Charlie Barnes, the figure at the center of Ferris' A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is 68 and on his fifth marriage, and after a self-diagnosed cancer scare, he wants his son to write his life story.
Sometimes, it's not the author you choose, it's the translator. So we've picked three novels where the translation will help you discover new things about the text, even if you can read the original.
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows four people in very different times and places, all connected by an imaginary manuscript — also called "Cloud Cuckoo Land" — by a real author, the philosopher Diogenes.
Altogether, Believing is an elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors.
Both The City Beautiful and Before We Disappear feature young crooks getting by in big cities at the turn of the 19th century, one haunted by his past and the other trapped by his magic powers.
In The Trees, Everett revisits the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, imagining a series of similar killings in the same small Mississippi town. Mixing horror, humor and insight, it's impossible to put down.
Jon McGregor's new novel follows an expedition guide who suffers a stroke in the middle of an Antarctic ice storm and loses the ability to speak — and the people around him at a loss for what to say.
Powers climbs down from the treetops of The Overstory in his latest novel, to tell the story of a widowed father and his troubled son who head into the wilderness to try to figure out their lives.
The atmosphere throughout this account is foreboding, darkened by the shadow COVID-19 cast over the country but also by the dangers to democracy the authors perceive and depict.
R.C. Sherriff's recently reissued 1931 novel, which follows a British family on their two-week holiday, is a reflection on how time changes shape in periods like a vacation — or even a pandemic.
Michelle Quach's immensely lovable YA debut Not Here to Be Liked centers on Eliza, who's just been done out of her dream job as editor of the high school paper by an unqualified but very charming boy.
Amanda Jayatissa's My Sweet Girl is a twisty psychological thriller — but also a nuanced examination of identity as its Sri Lankan American heroine struggles with a murder that may not have happened.
Historian Fernando Cervantes marshals an enormous array of primary and secondary sources to tell the story of the decades that followed Christopher Columbus' arrival to the New World.
The versatile novelist moves away from the heavier themes that won him a brace of Pulitzer Prizes in Harlem Shuffle, a heist caper starring a mostly-upright furniture salesman with a criminal streak.
