Auster's tale of family dynamics past and present from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy : 'a literary voice for the ages' ( Guardian ) 'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .' So begins Paul Auster's remarkable novel, The Brooklyn Follies . Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career, and, indeed, from life in general. Having accidentally ended up in the same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with life and passion. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts that offers them the possibility of redemption. Infused with character, mystery and humour, these lives intertwine and become bound together as Auster brilliantly explores the wider terrain of contemporary America - a crucible of broken dreams and of human folly.

Award-winning American novelist Nicole Krauss first captivated readers with her groundbreaking debut novel Man Walks into a Room a novel in which Krauss explores what it is to lose one's identity and what it is to discover what makes us human. Samson Greene has been missing for eight days when he is discovered wandering through the Nevada desert 'ragged as a crow' and with no idea who he is. He is rushed to hospital where doctors save his life but all his memories after the age of twelve have been permanently lost. Now as he looks around the beautiful apartment he apparently shares with his wife and which is filed with all the souvenirs of a life well lived Samson feels nothing more than a vague admiration. In her first novel Nicole Krauss tells the story of a man suddenly liberated from the life he has made disconnected from the people who have defined him. Withdrawing from a wife he has no memory of loving Samson plunges weightless into the future. But when he agrees to participate in a revolutionary experiment what he experiences a revelation of what it means to be human. 'Krauss celebrates the anything-but-simple art of human connection' San Francisco Chronicle 'You'll savour the last page - and be hungry for future work from this talented author' The Washington Post Book World Nicole Krauss is an American bestselling author who has received international critical acclaim for her first three novels: Great House (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011) The History of Love (Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 and winner of the 2006 Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger) and Man Walks into a Room all of which are available in Penguin paperback.

"One hot midsummer morning, crime novelist Howard Engel picked up his newspaper from his front step and discovered he could no longer read it. The letters had mysteriously jumbled themselves into something that looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. While he slept, Engel had experienced a stroke and now suffered from a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia, meaning that while he could still write, he could no longer read"--Jacket flap.

"This flip book features two separate novellas: In Sickness and In Health: Lily's most cherished goal in life has always been to be "normal," so as an adult she has painstakingly constructed a "normal" life for herself, with family, friends, and career. But her need to keep hidden her invisible disability, due to its stigma and her shame, now threatens to destroy everything she has worked so hard for. Yom Kippur in a Gym: Five isolated strangers in a synagogue on Yom Kippur - a day of intense reflection and soul-searching - are each struggling with a major personal crisis, when unexpectedly they are thrown together by an emergency that, in one hour, changes all their lives forever"--

The author's daring treatment of nine frenzied days in the life of a troubled Israeli family, Yehoshua's latest novel reconfirms his status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals. Neatly and leisurely divided into "five seasons" following the death of the protagonist's wife of 30 years, this is a genuine and elegant portrait of a widower, Molkho, a middle-aged Sephardi, like his creator, and his heartfelt grief and painfully awkward readjustment to life as a single person. A passive, frugal civil servant obsessed with bodily functions and malfunctions, who diligently and celibately cared for his wife through a long illness, Molkho is a straight man, vulnerably ripe for absurd romantic entanglements. He is variously infatuated with or fancied by the barren, fey cast-off wife of a "born-again" Orthodox Jew; an aggressive lawyer, who is senior to him on the bureaucratic ladder; an Indian girl in a development town; and a Russian emigre Molkho helps to repatriate. Although much here is universally applicable, Yehoshua continues to advance his vision of Israel as the necessary, if chaotic and problematic, receptacle of the scattered remnants of world Jewry.

As the author of this gripping narrative, Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D. makes his debut as a novelist par excellence. World renowned for his self-help books, in Light at the End of the Tunnel he departs from this mode to create characters that are compelling, vulnerable, witty, curious - and most of all, palpably human. The story revolves around a secular Jew, Alan Silverman, a successful lawyer, whose professional life has earned him wealth, prestige and a reputation for invincibility. Everything is going well for him, until a dreaded disease threatens to upend his carefully built personal empire. Suddenly faced with the prospect that his life may soon end, he searches for answers to questions he had never asked before. In the process, he discovers a new element in his life - a neshamah, an eternal soul. A world closed to him in the past - an eternal world of spiritual meaning - slowly unfolds as he relentlessly pursues the purpose of his life. Challenged and enthralled by the mystical teachings of Judaism, he explores the idea of an Afterlife and, most surprisingly, discovers the fulfillment of a life well lived. With the talent of a novelist, the deep insight of a master psychologist and the Torah wisdom of his heritage, Rabbi Dr. Twerski has achieved a powerful literary breakthrough. This one-of-a-kind book is an illuminating and uplifting masterpiece.

From Kirkus Reviews Reading a Rubens novel (Mate in Three, Our Father, Sat on Edge--all 1987) requires an iron-nerved distance. Her cool tales about acrid domestic relations and solitary masturbatory griefs, rages, and obsessions, touched as they are with a bizarre comic irony, cut deep. Here, a London psychiatrist, cold as an arctic bean, germinates an evil seed. Dr. Alistair Crown's wife, Virginia, has just given birth to their first child, named ``Doris'' by an angry Virginia from a card she found in the flowers Alistair brought her--flowers purloined from a cemetery. Alistair is cheap as well as rotten. Doris is born with Down's syndrome, and Alistair will never look at the child's face. But he will touch her body (after covering her face) with what he considers one version of parental love, and then, obsessed, he will draw doodles of an imagined Doris face. Inevitably, Alistair and Virginia separate, and he continues to see patients. (Rubens wickedly skewers the workday of a bored psychiatrist). Into Alistair's office one day comes ``Esau,'' a huge man covered with hair like an animal. Rejected by his father, Esau strips before medical men to reverse his father's withering verdict, and Esau becomes Alistair's gentle friend (platonic). Esau's tragic end preludes another erasure of innocence when little five-year-old Doris is kidnapped. The anguish of temporarily reunited parents and grandparents as hours and days tick by has acid calms and tempests of unrelieved nightmare. The close is predictable, but such is Rubens's skill that the reader must plunge along to the end of a very direful road indeed. A teeth-grinding, chilling tale of human nastiness--in guises that are both horrible and most commonplace. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description Dr. Alistair Crown is disappointed when his wife gives birth to a daughter, but when he learns that she has Down syndrome, he rejects the child