is the relationship of these two men, one who lives in the past and the other trying to grasp hold of the present, that drives the story of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die to its terrifying conclusion. Step by step, inexorably, Walkowitz strips Jud of everything dear to him, until finally, standing on an empty stage, the two men, with a woman between them, come face to face in a life-and-death struggle only one of them can survive.

Michael Tolkin has garnered acclaim for his classic dark comedies The Player and Among the Dead. His most ambitious novel yet, Under Radar is a tale of guilt and redemption that is "provocative...so unexpected, so full of startling insights, that it sems to be blazing a fresh trail" (John Hartl, The Oregonian). While vacationing in Jamaica, Tom Levy witnesses a man goading his four-year-old daughter into an act so vulgar that Tom vows he must pay for it with his life. The next day, when they come to grips atop the Dunn's River Falls, Tom kills the man in cold blood. Condemned to prison, Tom faces a world unlike any be has ever known, among the most brutal and hardened men of Jamaica. Does an elusive story hold the key their salvation, and Tom's own? And once Tom has told it, can he find a way to reenter the hearts of those he has left behind? As gripping as it is wrought with layers of meaning, Under Radar "places parables within parables, exploring the essence of evil and the possibility of redemption....Tolkin has shown himself no stranger to the psyche's stranger recesses, though the results here are more unsettling than ever" (Don McLeese, Msnbc.com).

In this powerfully affecting novel—by the author of The Pawnbroker—Joe Berman, an immigrant at eighteen, fifty-nine now, and a hard-working Connecticut plumber, faces the loss of his deeply loved wife. The months that follow, months of wrath and rebellion during which he fights his way to a new idea of life, death, and God, are part of Berman's human season. But so are the years behind him, vividly evoked as the narrative travels back into the past.

"Moods by Yoel Hoffmann--"Isreal's celebrated avant-garde genius" (The Forward)--supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite. Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings--about his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee, with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness accentuated by a new dimension brought along with "that great big pill of Prozac." Literature's so pathetic. We peddle fabric with a sun painted on it and no one even looks up... Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book and, with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once called himself "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy" --

This is a gothic noir novel that explores questions about fate, identity, and genetics in the guide of a gripping psychological thriller.

"Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn't sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become a broken series of unsuccessful gestures. Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan's will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey - a tufted capuchin named Ottoline - to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan's life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?"--Publisher description.

It is 1947 and Dr. Harrison, chief psychiatrist at the private asylum Shadowbrook, is treating a mysterious patient, Bertram, who has voluntarily come to the hospital. As treatment of Bertram progresses, Dr. Harrison begins to lose control of his objectivity and makes questionable decisions that may lead to self-destruction.

Returning from his Carolina coast security job to upstate New York, Jack, haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, is hired to search for a lawyer's missing nephew, a search that leads into the dark underworld of his hometown.

Deena Metzger brings us a novel of mysterious and deep insight. Twelve years in the writing, this novel is written in the voice of a woman astronomer. It is a profound self-examination and mediation on the nature of the darkness we have called down into this century and a lyrical vision of the possibilities of light that are opening to each of us now.

Growing up in Soviet Russia, Kat Knopman worships her parents, Jewish intellectuals who teach literature at a Moscow school, run a drama club, and dabble in political radicalism. When Kat is diagnosed with rapidly-progressing scoliosis, the trajectory of her life changes and she finds herself at a different institution-- a school-sanatorium for children with spinal ailments. Confined to a brace, surrounded by unsympathetic peers, Kat embarks on a quest to prove that she can be as exceptional as her parents despite her physical limitations, her Jewishness, and her suspicion that her beloved parents are in fact flawed.

When Joe arrives in Boston and is mistaken for African-- rather than African American-- he quickly discovers that letting the illusion stand generates magic. A job, a place to live, even a kind of deference he's never known before are suddenly casually endowed upon him, a man who surely must have a closer connection to life's hidden possibilities. Central Square bustles with the complexities and contradictions of today's urban existence as it tells what happens when the enigmatic Joe meets up with several other disparate characters. There is Paula, the social worker whose loneliness is intensified with each sad story she hears; Eric, the writer who struggles in a world that ignores his work and whose wife has abandoned him for pregnancy; the mysterious community group that has posted titillating "feel-good" signs around the city. As characters collide with circumstances, and each other, George Packer's bold novel explores the conflict between personal desires and social constraints, and the unattainable balance between private life and the life of a community. Unafraid to expose the difficult truths about contemporary society, Central Square asks how we can find something decent to which to commit our lives.

Born with a split lip and cleft palate, Toshy Wolfman's life is an uphill battle. Believing he is dim-witted and ugly, Toshy finds his resentment slowly building as he is ridiculed, used, and misled. Ultimately, he is imprisoned after being caught stealing a valuable and famous diamond, the Orange Sunset. But Toshy's story is not his alone - it is shared with his two sisters: Lil, a radical and a devotee of anarchist Emma Goldman; and Bessie, who goes to work for one of Goldmans enemies, the owners of the Orange Sunset. Toshy's love for his sisters drives him to make some of the bravest decisions of his life. But despite having seemingly overcome his obstacles, an aging Toshy stuns his nephew by asking for his assistance in committing suicide.Toshy wont fully explain his decision. Nor will he fully explain why, at this late stage in life, he is obsessed with making a journey to France.