Booklist

"Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block -- her neighbor Theo....

In his bestselling and lavishly praised first book of stories, Adam Haslett explores lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them. The impact is at once harrowing and thrilling. An elderly inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. A bereaved boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a long-time...

A transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. When, in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this "dazzling" (Entertainment Weekly) saga of epic scope is both a family and a political drama.

The aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family preside over their large household, made up of their five adult children and their respective children, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. Each set of family members occupies a floor

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Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where...

"From international bestseller and Booker Prize-nominee Siri Hustvedt comes a provocative novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, Then tells the indelible story of a young Midwestern woman's fixation with her mysterious neighbor over the course of a threadbare year in 1970s New York" -- 1970s, New York City. S.H., aka 'Minnesota' listens to Lucy through the thin walls of their building, and transcribes her neighbor's bizarre and increasingly...

A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows pregnant thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a primitive human species. Evolution has reversed itself: woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. For Cedar Hawk Songmaker, this change is profound and deeply personal:...

"It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings--his Bible is their "book of strange new...

Following the death of New York City painter Oscar Feldman, an artist known for his paintings of the female nude, two rival biographers compete and collide as they set out to tell his life story, with the help of his wife Abigail, sister Maxine, and Teddy, his longtime mistress, in a satirical novel of literary rivalry.