Novels Now

“See Lola, you’re the only one with nothing to confess. You’re the only one who’s never done anything rotten enough to ask for forgiveness.”
Lola put her had back and laughed, a bright swelling laugh that made the others smile to hear it.
“Why are you laughing?” Mel asked.
“What’s so funny?”
“If only it were that [...]

Handsome in a rugged way. Athletic and muscular rather than thin. With a square jaw and eyes that could cut through any kind of lie, he’s smart and pensive, his emotions usually under tight rein.
And yet he has an Achilles heel.
One that will bring him down.
- from Malice, page 59 -
After the questionable death of [...]

The horror of this case was that the corruption lay inside the ‘domestic sanctum’, that the bolts, locks and fastenings of the house were hopelessly redundant. ‘The secret lies with someone who was within…the household collectively must be responsible for this mysterious and dreadful event. Not one of them ought to be at large till [...]

Last Night in Montreal is Emily St. John Mandel’s first novel, and it is a stunning debut. Told from multiple viewpoints and moving back and forth between the present and past, the book is compulsively readable. Mandel’s writing is flawless - poetic, compelling, and achingly beautiful. Perhaps the strongest aspect of Mandel’s prose is her ability to fully develop her characters - people who are adrift and searching and often in pain, but who attract the reader’s empathy and admiration despite their [...]

Even if I had the key to Pa’s request, I had no idea how to tackle a murder investigation. All I could do was to remain vigilant - an early morning sparrow, picking up tidbits of information, hungrily following any leads that presented themselves. - from The Scent of Oranges, page 81 -
When a [...]

People are forever asking me what it was like to grow up in a commune, and it’s a question that has no easy answer. Northern New Mexico was Commune Central in those days, and each of the twenty-odd settlements had its own vision, its own quirky dynamics, its own culture. And, of course, no [...]

On the bald spot and through the strands of his scant pale hair could be seen glistening beads of sweat. “That’s not her name, by the way,” he said. Quirke did not understand. “I mean, it is her name, only she called herself something else. Laura – Laura Swan. It was sort of her [...]

But Carlotta, though her bedside lamp glows, sleeps; down the hall, Maximilian sleeps; around the corner, Pepa, serene princess, sleeps; and, most sweetly of all, an angel on pillows of gossamer, the tiny Agustin sleeps with his thumb in his mouth, never dreaming that his home is being abandoned, his father’s and mother’s clothes, [...]

She entrusted me with her version of this story late in her life. In fact, it’s a long story when all the pieces are added together, and it begins many years before my father jumped from the pedestrian bridge, when my grandmother was young and set out to follow the Tuskee River north. She [...]

The more she cooked, the more she began to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of the places they were originally from and all those they had traveled through over the years. She discovered that people seemed to react to spices much as they did to other people, relaxing instinctively into some, [...]

Here’s what I need to confess about Peter and me: We were not exactly in love anymore. After fifteen years and three children together, we were often other places besides in it. We were under it, sometimes. Or above it. Or against it. Or in arms’ reach of it. Or in shouting distance of it. [...]

Carefully, delicately, she caught the end of the paper with her thumbnail and withdrew it slowly from the shaft. It looked like a miniature parchment, tightly rolled into a tub. She laid the key in her lap and held the parchment up to the lamp, unrolling the crisp, brittle slip one millimeter at a time. [...]

To Tricia and her coworkers, my mother is not entirely human - not a daughter, not a mother, not a wife. Her past wiped out, she is just another sack of flesh, dehumanized. She has become a freak. Staff members put food in Ellen’s mouth, strip clothes off her body, dress her and lay her [...]

Some people are too stupid to be afraid on a runaway horse. Some people seize up. Some people turn cold and clear inside, like Clay, and only start to shake afterward. Annie sails into trouble like she wants it to last forever, like she can skim off from fear only what’s precious. She almost [...]

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense [...]

["]I remembered a story Johnny Leahy told right before our wedding. Fado,” Maire said, and winked at me. “Johnny was out fishing where Galway Bay meets the sea. They’d caught nothing, no fish, all day. When the sun sank beneath the waves, some boats turned back to shore, empty. But Johnny and his da [...]

Hearts. This is all about hearts, restless or yearning, broken or bleeding. - from Bleeding Heart Square, page 229 -
Andrew Taylor’s latest crime mystery is a literary whodunnit set in London in the early 1930’s. Lydia Langstone, leaves her abusive marriage and arrives to live with her father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, at Number 7 Bleeding [...]

Near mid-century when Edward was born, the full moon was years from being the brightest. That would happen - in terms of luminosity and size - in the last month of the century. As a child growing up, however, Edward found much splendor and mystery in the moon. It kept changing and following him [...]

Although Janine understood almost none of the language, the expressions and gestures of the people at the table were so familiar that she felt she’d already heard this entire conversation and understood it perfectly, sitting among her aunts and uncles in her grandmother’s house many nights near the San Francisco Bay. - from The [...]

It was like the painting they’d first looked at together in London, the small mirror at the back revealing more than the room at first appeared to contain. - from Only Goodness, page 157 -
Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories - Unaccustomed Earth - reveals more about the relationships between its multi-faceted characters than  [...]