Literary Fiction Psychological

Jack Slade and Sam Healey, flying partners during World War II, establish a bush pilot business in Alaska after the war. When their C-47 Dakota is forced down on a glacier by a wolverine in the cargo deck that breaks out of its cage, they discover a valley that offers the realization each man's dreams. To Jack Slade, it’s the ideal place to homestead, raise a family, and live simply as a professional hunting and fishing guide; to Healey, the pool of crude oil he locates under the glacial ice promises the wealth he always wanted.

Don Quixote, a man driven by chivalrous ideals and wild delusions, adopts sword and lance as a knight-errant to defend the weak, slay the ignoble, and win the heart of the farm girl he envisions as a princess. In his world of fantasy - where inns are castles, peasants are kings, and windmills are beasts - Quixote, his nag, and his sound but devoted squire, Sancho Panza, set forth on a picaresque adventure conceivable only to a man obsessed.

When the bullet-ridden body of a Silicon Valley billionaire washes up on shore, assistant D.A. Dismas Hardy finds himself the prosecutor in San Francisco's murder trial of the century. The suspect: a Japanese call girl with a long list of prominent clients. But when a bizarre series of events blows the case wide open, Hardy finds himself on the other side of the law - as a lawyer for the defense.

Claire is a hardworking doctor living a simple, quiet life in London. She is also the daughter of the most notorious murder suspect in the country, though no one knows it. Nearly 30 years ago, while Claire and her infant brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family's townhouse.

On a sunny afternoon, the middle-aged writer Joe Rose and his wife look up from their picnic in the countryside to see an elderly man desperately trying to anchor his giant helium balloon. Running to help, Joe is joined by other bystanders. But from that fateful day, one of them, Jed Parry, will begin to stalk Joe. Driven by religious zeal and misdirected love, the strange young man will slowly unravel each strand of Joe's life.

What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence.

Violet Parry is living the quintessential life of luxury in the Hollywood Hills with David, her rock-and-roll manager husband, and her darling toddler, Dot. She has the perfect life - except that she's deeply unhappy. David expects the world of Violet but gives little of himself in return. When she meets Teddy, a roguish small-time bass player, Violet comes alive, and soon she's risking everything for the chance to find herself again.

Los Ángeles, Nochevieja de 1949. El cadáver mutilado de un hombre joven, los ojos arrancados, mordeduras por todo el cuerpo...es el primer asesinato de la oleada que sembrará el pánico en los entornos comunistas de la ciudad. Danny Upshaw, ayudante del sheriff, se obsesiona con el caso mientras se convierte en anzuelo contra los comunistas en Hollywood. Se sumarán a la caza de brujas Mal Considine, ambicioso teniente de la fiscalía del distrito, y Buzz Meeks, expolicía caído en desgracia.

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee”, she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister”. As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork.

Pursuing literary glory, Edward Gunther gives up his job as a copywriter, sells everything he owns, and moves with his wife and three children from Chicago to Venice. But success does not come as quickly or as painlessly as Edward had hoped. During his first month in Italy, he struggles to get his essays published, argues with his wife about the family finances, and embarks on an unsteady affair with Nina Callahan, an American poet who insists on keeping him at arm's length.

Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute, the Buddhist retreat where Beth Marriot has taken refuge, and that's a big advantage. Beth has been working as a server, assisting in the kitchen and helping out - discreetly, so the meditators aren't disturbed. The meditators are making big sacrifices to come here and change their lives. So the servers must observe the rules, and silence and separation of the sexes are chief among them.

Carol spends the majority of her vagrant days socializing with her homeless neighbors, arguing with a testy social worker, and wandering the streets with Alphonse, a wayward South African wino and self-professed actor. Alphonse proves to be an inspiring force, and soon Carol is weaning herself off antidepressants as the sifting of her memories - mostly of her upbringing by two aunts in Massachusetts - creates a chance for redemption.

An impeccable ear for language, an eye for the smallest shifts in the cultural landscape, and a preternatural understanding of motivation and behavior, Ann Beattie's renowned storytelling abilities are on dazzling display in The Doctor's House. The novel opens with Nina's account of her brother's sexual appetites and betrayals, and leads into her mother's narrative.

At the International Classical Guitar Competition in Montreal, top-flight musicians fly in from all over the world to compete in a gruelling week. A career can be made or lost here, and the slightest mishap - a lapse of memory, a shaking right hand, a broken fingernail - can ruin years of preparation. Judges and contestants alike battle and scheme to achieve what they most desire here. There is much more than pretty music being performed on this stage.

Frustrated 35-year-old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father's plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac's dreams of attending the University of Michigan fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn't stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical textbook and journal available to him. For practical experience, Isaac performs surgeries on the wildlife around his house, preparing for the day he attends Michigan.

The Deer at the River follows an especially intense period in the life of Noah Dubbins, a young carpenter and father of three living in rural New Hampshire. Noah’s life changes drastically when he returns from work one day to find his wife, Ruth, behaving erratically and reenacting the birth of their youngest son. Ruth is committed to a psychiatric hospital and Noah is left to look after their children on his own. In his loneliness, he wrestles with his lust for an old flame and a burgeoning confusion about his sexuality.

An underground classic, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways", experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister then the last.

When Nancy Hennessy is murdered, she leaves behind two best friends, an adoring husband and daughter, and a secret lover whose identity she took to the grave. Nancy was gorgeous, wealthy, and cherished by those who knew her - from the outside, her life was perfect. But as the investigation into her death flounders and her friends Eleanor and Mary wrestle with their grief, dark details surface that reveal how little they knew their friend, each other, and maybe even themselves.

The fascinating, and largely autobiographical, sequel to J. G. Ballard’s prize-winning Empire of the Sun, that follows Jim to post-war England. The Kindness of Women continues the story of the boy whose life in Japanese-occupied Shaghai was described so memorably in Empire of the Sun, it sets those traumatic events within the context of a lifetime as we follow the narrator, Jim, to England and suburban Shepperton after the war.