Monopolizing Fiction
Explore the ultimate list of monopolizing fiction books that dominate the genre. Discover must-read titles that captivate and control the literary world with gripping narratives.
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March
by Geraldine Brooks
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize--a powerful love story set against the backdrop of the Civil War, from the author of The Secret Chord. From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction.
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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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The Bastard of Istanbul
by Elif Shafak
A âvivid and entertainingâ (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick) "Zesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." âUSA Today As an Armenian American living in San Francisco, Armanoush feels like part of her identity is missing and that she must make a journey back to the past, to Turkey, in order to start living her life. Asya is a nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Jonny Cash and the French existentialists. The Bastard of Istanbul tells the story of their two families--and a secret connection linking them to a violent event in the history of their homeland. Filed with humor and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it, and about Turkey itself.
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Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris
No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
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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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The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
In this rousingly good ghost story, Setterfield's debut novel rejuvenates the genre with a closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths.
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The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett
From the author of The History Boys and The Clothes They Stood Up In A deliciously funny novella that celebrates the pleasure of reading. When the Queen in pursuit of her wandering corgis stumbles upon a mobile library she feels duty bound to borrow a book. Aided by Norman, a young man from the palace kitchen who frequents the library, Bennett describes the Queen's transformation as she discovers the liberating pleasures of the written word. With the poignant and mischievous wit of The History Boys, England's best loved author revels in the power of literature to change even the most uncommon reader's life.
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The Collaborator of Bethlehem
by Matt Rees
The murder of a leader of the Palestinian Martyrs Brigade leads to the arrest of George Saba, a Palestinian Christian accused of collaborating with the Israelis. Omar Yussef, a modest history teacher at a United Nations school in the West Bank, is impelled to investigate the murder to exonerate his former pupil, whom he knows is innocent. As he struggles to save George, Omar Yussef is drawn into a complex plot where it is impossible to tell friend from enemy.
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River
by Lowen Clausen
From a remote corner of a vanishing American landscape, a bereaved father begins a journey down the river that has been all but inseparable from his life. At the riverâs origin the shallow stream courses through the ranch where he was born. It is where he fell in love the first time and where the ashes of his son have been poured. âNow, before itâs too late, before I lose the will to do anything, I am leaving this land to follow the sticks I dropped into the river so long ago.â But this manâs passage along the interlacing rivers to the ocean will not be simple or disconnected from the life he leaves behind. His estranged sonâs last angry words echo in his memory, and despite moments of pure concentration on the waters ahead, the solitary voyager finds the past seeping into his thoughts and dreams. InRiver,novelist Lowen Clausen has created a story of deep beauty and seriousness, in which he weaves together the complex threads of one manâs search for wholeness. Clausenâs rich, elegiac prose becomes its own landscape and river, transporting the reader on a journey through despair and doubt into discovery.
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Life Class
by Pat Barker
A novel capturing the devastation and psychological trauma of the Great War on every level of British society focuses on a group of young art students, including Paul Tarrant, a Red Cross volunteer, who discovers that life, love, and art will never be the
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The Last Cowgirl
by Jana Richman
In the tradition of Pam Houston and Anita Shreve, a powerhouse new talent delivers an unforgettable emotional journey of loss, love, and healing.
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My Enemy's Cradle
by Sara Young
Cyrla has been warned that her neighbors know she is half Jewish--grounds for certain arrest in their Nazi-occupied town. A cruel twist of fate places Cyrla in a terrible dilemma in this page-turning debut novel.
