Five Recently-Arrived Titles from the Fiction Section:
And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini, the #1 ‘New York Times’-bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how people love, how they take care of one another, and how choices resonate through generations. From Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.
Big Brother is a striking novel about siblings, marriage, and obesity from Lionel Shriver, the acclaimed author the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the ‘toxic’ dishes that he’d savored through their courtship, and spends hours each day to manic cycling. Then, when Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the airport, she doesn’t recognize him. In the years since they’ve seen one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me.Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much sacrifice we’ll make to save single members of our families, and whether it’s ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.
Fortune’s Rocks (40th Anniversary Edition) – Anita Shreve
In turn-of-the-century New England 14-year-old Olympia Biddeford is spending the summer with her parents at their seasonal house at Fortune’s Rocks. She is swiftly despatched to Boston when it’s discovered she has embarked on an affair with a friend of her father’s, but Olympia is already pregnant.
A literary event, a major new novel, his first work of fiction in seven years, from the universally acclaimed master and PEN/Faulkner winner: a sweeping, seductive love story set in post-World War II America that tells of one man’s great passions and regrets over the course of his lifetime.
The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.
Read Godelinde’s You Review of last year’s hardcover/large paperback here.
