Literary Fiction Psychological

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge—she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake.

Twenty-five years ago, a young girl left home to walk to school. Her younger sister soon followed. But one of them arrived, and one of them didn’t. Her sister’s disappearance has defined Willa’s life. Everyone thinks her sister is dead, but Willa knows she isn’t. Because there are some things that only sisters know about each other—and some bonds only sisters can break. When Willa is invited to a party thrown by her first love, she has no reason to expect it will be anything other than an ordinary evening But nothing about Willa’s life has been ordinary since the day her sister disappeared.

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being.

Jessie, thriving again in downtown LA, is sure she’s moved on from her suburban nightmare. Ready to put her failed marriage behind her, she lands a job with the local police department, deferring her acceptance to the FBI’s Academy. She is assigned a straightforward murder in a wealthy neighborhood, a simple case to start her career. But little do her bosses know, there's more to the case than anyone suspected.

Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.

In this gripping thriller, Claire Keesey, the branch manager for a Boston bank, is taken hostage during a robbery. She is released, but Doug MacRay, the brains behind the tough, tight-knit crew of thieves, can't get her out of his mind. Tracking her down without his mask and gun, Doug introduces himself, and their mutual attraction is undeniable - as are the risks of a relationship. Doug imagines a life away from bank robberies and Charlestown. But before that can happen, the crew learns that there may be a way to rob Boston's venerable baseball stadium, Fenway Park.

In this brilliant, multi-layered novel, a young Southerner, Stingo, wants to become a writer. In Brooklyn, he meets Nathan, a brilliant Jewish intellectual involved in a turbulent love-hate affair with Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman. She has a terrible wound in her past, one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S. M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved.

Allan had been away from Coombaragana, flying in the Royal Air Force. Now he has returned, wounded and disillusioned, to his ancestral home. Days before, Jessie Proctor had taken her own life. Why? Allan looked at the young face in the photograph in Jessie’s passport and froze. He knew who she really was.

Lily is haunted by memories of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower and asks the gods for forgiveness.

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner.

Like Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding, Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season, when every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity. Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, Stephen Florida a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.

Herring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life, bored of thinking the same old thoughts. One December day, following a hunch, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the course of everything in his life.

After her mother’s sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to Kelli, her older sister. Overwhelmed with grief and the daily needs of Kelli, who was born with a developmental disability, Karen begins to feel consumed by the isolation of her new role. On top of that, she’s weighed down with guilt over her years spent keeping Kelli and their independent-to-a-fault mother, Irene, at arm’s length.

In a famous but declining Hollywood bar works A Barman. Morbidly amused by the decadent decay of his surroundings, he watches the patrons fall into their nightly oblivion, making notes for his novel. In the hope of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with the cast of variously pathological regulars.

In Watching, 22 year old psychology major - and aspiring FBI agent - Riley Paige finds herself in a battle for her life as her closest friends on campus are abducted and killed by a serial killer. She senses that she, too, is being targeted - and that if she is to survive, she must apply her brilliant mind to stop the killer herself. When the FBI hits a dead end, they are impressed enough by Riley’s keen insight into the killer’s mind to allow her to help.

When the pandemic hits, Kristofer is forced to shutter his successful restaurant in Reykjavik, sending him into a spiral of uncertainty, even as his memory seems to be failing. But an uncanny bolt from the blue—a message from Miko Nakamura, a woman whom he’d known in the sixties when they were students in London—both inspires and rattles him, as he is drawn inexorably back into a love story that has marked him for life.

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime - the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old woman no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime - to transgress moral law - if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, and a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious, and social commentary.

When the body of a woman is discovered in a local park - with her bewildered four-year-old son sitting beside her - veteran social worker Ellen Moore is called in to assist in the police investigation. Positioned beneath a statue of Leto, the goddess of motherhood, the crime is weighted with meaning and, Ellen discovers, remarkably similar to one from a decade past. Ellen's professional duty is to protect the child, but she's not equipped to contend with a killer. As she races to connect the dots, she knows her time is running out.