Notable Fiction 2008

As Alice Blackwell faces a personal crisis on the most important day of her husband's presidency, she takes a moment to consider the winding and unexpected path led her to the White House. A bookish, card-carrying... more info...

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife, Rema, disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves just like her! Certain that the original Rema is alive and in hiding,... more info...

On what seems like a normal Saturday night in Las Vegas, a twelve-year-old boy vanishes, and other events on that same evening reverberate through the lives of several seemingly unconnected strangers,... more info...

After a soldier's bullet pierces Dai Wei as he protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he falls into a deep coma, and his mother moves him from one place to another to avoid the constant surveillance of... more info...

When he burst onto the literary scene with "Gob's Grief" and "The Children's Hospital," Chris Adrian proved himself a writer of extraordinary talent and limitless inventiveness. Now, in "A Better Angel,"... more info...

Riding a gathering storm of minimalist intensity, this here's the story of paramedic wannabe Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-90s New York City, a city wracked by crack wars, unemployment... more info...

In "Jim the Boy" acclaimed author Tony Earley told the moving story of a precocious ten-year-old boy named Jim Glass, and now Earley returns to that unforgettable young man, now eighteen years old and... more info...

The seven stories in this dazzling, emotionally riveting tour de force cross ethnic, cultural, and linguistic barriers to picture the hearts and minds of characters from all oveer the world. A debut collection... more info...

A spellbinding collection of thirteen stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author: captivating, darkly comic tales of obsession, mystery, and wonder. Divided into three sections, these stories explore... more info...

Bennie Ford, a 53-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare... more info...

Aging author Senor C has been commissioned to write a series of essays entitled "Strong Opinions," of which he has many. After hiring a beautiful young typist named Anya, the two embark on a relationship... more info...

Ozick's latest work of fiction brings together four long stories, including the novella-length "Dictation," that showcase her sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart. Each starts in the comic... more info...

A riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estrate shark of oan ex-wife, on a road trip across America. A 2009 Michigan Notable Book... more info...

This intense interweaving of biography, history, surrealist fiction, and memoir centers around the life and history of Frantz Fanon, the French psychiatrist and revolutionary that left a legacy of thought... more info...

It all began when a stunning young Chinese woman named Jin Li agreed to take a car ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn with two illegal Mexican women. Now Jin Li is running for her life. See, she's not quite... more info...

Each character is a pioneer of a sort - some are billionaires, some are escapists, and some just think the rest of the country has it wrong. Proulx's sympathies lie with the men and women fighting to survive... more info...

Winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Twelve-year-old Ren is missing his left hand. How it was lost is one of the mysteries that Ren has been trying to solve his entire life - as well as who... more info...

"His Illegal Self" is a touching novel from Peter Carey, about a boy named Che, raised by his strict but wealthy grandmother, who yearns for the parents who have left him behind. As Che becomes more and... more info...

A brilliantly reimagined telling of the prodigal son parable, set at the same moment and in the same Iowa town as the author's preceeding, incandescent novel Gilead. Here, the Reverend Boughton's hell-raising... more info...

In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophmore year on the postoral, conservative campus of Ohio's... more info...

National Book Award Finalist. On March 2, 1908 nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant was shot to death on the doorstep of the Chicago chief of police and cast as a would-be... more info...

In this superb new novel, Pat Barker returns to her most renowned subject: the devastation and psychic damage wrought by WWI on all levels of British society. In the spring of 1914, a group of young students... more info...

In his latest novel (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, among others), Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show readers the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control... more info...

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. Toni Morrison conjures up the beautiful, untamed lawless world that was America in the 17th century. In the 1680s, the slave trade in the Americas is... more info...

A half-starved young Russian is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.... more info...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans - a banker originally from the Netherlands - finds himself marooned and left alone after his English... more info...

Clive James ineffably combines humor and great tragedy to create poems that are at once traditional yet engagingly fresh. With this coruscating work, James dispenses with his reputation as a penennial... more info...

David Guterson, the bestselling author of "Snow Falling on Cedars," returns with a moving novel of friendship, trust, and the reality that intrudes on both. Though John William Barry and Neil Countryman... more info...

Carolyn Chute, the bestselling author of "The Beans of Egypt, Maine," returns with "The School on Heart's Content Road," a moving tale of abandoment, family, and culture. Evicted from his home by his half-brother,... more info...

Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" was rediscovered only 200 years agoand published for the first time... more info...

Set in the affluent American plantations and desperate cities of pre-revolutionary Cuba, Rachel Kushner's debut novel provides a fascinating window into a society of stark, at times brutal racial and social... more info...

Widely acclaimed, 2666 was composed in the last two years of Roberto Bolano's life. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist,... more info...

Lahiri's debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pultizer Prize, among other honors. This latest collection of short stories is both the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International... more info...

There is no better introduction to this amazing, experimental novelist than by reading "The Unfortunates." A legendary 1960s experiment in form, the work is the author's famous "book in a box," in which... more info...

On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever...On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective Jackson Brodie finds... more info...

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and Notable Book of the Year; a Denver Post Editor's Choice. These deeply moving 31 short-stories glimpse the lives of ordinary men & women, illuminating the... more info...