A Hot Collection of Gripping Fiction
Discover a gripping fiction collection featuring page-turners like *The Road*, *Water for Elephants*, *The Book Thief*, and *The Thirteenth Tale*. This curated list of riveting novels from bestselling authors—including Cormac McCarthy, Sara Gruen, and Philippa Gregory—is perfect for readers seeking compelling, unforgettable stories that keep you hooked from the first page.
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, but their world--and Sai's romance with her handsome Nepali tutor--is threatened by a Nepalese insurgency. By the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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Tangerine Dream
by Ken Douglas
Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.
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Body Surfing
by Anita Shreve
Struggling to start over again after being divorced and widowed while still in her twenties, Sydney tutors the daughter of a wealthy couple during a New Hampshire summer but finds herself caught up in a bitter family squabble involving her charge's two grown brothers. By the author of The Pilot's Wife.
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Still Summer
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Twenty years after a shared childhood marked by their considerable popularity, Tracy, Olivia, and Holly reunite on a luxury Caribbean cruise during which a chance mistake triggers a series of devastating events that puts their survival in jeopardy. By the author of Cage of Stars. 100,000 first printing.
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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The Lying Tongue
by Andrew Wilson
Relocating to Venice, Adam Woods becomes the personal assistant to a famous elderly expatriate novelist, whose biography Adam secretly pens before the writer discovers him and launches a psychological contest to determine how the biography will end.
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Dream when You're Feeling Blue
by Elizabeth Berg
Through their letters, sisters Kitty and Louise tell their tales after watching the boys leave for battle during World War II and Kitty joining the USO as a dancer.
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Finn
by Jon Clinch
In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature's most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn's father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain's classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own. Finnsets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body-flayed and stripped of all identifying marks-drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim's identity, shape Finn's story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn's terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn's mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity-not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright. Finnis a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America's past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
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Rise and Shine
by Anna Quindlen
Life will never be the same for Meghan, the star of Rise and shine, after she mutters words of profanity into the open mike, as they cut for a commercial break.
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Killing Johnny Fry
by Walter Mosley
When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the experience dissolves his calm, everyday existence into a thirst for revenge and a sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life.
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The Boleyn Inheritance
by Philippa Gregory
From the author of "The Other Boleyn Girl" comes an atmospheric evocation of the court of Henry VIII, and the one woman who destroyed two of his queens.
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Sisters
by Danielle Steel
During an annual Fourth of July family gathering, the lives of four sisters--Candy, a supermodel; Tammy, a TV producer; Sabrina, an ambitious young lawyer; and Annie, an artist--are changed forever by tragedy as they come together to support one another and to pick up the pieces, while one sister struggles to heal her shattered body and soul. 800,000 first printing.
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The Knitting Circle
by Ann Hood
After the sudden loss of Stella, her only child, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle in Providence, Rhode Island. Seeking a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days, she little realizes that the circle will change her life.
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The Friday Night Knitting Club
by Kate Jacobs
Gathering for their weekly knitting club at a small yarn shop on Manhattan's upper west side, a group of friends shares such challenges as raising children, navigating the ups and downs of their education and careers, and pursuing uncertain relationships.
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The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
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The Double Bind
by Chris Bohjalian
Working at a homeless shelter, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel embarks on an obsessive search for the truth behind the photos.
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Coal Black Horse
by Robert Olmstead
When Robey Childs's mother experiences a premonition about her husband, a Civil War soldier, she sends her only son to retrieve his father from the battlefield, accompanied by a horse that becomes his only companion as he makes his way through the destruc
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The God of Animals
by Aryn Kyle
Based on the author's short story titled "The Foaling Season," the tale of rancher's daughter Alice Winston finds her helping to support the family business by boarding the horses of rich neighbors and leaving behind the innocence of her youth.
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The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. Attacked by a force he cannot see and confronted with memories he cannot ignore, Eric discovers he is being hunted by a psychic predator, a shark. This creature may exist only in his mind, but it soon starts making some very real appearances in his world. Loaded with letters from his past self, each signed 'With regret and also hope, The First Eric Sanderson', Eric embarks on a quest to recover his life. A love story, an adventure, a psychological drama - this wild, touching, modern tale is cut through with an understated humour and warmth. The depths of love, language, memory and the inevitability of loss have never been plumbed with such deep-hearted imagination.
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The Camel Bookmobile
by Masha Hamilton
Reminiscent of "Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Camel Bookmobile" is a captivating novel about a young American woman who leaves her everyday life behind, to bring the joy of reading to a small African village.
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Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Vanora Bennett
In an epic tale set against a backdrop of civil-war torn sixteenth-century Europe, portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger flees to the safety of Tudor England in order to escape artistic censorship.
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Burning Bright
by Tracy Chevalier
Presents a sweeping and romantic tale set against the historical backdrop of William Blake's London.
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The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
Kvothe spends his life fighting hidden and familiar foes while struggling to master his magical powers and battle ancient evils that threaten his world.
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The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish
by Elise Blackwell
Set in southern Louisiana in the weeks preceding the great flood of 1927, this novel depicts a place and way of life about to be forever changed. On the verge of manhood and a stone’s throw of the rising Mississippi River, Louis Proby is pulled between his love of the natural world and the glittering temptations of New Orleans, between the beautiful Nanette Lançon and a father who no longer seems larger-than-life, between the simplicity of childhood and the complicated decisions of adulthood. Louis comes of age at a time when the country is coming of age. In Louisiana, it’s a time when the powerful prove themselves willing to sacrifice the poor to protect their position. As the people of Cypress Parish go about their daily lives, bankers in New Orleans are plotting to alter those lives irrevocably. Like so many calamities, the one that befalls Cypress Parish has both natural and human causes. Based on historical events and narrated on the eve of another disaster, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish tells the story of a young man growing up in a time and place not quite like any other.
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Falling Boy
by Alison McGhee
In McGhee's strange and powerful novel, a small band of tough kids turn the myth of the super hero inside out as they face down the shadows of childhood, responsibility, and life in a quiet town.
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Valentine
by Chet Raymo
In this novel that explores the life of St. Valentine, Raymo draws on the tradition that Valentine was a physician in love with the blind Julia to thread his way through the fabric of romance while illuminating the world of the Roman Empire of Claudius II.
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Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A modern classic of adolescent angst and ambition set in the world of prep school, from the author of Romantic Comedy and Eligible—“a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics” (The Boston Globe) One of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of—and, ultimately, a participant in—their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered. Ultimately, Lee’s experiences—complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant—coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
