Fiction Memoir

Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only 16, intending for it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. This thinly veiled autobiographical tale of a young girl hungering for life and love in the outback was so beyond its years when first released in 1901 that Franklin insisted it not be published again until 10 years after her death. My Brilliant Career is a coming of age story for all of the ages.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to fans of the New York Times best seller The Cat Who Walks through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, he is dead.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds.

Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles's Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world.

fascinating exploration of early- to mid-20th-century political and social structure as seen through the eyes of a Roosevelt technocrat. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a young man living in an interesting political and social atmosphere. Surrounded by people who viewed the world through a Social Darwinist lens, and grappling with his identity as an American Jew during the atrocities of WWII in Europe, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. played an integral role as Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury during a tough economic and political time.

Enter Regency-era England—and a world in which magical mayhem and high society go hand in hand—with three novels featuring cousins Cecelia and Kate. In Sorcery & Cecelia, the two cousins have been inseparable since girlhood. But in 1817, Kate goes to London to make her debut into English society, leaving Cecelia behind. While visiting the Royal College of Wizards, Kate stumbles on a plot to destroy a beloved sorcerer—and only Cecelia can help her save him.

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage.

In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death - in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence....

More than 20 years ago, Frances Mayes - widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer - introduced readers to a wondrous new world when she bought and restored an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. Under the Tuscan Sun inspired generations to embark on their own journeys.

The author of Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, and long-running New York Times best seller, turns to nonfiction in a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

Lancater and York is a riveting account of the Wars of the Roses, from beloved historian Alison Weir. The war between the houses of Lancaster and York was characterised by treachery, deceit, and bloody battles. Alison Weir's lucid and gripping account focuses on the human side of history. At the centre of the book stands Henry VI, the pious king whose mental instability led to political chaos, and his wife Margaret of Anjou, who took up her arms in her husband's cause and battled in a violent man's world.

The mighty, iconic A-10 Warthog was first thrust into battle in Operation Desert Storm. The men who took it through walls of flak and surface-to-air missiles to help defeat the world's fourth-largest army were as untested as their airplanes, so they relied on personal determination and the amazing A-10 to accomplish their missions, despite the odds.

Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect – while surviving on eight dollars a year. From this experience emerged Walden, one of the great classics of American literature.

Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig.

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, counselor, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred. But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the violence with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and dreams she'd built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing.

​For Detective Billy Harney, getting shot in the head, stalked by a state’s attorney, and accused of murder by his fellow cops is a normal week on the job. So when a drive-by shooting on the Chicago's west side turns political, he leads the way to a quick solve. But Harney's instincts - his father was once chief of detectives and his twin sister, Patti, is also on the force - run deep. As a population hungry for justice threatens to riot, he realizes that the three known victims are hardly the only casualties.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthrals with its lively gossip, witty observations and subtle impressions. Lady Shōnagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shōnagon so eloquently relates.

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?