Novels Now

This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it traveled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading [...]

Philosophical nothings. Yet somehow, exchanging the small terrors and joys of parenthood with Dr. Peter Kendrick did not seem like nothing. Maybe it was the gulf between their lives which, perversely, made connection seem possible. Maybe it was something else: just Peter. Either way, she had no sensible basis for believing he might phone. But [...]

I don’t know, maybe we’re all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we’re scared shitless of explosive change. But we’re fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash [...]

Marriages break up, I wanted to shout. Fathers can abandon their children, children can be left alone. There is  nothing in the vow that is sacred. There is no security – we are each of us alone. – from Looking After Pigeon, page 180 -
Pigeon is five years old – the youngest of three children [...]

I’ve always felt almost human. I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs. Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell. It’s what’s inside that’s important. The soul. And my soul is very human. – from The Art of Racing in the Rain, page 3 -
Enzo [...]

The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long. For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he’d slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand. One of the loggers had reached for the youth’s [...]

To-Do List:
1. Take Laurie to her one-month wellness appointment.
2. Visit Galigani in the hospital, find out what happened to him.
3. Find George.
4. Interview Kiku (bring own water!).
5. Call Winter Henderson re: hippie chick alibi.
6. Read the parenting book from library.
7. Find the parenting book from library.
8. Oh yeah, diet, exercise, clean car, be good mom/wife, [...]

And holding her hands there, as the minister spoke, he realized that love was making him into far more than he ever could have been on his own. He could have sailed around the earth in a hot-air balloon or been a scientist inside a laboratory solving cancer and still those things would have [...]

My interest – okay, obsession – with math is genuine, and has been since the first time I was ripped away from the life I loved. I buried myself in numbers and word problems where an answer was certain (or at least in the back of the book) and I knew I’d found something I [...]

Every year as August wanes and the school year looms, New Orleans can expect to see at least one or two storms. They are as much a part of the calendar as Thanksgiving or Easter. Many people who can leave town do so, driving to Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, or Jackson or Houston, just [...]

I looked at myself in the mirror. And I saw her. With each step, Margaret’s ghost expanded. Gingerly, I touched the glass. I thought of those fairy-tale mirrors that show you your dearest wish in return for some terrible price. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Your firstborn son for straw woven into gold, a glimpse [...]

Go smiled, said, “When we see ourselves without judgment, then we’ll begin to see and accept others without judgment. We’ll turn the volume down on the external world, and we’ll see we’re all connected, we’re all same-same.” – from Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same, page 175 -
Cesar is a troubled seventeen year old, growing [...]

Where is my village? Where do I live? I live on this train. I used to live in one place and I will live in another but now I live in this perfect place between the past and the future, the known and the unknown, the bad and the good. – from A Disobedient Girl, [...]

She used to think that without her brother she would simply cease to exist. But now, as she heard her lungs gasping for air and felt the ache of her knees against the hardwood floor, she knew her body was stubborn; it would insist on remaining alive, even if her life no longer made sense [...]

“It’s your turn,” Alexander said. When our mother didn’t respond, he repeated, “Mother, it’s your turn.”
But she wasn’t listening. Her face was turned in the direction of the sea, where the lighthouse of our ancestors had been built on the island of Pharos to the east. We were the greatest family in the world, [...]

Miss Skeeter move her eyes back to the window, on Miss Hilly’s Buick. She shake her head, just a little. “Aibileen, that talk in there…Hilly’s talk. I mean…”
I pick up a coffee cup, start drying it real good with my cloth.
“Do you ever wish you could…change things?” she asks.
And I can’t help myself. I look [...]

I was like a man, shovel in hand, finding himself standing in a freshly dug grave but with no memory of having dug it. I stayed there because at least if you’ve hit bottom you had no farther to fall. - from The Long Fall -
Leonid McGill is a man of contradictions. He has spent [...]

The trajectory of any life, laid out across a table, reduced to jottings in a pad, would no doubt seem both damning and inane, our imperfections difficult to justify despite our best intentions. - from Best Intentions, page 302 -
Lisa Barkley seems to have it all – two beautiful daughters with enough money to [...]

What had persuaded her to buy the house, though, were none of these sensible reasons but the thought that sprang into her mind at the first sight of the address – 41 Fortune Street – that her grandfather would have liked the name. “Straight out of Dickens,” she could hear him say, straw hat rocking. [...]

He had no memory of a beginning – of a mother or father, sister or brother. His life was simply there, at Saint Anthony’s, and what he remembered began in the middle of things – the smell of boiled sheets and lye; the taste of watery oatmeal; the feel of dropping a brick onto [...]