Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE LITTLE LIAR de Mitch Albom

Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel that moves from a small village in Greece during the Holocaust, to America, where the intertwined lives of three survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption.

THE LITTLE LIAR
by Mitch Albom
Harper, November 2023
(via David Black
Literary)

Credit: Jenny Risher

Eleven-year-old Nico Crispi never told a lie. When the Nazi’s invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading towards “the east” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures the passengers that the journey is safe. But when the final train is at the station, Nico sees his family being loaded into a large boxcar crowded with other neighbors. Only after it is too late does Nico discover that he helped send the people he loved—and all the others—to their doom at Auschwitz.
Nico never tells the truth again.
In THE LITTLE LIAR
, his first novel set during the Holocaust, Mitch Albom interweaves the stories of Nico, his brother Sebastian, and their schoolmate Fanni, who miraculously survive the death camps and spend years searching for Nico, who has become a pathological liar, and the Nazi officer who radically changed their lives. As the decades pass, Albom reveals the consequences of what they said, did, and endured.
A moving parable that explores honesty, survival, revenge and devotion, THE LITTLE LIAR is Mitch Albom at his very best. Narrated by the voice of Truth itself, it is a timeless story about the harm we inflict with our deceits, and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.

Mitch Albom is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, which have collectively sold more than forty million copies in forty-seven languages worldwide. He has written seven number-one New York Times bestsellers – including Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time, which topped the list for four straight years – award-winning TV films, stage plays, screenplays, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and a musical. Through his work at the Detroit Free Press, he was inducted into both the National Sports Media Association and Michigan Sports halls of fame and is the recipient of the 2010 Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. After bestselling memoir Finding Chika and “Human Touch,” the weekly serial written and published online in real-time to raise funds for pandemic relief, his latest work is a return to fiction with The Stranger in the Lifeboat (Harper, November 2021). He founded and oversees SAY Detroit, a consortium of nine different charitable operations in his hometown, including a nonprofit dessert shop and food product line to fund programs for Detroit’s most underserved citizens. He also operates an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, which he visits monthly. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

AMERICA FANTASTICA de Tim O’Brien

An American Master returns: The author of The Things They Carried delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery by a disgraced journalist sparks a cross-country chase through a nation corroded by shameless delusion and deceit.

AMERICA FANTASTICA
by Tim O’Brien
Mariner Books/HarperCollins, October 2023

At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in northern California.
“How much is on hand, would you say?” he asked the teller. “I’ll want it all.”
“You’re robbing me?”
“Not 
you,” Boyd replied, revealing a Temptation .38 Special.
Angie Bing, the teller, scraped together $81,000.
Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to take a ride with me. …”
So begins the adventure of Boyd Halverson—star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JC Penny manager—and his irrepressible hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday Boyd and Angie reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police. 
AMERICA FANTASTICA
 marks the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. Just as O’Brien’s modern classic, The Things They Carried, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, AMERICA FANTASTICA  puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.

Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

THOUGHTLESS de Lucie Britsch

The darkly hilarious, brilliantly wise new novel from the author of Sad Janet.

THOUGHTLESS
by Lucie Britsch
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, August 2023
(via Writers House)

All her life, Susan’s loved ones have been hiding a terrible secret from her: If she thinks too hard, her head will explode.
Luckily, her devoted boyfriend, anxious parents and fierce best friend are prepared to do whatever it takes to keep Susan safe in ignorant, thoughtless bliss. And until now, Susan has lived happily in a bubble of TV and takeaways, social media and small talk; anything to distract her from the spiralling thoughts that so often haunt the rest of us — thoughts that would be deadly for her.
But what happens when reality creeps in and Susan’s perfectly curated world starts to crumble? Can we distract ourselves from the real world forever… and should we?

Lucie Britsch’s writing has appeared in Catapult Story, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Split Lip Magazine, and The Sun Magazine, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Sad Janet (W&N, Riverhead, 2020).

MRS. GULLIVER de Valerie Martin

From Orange Prize-winning author and Guggenheim Fellow, Valerie Martin comes a timeless story of female agency.

MRS. GULLIVER
by Valerie Martin
Doubleday, February 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

It’s 1954 on far-flung Verona Island, a tropical paradise with a fragile economy and a rising crime rate. Prostitution is legal and Lila Gulliver is proud of her business, a high-end brothel where her clients are guaranteed privacy and discretion. When Carità Bercy, a young, destitute, and beautiful blind woman arrives at her door seeking employment, Lila decides to give her a chance.
Carità proves a valuable asset to the house, as well as a psychological puzzle to her employer. One hot night, Ian Drohan, the young scion of the wealthiest family on the island, visits Lila’s house and falls madly in love with Carità. Lila doubts his sincerity and fears for Carità‘s future. Carità has no such fears. In fact, Carità is a reckless force of nature, determined to succeed in ways Lila hasn’t even contemplated.

Valerie Martin is the author of 11 novels, including The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, The Confessions of Edward Day, Trespass, and Property; four collections of short fiction; and Salvation, a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property).

OTHERS WERE EMERALDS de Lang Leav

Internationally acclaimed poet Lang Leav’s debut adult novel combines her poetical lyricism and emotional acumen to create an enthralling coming of age narrative set against the backdrop of anti-Asian sentiment sweeping Australia in the late 90’s. A stirring portrayal of guilt, loss, and memory, OTHERS WERE EMERALDS explores the inherent danger of allowing our misconceptions to shape our reality.

OTHERS WERE EMERALDS
by Lang Leav
HarperCollins, September 2023
(via Writers House)

What comes first, the photograph or the memory? The daughter of Cambodian refugees, Ai grew up in the small Australian town of Whitlam populated by Asian immigrants who once fled war-torn countries to rebuild their shattered lives. It is now the late 90’s and despite their parent’s harrowing past, Ai and her tightknit group of school friends: charismatic Brigitte, sweet, endearing Bowie, shy, inscrutable Tin, and politically minded Sying, lead seemingly ordinary lives, far removed from the unimaginable horrors suffered by their parents.
But that carefree innocence is shattered in their last year of school when Ai and her friends encounter a pair of racist men whose cruel acts of intimidation spiral into senseless violence. Grappling with the magnitude of her grief at such a young age, Ai leaves Whitlam for college before her trauma has a chance to fully resolve.
In her second year of college Ai suffers a mental health crisis, driving her back home to Whitlam, a place she swore never to return. There, she reconnects with those she left behind and together they are compelled to look back on the tragedy that shaped their adolescence and examine the role they may have unwittingly played.

Lang Leav is the author of several previous poetry collections, including Love & Misadventure, which was a breakout success in 2013. Her YA novel Sad Girls was published in 2016 and was an international bestseller. Her books often reach #1 on the Straits Times bestseller list in Singapore/Malaysia, where her tour events have drawn large crowds; her previous books have also received major support from bookstores and chains in Australia, New Zealand, the UAE, and Indonesia, where she is incredibly popular. Lang has been featured on CNN, SBS Australia, Intelligence Squared UK, Radio New Zealand and in various publications, including Vogue, Newsweek, the Straits Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times.