New Literary Fiction

Tepper enjoys sitting in his car, reading his newspaper in peace. His car always seems to be parked in a prime spot and other drivers want to know if Tepper is going out. He isn't. This drives some people crazy - including the mayor - but leads others to think Tepper harbors some hidden wisdom. The tale that emerges is "refreshing and completely likable."

An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven—it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere everyone can feel safe, loved, and accepted.

Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, "the French rat". That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge - or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why.

Clayton Miller's life is a mess. His career as one of the country's best comedy script writers has stalled and his long term girlfriend has left him for his ex best friend and ex writing partner. Just when he thinks his life couldn't get any worse, he commits a spectacularly public fall from grace and with the press hounding him, his agent banishes him to the middle of nowhere until the dust has settled.

After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with 12 new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina, and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities.

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Whittled down with a singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the listener on a careening joyride around the inside track.

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi Hunter, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of London, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe.

Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents: a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming of age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real estate and technological developments that foreshadow a drastically different future.

The singles ministry at New Day Temple of Faith is beginning to unravel, and the pastor is considering dissolving it. Some members believe the only way to hold it together is by getting their pastor to join. And why shouldn't their leader show support by joining, considering the pastor's own single status? Some church members support the idea, while others frown upon the fact that they are being led by a shepherd who is single in the first place.

Ingrid is desperate to sell up and move on. Recently widowed, she no longer needs the large house or the treasures (and tat) collected by her late husband, Tommy, an auctioneer. Then there’s the debt he left her with, too. So, she jumps at the chance to downsize and move to Willowbrook on a temporary lease. She’ll open a pop-up shop for just one year – to dispose of Tommy’s accumulated goods – and then move on. No getting embroiled in village life. But Ingrid hasn’t reckoned on Willowbrook’s extrovert local ladies. Or handsome local craftsman Joel, with whom there’s a definite attraction.

It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her: she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too. Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.

Set in the forest in northern New Zealand, Mila is a young woman descended from healers. A family death causes her terrible guilt and sets her on a path away from home and to the distant city. Her friend Tommy, the quirky boy next door who makes models from bones, helps to bring her home, where she belongs.

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

La protagonista es Berta. Por decisión propia, y que sorprende, acepta casarse con Julio Mitchell. Éste no sólo es más mayor que ella sino que, además, tan sólo lo ha visto una vez. Su decisión hará que abandone Barcelona para marchar a Argentina e iniciar una nueva vida. Berta realizará su viaje a bordo del Reina Victoria Eugenia.

تدور أحداث الرواية حول شاب يتأرجح بين الطبقتين المتوسطة والفقيرة، يرفض تكرار مسيرة والده سائق التاكسي، ويرفض كل الخيارات السهلة المتاحة أمامه، ويقرر التمرد على كل ذلك، متمسكًا بقناعته بأنه مميز وقادر على تغيير العالم.

A new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test and in its aftermath find themselves in a newly uncertain world.

Late September 1957. Henry and Effie, very young newlyweds from Georgia, arrive in Cape May, New Jersey, for their honeymoon only to find the town is deserted. Feeling shy of each other and isolated, they decide to cut the trip short. But before they leave, they meet a glamorous set of people who sweep them up into their drama. The empty beach town becomes their playground, and as they sneak into abandoned summer homes, go sailing, walk naked under the stars, make love, and drink a great deal of gin, Henry and Effie slip from innocence into betrayal, with irrevocable consequences.

A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, The Floating World takes listeners into the heart of Hurricane Katrina with the story of the Boisdores, whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora, the family's fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city, forcing her parents, Joe Boisdore, an artist descended from a freed slave, and his white "uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic.

When June arrives on the coast of New England, baby in arms, an untrustworthy man by her side, Mabel - who rents them a cabin - senses trouble. A few days later, the girl and her child are abandoned. June is soon placed with Mabel's friend, Iris, in town, and her life becomes entwined with a number of locals who have known one another for decades.

After the end of a brutal civil war, London is divided, with slums standing next to a walled city of elites. Monk-like masters are selected for special schooling and shut away for decades, learning to write beautiful compositions for the chimes, played citywide morning and night, to mute memory and keep the citizens trapped in ignorance.