Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE STRANGER INSIDE de Lisa Unger

“Astute Engrossing thriller” – starred Kirkus

The Stranger Inside
Lisa Unger
Park Row,publication September 2019

« A darkly thrilling tale of survival and obsession. Lisa Unger never disappoints. » —Riley Sager, bestselling author of Lock Every Door
“It’s not often that I’m stunned by the ending to a novel. But The Stranger Inside is rich with surprise from the very first page. It’s a smart, taut thriller.” —Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and Midwives
Rain Winter, a former investigative journalist and news producer is trying to live the perfect suburban life. She very much wants to be an involved stay-at-home mom for her daughter Lily and most of the time she loves it. But she is also still drawn to the career she left behind, she misses her work friends and doesn’t always find it easy to relate to other mothers on the playground or even to her busy working husband. Even though this is a thriller, Rain’s story, her struggle to reconcile her two selves adds an extra layer to the already great story and will resonate on another level with every female reader of the book.
When she was twelve, Rain narrowly escaped an abduction while walking to a friend’s house. Her two best friends, Tess and Hank, were not as lucky. Tess never came home, and Hank was held in captivity before managing to escape. Their abductor was sent to prison but years later was released. Then someone delivered real justice—and killed him in cold blood. And now, another brutal murderer who escaped justice is found dead and Rain is instantly drawn into the case. Eerie similarities to the murder of her friends’ abductor force Rain to revisit memories she’s worked hard to leave behind.
In The Stranger Inside Lisa Unger has created a very compelling and original killer and has stretched the boundaries and skillfully blurred the lines between right and wrong, crime and justice, and most importantly who should be administering it.
Lisa Unger is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of fourteen novels. Her last l Under My Skin and her short story The Sleep Tight Motel were nominated for Edgar Award.

THIS TRAIN IS BEING HELD de Ismée Williams

When family and class differences threaten the love of two teens in this contemporary romance

THIS TRAIN IS BEING HELD
by Ismee Williams
Amulet, Publication février 2020

When private school student Isabelle Warren first meets Dominican-American Alex Rosario on the 1 train, she remembers his green eyes and gentlemanly behavior. He remembers her long ballet dancer’s legs and untroubled happiness, something he feels belongs to all rich kids. As the two grow closer in and out of the subway, Isabelle learns of Alex’s father, who is hell-bent on Alex being a contender for the major leagues despite Alex’s desire to go to college and become a poet. Alex learns about Isabelle’s Havana-born mother, Eliza, a woman with a prejudice against Latino men, who pressures her daughter to stay away from him. When Isabelle’s father loses his job and her older brother struggles with his mental health, her relationship with Alex falters. But fate—and the 1 train—throw them together when Isabelle needs him the most.
Ismée Williams is a pediatric cardiologist by day and an accomplished author by night. Her first book with Abrams, Water in May, was released in 2017 to critical acclaim. She lives in New York City.

HEATHCLIFF REDUX AND STORIES de Lily Tuck

A provocative and haunting novella and stories that excavates, with cool precision, the hidden dynamics and unspoken conflicts at the heart of human relationships.

HEATHCLIFF REDUX AND STORIES
by Lily Tuck
Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2020

In the title novella, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights at the same time that she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. With “Labyrinth Two,” Tuck pays homage to Roberto Bolaño in a story of a single photograph that illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café. Another story describes a woman who, in the wake of her unstable husband’s arrest, brings home a peculiar item she finds on the beach, while “Carl Schurz Park” details a forgotten act of violence in New York as it returns to haunt the present. In the final story, a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult.
With keen psychological insight and delicate restraint, Heathcliff Redux and Stories pries open the desires, doubts, and secret motives of its characters and exposes their vulnerabilities to the light. Sharp and unflinching, the novella and stories together form an exquisitely crafted collection from one of our most treasured, award-winning writers.

Lily Tuck is the author of seven novels: Sisters; The Double Life of Liliane; I Married You for Happiness; Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up; The Woman Who Walked on Water; Siam or the Woman Who Shot a Man, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The News from Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award; the short-story collections The House at Belle Fontaine and Limbo, and Other Places I Hav

Lily Tuck’s writing has been praised as « enlivening » and « elegant »

SISTERS
By Lily Tuck
Atlantic Monthly Press, September 2017

Lily Tuck’s critically lauded, bestselling I Married You for Happiness was hailed by the Boston Globe as “an artfully crafted still life of one couple’s marriage.” In her singular new novel Sisters, Tuck gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal. Tuck’s unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise buildup to an eerily wonderful conclusion is a triumph of subtlety and surprise.
With Sisters, Lily Tuck delivers a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession—charting with elegance and insight love in all its phases.

THIN GIRLS de Diane Clarke

An understanding and dissection of young women’s emotions, friendships and rivalries

THIN GIRLS
by Diana Clarke
HarperCollins, Publication summer 2020

Diana Clarke is a recent MFA graduate of Purdue, where Roxane Gay was her advisor.

“Diana Clarke is a fiercely intelligent writer who wields words like weapons and tells stories of great importance. THIN GIRLS is a deeply necessary novel, its subject troubling and true, but Clarke’s wit and humor keep this tale from sinking, and instead make it an engrossing, beguiling delight to read. We are witnessing the start of a long, successful career.” Roxane Gay
Rose and Lily Winters are twins. Born to disinterested, uninvolved parents they rely on each other even more than twins usually do. They’re so close their bond is almost magical – they can taste each other’s emotions, and have a fierce need to protect and balance each other…when Rose stops eating, Lily starts… when Lily starts eating, Rose stops… But when their social standings at school start to differ, Rose becomes anorexic and Lily continues eating—overeating—everything that Rose wouldn’t and couldn’t. At the start of the story, Rose is living in a rehabilitation clinic and Lily is her sole visitor and the only connection to a normal life. But Rose has no desire to make real progress in her recovery or live that normal life, it’s as if she were waiting to die. When Lily joins a bizarre dieting cult Rose realizes that she is the only person who can help her and to do that she finally must get better herself.
THIN GIRLS powerfully depicts the world of eating disorders and what it means to recover from them but at its center it is first and foremost a story about sisterhood, love, and lifelong friendships. It is a dark, visceral, painful and truly beautiful.

THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE de Steven Wright

A sharp and urgent debut from a gifted young lawyer and fiction writer

THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE
by Steven Wright
Ecco, April 2020

*Sold in a four-way auction for six figures*

Toussaint Andre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful African-American political consultant, his aggressive tactics have tarnished his firm’s reputation. Now his boss and mentor Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and shepherded his career, is exiling him to the boondocks of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting in favor of the sale of pristine public land to the highest bidder.
Dre arrives in God-fearing, flag-waving Carthage County, an area America’s New Economy has left behind, with only Mrs. Fitz’s well-meaning yet naïve grandson Brendan on his « team. » A local is needed as a strawman to collect signatures, and Dre hires blue-collar couple, oafish Tyler Lee and his pious wife Chalene, to act as the initiative’s public face.
Under Dre’s cynical direction, a land grab is disguised as a righteous fight for faith and liberty. As lines are crossed and lives ruined, Dre’s increasingly cutthroat campaign threatens the last remnants of his own humanity and the very soul of Carthage County.
A piercing portrait of our fragile democracy and one man’s unraveling, THE COYOTES OF CARTHAGE may very well be the political novel of our times.

STEVEN WRIGHT is a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, where he co-directs the Wisconsin Innocence Project. From 2007-2012 he served as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice. He has written numerous essays about race, criminal justice, and election law for the New York Review of Books. Steven is a 2014 graduate of the MFA program at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and holds a Masters of Arts in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University.