Literary Life

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while singlehandedly raising his unusual nine-year-old son, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures of the endangered animals he loves. He is also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face.

Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Pirriwee Public is a beautiful little beachside primary school where children are taught that ‘sharing is caring.’ So how has the annual School Trivia Night ended in full-blown riot? Sirens are wailing. People are screaming. The principal is mortified. And one parent is dead. Was it a murder, a tragic accident or just good parents gone bad? As the parents at Pirriwee Public are about to discover, sometimes it’s the little lies that turn out to be the most lethal.

Elegant, secretive Sabina may be empress of Rome, but she still stands poised on a knife's edge. She must keep the peace between two deadly enemies: her husband, Hadrian, Rome's brilliant and sinister emperor; and battered warrior Vix, who is her first love. But Sabina is guardian of a deadly secret: Vix's beautiful son, Antinous, has become the emperor's latest obsession.

Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing details the life of Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland's high court, a man remote from his wife, his son and daughter and, at least outwardly, his own childhood. The life he has built for himself, between his work in Dublin and his family's retreat by the sea at Cush, is distinguished by order and by achievement. When, like his beloved coastline, it begins to slip away, he is pulled sharply into the present and finds himself revisiting his past.

The Hartes and the Golds have been neighbors for 18 years and are very close. So when Chris and Emily's friendship reaches the next level, nobody is surprised. Then one night, the hospital calls. Seventeen-year-old Emily is dead - shot in the head by a gun Chris took from his father's cabinet. One bullet remains in the chamber, and Chris tells of his suicide pact with Emily. But the police have questions, and soon Chris is on trial for murder.

New York City/Paris, 1942: When American model Jessica May arrives in Europe to cover the war as a photojournalist for Vogue, most of the soldiers are determined to make her life as difficult as possible. But three friendships change that. Journalist Martha Gellhorn encourages Jess to bend the rules. Captain Dan Hallworth keeps her safe in dangerous places so she can capture the stories that truly matter. And most important of all, the love of a little orphan named Victorine gives Jess strength to do the impossible. But her success will come at a price....

Hardacre is the sweeping rags to riches story of the Hardacre family. This dramatic family saga follows generations of the Hardacres from Victorian times to the 1950s. Set against the backdrop of major historical events, Hardacre traces the family's humble beginnings to their position of great wealth. Sam Hardacre makes a tough yet honest living as a fish gutter. But he has ambitions for a life far removed from the harsh existence on the quays of the north English coast. Through drive and determination he builds a business empire and amasses a fortune.

One moment June Nealon was happily looking forward to years full of laughter and adventure with her family, and the next she was staring into a future that was as empty as her heart. Now her life is a waiting game. Waiting for time to heal her wounds, waiting for justice. In short, waiting for a miracle to happen. For Shay Bourne, life holds no more surprises. The world has given him nothing, and he has nothing to offer the world. In a heartbeat, though, something happens that changes everything for him.

The corridor of the Fine Arts Building was deserted, save for two figures at the far end, two men approaching slowly. Rose was about to go into the classroom, where she'd left her purse, when she saw a sign on the door - a crude sign in pencil, on a ragged sheet of paper. "Collapse of Western Civilization - Dr. Norbert Beilstein," it said. "Visitors welcome."

Kim Edwards' stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead she disappears into another city to raise the child herself.

It is 1970. "Bean" Holladay is 12 and her sister, Liz, is 15 when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who flees every place she’s ever lived at the first sign of trouble," takes off to find herself." She leaves her girls enough money for food to last a month or two. But when Bean gets home from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying antebellum mansion that’s been in the family for generations.

Walker & Daughter is Georgia Walker's little yarn shop, tucked into a quiet storefront on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The Friday Night Knitting Club is the ad hoc creation of some of Georgia's regulars, who stroll into the shop looking for tips on knitting and end up finding much, much more. Once a week, they gather to work on their latest projects and to chat - and occasionally clash - over their stories of love, life, and everything in between.

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can - visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told.

In the 1930s, fresh from a stint in the Royal Navy Reserve, and against the wishes of his disapproving father, Fingal O'Reilly goes to Dublin to study medicine. Fingal and his fellow aspiring doctors face the arduous demands of Trinity College and Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital. The hours are long and the cases challenging, but Fingal manages to find time to box and play rugby—and to romance a fetching, gray-eyed nurse named Kitty O'Hallorhan.

The tangled lives of three generations evoke a vanished world in this, the first volume of the Cazalet Chronicle. Home Place, Sussex, 1937. The English family at home.... For two unforgettable summers they gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of war. In the heart of the Sussex countryside these were still sunlit days of childish games, lavish family meals and picnics on the beach.

Ireland, 1959: Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother’s death in childbirth. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling and prepare for their first communions.

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.