Some Outstanding Fiction
Discover a curated list of outstanding fiction books that captivate and inspire. Explore must-read novels and literary gems for every reader's taste.
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Bangkok Tattoo
by John Burdett
When the mutilated body of a CIA agent is discovered in District 8 and the killer appears to be a local working girl, Sonchai searches for the truth amid a cover-up orchestrated by his boss, Police Colonel Vikorn.
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The Master
by Colm Toibin
Presents a fictionalized study based upon the many biographical materials and family accounts of nineteenth-century novelist Henry James and examines his life of loneliness, despair, and failed relationships.
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Skinny Dip
by Carl Hiaasen
Marine biologist Chaz Perrone can't tell a sea horse from a sawhorse. And when he throws his beautiful wife, Joey, off a cruise liner, he really should know better. An expert swimmer, Joey makes her way to a floating bale of Jamaican pot-and then to an island inhabited by an ex-cop named Mick Stanahan whose ex-wives include five waitresses and a TV producer. Now Joey wants to get revenge on Chaz and Mick's happy to help her. But in swampy South Florida, separating lies from truths and stupidity from brilliance isn't easy. Especially when you're after a guy like Chaz-who's bad at murder, great at fraud, and just terrible at getting caught...
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The Swallows of Kabul
by Yasmina Khadra
Set in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul, this extraordinary novel "puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban" (San Francisco Chronicle), taking readers into the seemingly divergent lives of two couples—and depicting with compassion and exquisite details the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Mohsen comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair. Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.
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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 Dew Breaker
by Edwidge Danticat
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "brilliant book, undoubtedly the best one yet by an enormously talented writer” (The Washington Post Book World), about love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. In this award-winning, bestselling work of fiction that moves between Haiti in the 1960s and New York in the present day, we meet an unusual man who is harboring a vital, dangerous secret. He is a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, we enter the lives of those around him, and his secret is slowly revealed. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”—or torturer—is an unforgettable story from one of America’s most essential writers.
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Eventide
by Kent Haruf
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Plainsong returns to the high-plains town of Holt, Colorado, with a novel that unveils the immemorial truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience, their selfishness and goodness, and their ability to find family in one another. • "Storytelling at its best.” —Entertainment Weekly The aging McPheron brothers are learning to live without Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they took in and who has now left their ranch to start college. A lonely young boy stoically cares for his grandfather while a disabled couple tries to protect their a violent relative. As these lives unfold and intersect, Eventide reveals Kent Haruf as a novelist of masterful authority. “Stunning.... The dry, cold air of Colorado's high plains seems to intensify the light Kent Haruf shines on every character in his masterful novel.... A book of hope, hope as plain and hard-won as Haruf's keenly styled prose.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
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The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
Born as an old man, Max Tivoli lives his life aging backwards, falling in love and living an odd, sometimes terrifying life in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century.
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Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Told in four distinct voices, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, encapsulating the most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
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Out
by Natsuo Kirino
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • Winner of Japan's Grand Prix for Crime Fiction • Edgar Award Finalist • Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out. This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.
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Good Grief
by Lolly Winston
Thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton desperately wants to be a good widow-a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, she is more of the Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with ice cream for breakfast, breaking down at the supermarket, and showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers-soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, house...and waistline. With humor and chutzpah Sophie leaves town, determined to reinvent her life. But starting over has its hurdles; soon she's involved with a thirteen-year-old who has a fascination with fire, and a handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with-yet.
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Plain Truth
by Jodi Picoult
Ellie Hathaway decides to defend an unmarried Amish woman against the charge of the murder of her own child.
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Salem Falls
by Jodi Picoult
Robbed of his teaching career and reputation by a student's false accusations, Jack St. Bride is struggling to rebuild his life, but accusations of rape by teenage girls from his former school threaten to destroy him once again.
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Perfect Match
by Jodi Picoult
What happens when you do all the right things for all the wrong reasons? As an assistant district attorney in York County, Maine, Nina Frost prosecutes the sort of crimes that tear families apart. She helps clients navigate their way through a nightmare – even though the legal system is not always the faultless compass they want and need it to be. She learns that the easiest way to cross this devastating minefield time and time again is to offer compassion, battle fiercely for justice, and keep her emotional distance. But when Nina and her husband Caleb discover that their five-year-old son Nathaniel has been sexually abused, that distance is impossible to maintain. The world Nina inhabits now seems different from the one she lived in yesterday; the lines between family and professional life are erased; and answers to questions she thought she knew are no longer easy to find. Overcome by anger and desperate for vengeance, Nina ignites a battle that may cause her to lose the very thing she's fighting for.
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Zorro
by Isabel Allende
A swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, he is a child of two worlds. Diego de la Vega's father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage. At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege. Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures -- duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues -- Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
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War Trash
by Ha Jin
Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world where kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, War Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitious book to date.
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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination. Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin.
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Captain Alatriste
by Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte
Wounded seventeenth-century Spanish soldier Alatriste works as a swordsman-for-hire in Madrid, but when his latest job takes an unexpectedly deadly turn, he realizes he is in the employ of one of the Spanish Inquisition's most dangerous figures.
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Pawleys Island
by Dorothea Benton Frank
Hoping to sell some of her watercolors, Becca Sims wanders into the seaside Gallery Valentine, never expecting that her life will be transformed forever by the gallery owner and his best friend, in a new novel set against the backdrop of small-town South Carolina. 250,000 first printing.
