Books I want to read now
Discover must-read fiction with our curated book list featuring Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Philip Roth—perfect for your next great read.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kathy and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
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Everyman
by Philip Roth
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
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A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
“One New Year’s Eve, four people with very different reasons but a common purpose find their way to the top of a fifteen-story building in London. None of them has calculated that, on a date humans favor for acts of significance, in a place known as a local suicide-jumpers’ favorite, they might encounter company. A Long Way Down is the story of what happens next, and of what doesn’t.” —The New York Times Book Review A wise, affecting novel from the beloved, award-winning author of Dickens and Prince, Funny Girl and High Fidelity Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they’ve reached the end of the line. In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.