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Now You See Him
by Eli Gottlieb
His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you've heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his early twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid upstate New York town. About a dozen years later, he murdered his writer-girlfriend and committed suicide. . . . The deaths of Rob Castor and his girlfriend begin a wrenching and enthrallingly suspenseful story that mines the explosive terrains of love and paternity, marriage and its delicate intricacies, family secrets and how they fester over time, and ultimately the true nature of loyalty and trust, friendship and envy, deception and manipulation. As the media takes hold of this sensational crime, a series of unexpected revelations unleashes hidden truths in the lives of those closest to Rob. At the center of this driving narrative is Rob's childhood best friend, Nick Framingham, whose ten-year marriage to his college sweetheart is faltering. Shocked by Rob's death, Nick begins to reevaluate his own life and his past, and as he does so, a fault line opens up beneath him, leading him all the way to the novel's startling conclusion. In this ambitious and thrilling novel, award-winning author Eli Gottliebâwith extraordinarily luxuriant and evocative proseâtakes us deep into the human psyche, where the most profound of secrets are kept.
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The Somnambulist
by Jonathan Barnes
This extraordinary tale involves Edward Moon, stage magician and detective, his silent sidekick the Somnambulist, and a devilish plot to re-create the apocalyptic prophecies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and bring the British Empire crashing down.
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Gardens of Water
by Alan Drew
The lives of two families living on the outskirts of Istanbul are changed by a massive earthquake that brings them together in a dangerous intimacy in which forbidden love blossoms between Irem, a Kurdish Muslim girl, and Dylan, a young American.
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The Boys in the Trees
by Mary Swan
âThis is a mesmerizing novel, that can truly claim to be filled with a âterrible beauty.âââAlice Munro Newly arrived to the countryside, William Heath, his wife, and two daughters appear the picture of a devoted family. But when accusations of embezzlement spur William to commit an unthinkable crime, those who witnessed this affectionate, attentive father go about his routine of work and family must reconcile action with character. A doctor who has cared for one daughter, encouraging her trust, examines the finer details of his brief interactions with William, searching for clues that might penetrate the mystery of his motivation. Meanwhile the other daughterâs teacher grapples with guilt over a moment when fate wove her into a succession of events that will haunt her dreams. In beautifully crafted prose, Mary Swan examines the volatile collisions between our best intentionsâhow a passing stranger can leave an indelible mark on our lives even as the people we know most intimately become alienated by tides of self-preservation and regret. In her nuanced, evocative descriptions a locket contains immeasurable sorrow, trees provide sanctuary and refuge to lost souls, and grief clicks into place when a man cocks the cold steel barrel of a revolver. A supreme literary achievement, The Boys in the Trees offers a chilling story that swells with acutely observed emotion and humanity.
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The Accident Man
by Tom Cain
Hired to orchestrate a fatal accident in a Paris tunnel, hired killer Samuel Carver finds himself targeted by the forces that hired him when the job goes terribly wrong, a circumstance that compels him to execute the most daring feat of his career. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.
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All Shall be Well; and All Shall be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall be Well
by Tod Wodicka
A wildly inventive, mesmerizing, and deeply moving debut novel that features one of the most winning, oddball characters to come along in years.
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Earthly Pleasures
by Karen Neches
When Skye Sebring, a hospitality greeter inside the pearly gates of Heaven, meets lawyer Ryan Blaine during his brush with death after a motorcycle accident, she falls so deeply in love that she follows him back to Earth, a world with strange customs she knows nothing about -- until she discovers that all of life's lessons can be learned from the lyrics of five Beatles songs.
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Ellington Boulevard
by Adam Langer
A wildly entertaining novel about real estate, Manhattan, and the lengths people go to in order to live in a small apartment on 106th Street and realize their dreams.
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Five Days in Autumn
by Langston Keane
Carter Lee, a work-consumed corporate executive, has no life other than his job. He becomes privy to the private journals of his dying grandfather and uncovers a past that binds their lives together in an unexpected way.
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Obedience
by Will Lavender
âWith superb confidence, Lavender constructs a brilliant fictional web of lies, inventively warping the psychological thriller to fit the confines of a scholarly investigation.â âKirkus Reviews When the students in Winchester Universityâs Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered. At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous? The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurredâand the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.
