Visionary Fiction

This masterful National Book Award winner explores the shattering effects of war on the human mind. Growing up, Birdy dreams of flying like a bird and shares these fantasies with his best friend Al. Years later, World War II sends both men to hospitals - Al for physical wounds and Birdy for psychological trauma. When Birdy falls into a catatonic state, it is Al who tries to pull him out.

In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake—if it was a mistake—until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn’t feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support group on the edge of Manhattan. There he meets two other drifting souls and launches into the business of life, determined to be happy.

Evan Michaels struggles with being different, with having the complete memories of two other people who lived sequentially before him. He fights loneliness and believes he is unique until he meets Poppy. She recognizes his struggle because she is like him, except that she is much older, remembering seven consecutive lives. But there is something else she must share with Evan - she is a member of the secretive Cognomina. They are, in effect, immortals - compiling experiences and skills over lifetimes into near superhuman abilities that they have used to drive history over centuries.

A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.

Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In midtour he bolts from his band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape.

America today is teetering on the edge of the alarming vision presented in LeVar Burton’s debut novel, written more than two decades ago. In 2012, the first African American president is assassinated by a White extremist - just four days after he is elected. The horrific tragedy leads to riots, financial collapse, and ultimately, a full-on civil war. In its aftermath, millions are left homeless as famine and disease spread throughout the country. But from Chicago, a mysterious voice cries out.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.

In The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, you can dine at a restaurant at the end of the universe, cultivate to immortality in the high mountains, watch roses perform Shakespeare, or arrive at the island of the gods on the backs of giant fish to ensure that the world can bloom. Written, edited, and translated by a female and nonbinary team, these stories have never before been published in English and represent both the richly complicated past and the vivid future of Chinese science fiction and fantasy.

Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully—he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he’s also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga. Four days later, there’s a tap on the window: something has happened.

It’s the year 2022. Dani Peterson has been walking in the west of Ireland, conducting historical research for her dissertation. But when she seeks shelter from a storm in Aideen O’Brien’s car, she gets more history than she bargained for. Aideen is a Time Link, with secret access to time travel technology. She sends Dani to 1978 to meet a younger version of herself. The two fall in love and Dani joins Aideen in her work. Their boss is a man from 2253 named Charles Burke, who says his mission is to save the future.

Evan Michaels is back in a new life as a Syrian refugee. When strange memories of his former lives lead him back to Zurich, headquarters of his old family of fellow reincarnationists, the Cognomina, he must reacquire their trust to rejoin their ranks. On the last leg of this journey, he is intercepted by an excommunicated member of the Cognomina who holds some serious grudges. She’s on a mission to wipe out large portions of the world’s population to save the planet from destruction. She proposes a union of the Cognomina and her own group of reincarnationists.

Millions of people are confronting aliens that authorities say do not exist. Now Whitley Strieber, author of the #1 best seller Communion, which detailed his own close encounters, returns with The Grays, a mind-bending journey behind the curtain of secrecy that surrounds the subject of aliens. This audiobook will make you think deeply, not only about the mystery of who the Grays are, but who exactly we are.

After journeying across the stars, a man from Earth finds himself lost among the scarlet deserts, black cliffs and semi-sentient oceans of Tormance, a world lit by the star Arcturus. Pulled northward by the sound of drums, and undergoing strange physical transformations, the Earthman's adventures with the planet's inhabitants begin to shine with arcane significance - ending finally in startling and unforgettable revelations.

When Olivia Kavanagh finds an old manuscript in her late grandfather's bookshop, she becomes fascinated by the story it tells of two young girls who mystified the world. But it is the discovery of an old photograph that leads her to realize how the fairy girls' lives intertwine with hers, connecting past to present and blurring her understanding of what is real and what is imagined. As she begins to understand why a nation once believed in fairies, can Olivia find a way to believe in herself?

After a soul-crushing Tinder date, a woman returns to her apartment to cook some squid and seethe. Her eye starts to itch; her memory starts to skip, and she starts to spiral. Offense is an auditory explosion and an exploration of the rash of loneliness...and what happens when the voices inside our heads start to warp.

All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading.

On the occasion of the centenary of Mata Hari's execution for espionage in 1917, Paulo Coelho reconsiders her life and character in a fictional memoir. In a series of letters written from prison on the eve of her death, Mata Hari reflects on the choices she has made to always pursue her own truth - from her childhood in a small Dutch town to unhappy years as the wife of an alcoholic diplomat in Java to her calculated and self-fashioned rise to celebrity in Paris and across Europe as an exotic dancer.

Oliver Dalrymple, nicknamed Boo because of his pale complexion and staticky hair, is an outcast at his Illinois middle school - more interested in biology and chemistry than the friendship of other kids. But after a tragic accident, Boo wakes up to find himself in a very strange sort of heaven: a town populated by only 13-year-old Americans.

At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott; and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.

Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world "harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains", he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the best seller lists.