In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Joness Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and “Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way).” In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is […]
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate — […]
Kim Edwardss stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mothers silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has […]
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthys masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the […]
The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well… J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregons “torchbearer for the nihilistic generation” deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities […]
Nick Hornbys second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And hes discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women – through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: hes got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps […]
In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out […]
After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the days, then the hours, then the hours, then the seconds until his release tick away, he can feel a storm building. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in apparently adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow […]
It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but the very funny novel High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This funny novel is obsessed with music; Hornbys narrator is an early-thirtysomething English guy who runs a London record store. He sells albums […]
Readers beware. The brilliant, breathtaking conclusion to J.K. Rowlings spellbinding series is not for the faint of heart–such revelations, battles, and betrayals await in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that no fan will make it to the end unscathed. Luckily, Rowling has prepped loyal readers for the end of her series by doling out […]
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” has been one of the most discussed, acclaimed, and debated novels in recent memory. And with good reason as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted, “Jonathan Safran Foer has done something both masterful and absolutely necessary: he has written the first great novel about September 11.” Foer confronts a subject few writers […]
In the world of the near future, who will control womens bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to […]
The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. […]
In Russias struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture, as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation. Tolstoy gave his personal approval […]
What can we never do? Barrow looks at what limits there might be to human discovery, and what we might find, ultimately, to be unknowable, undoable, or unthinkable. Science is a big success story, but where will it end? And, indeed, will it end? Weaving together a tapestry of surprises, Barrow explores the frontiers of […]