Novels Now

“Mile Stones Five Year Diary” was written in gold letters across the book’s worn cover. Holding my breath, I released the brass latch. Despite the rusted keyhole, the diary was unlocked. Little pieces of red leather sprinkled onto my white comforter. “This book belongs to…Florence Wolfson.” - from The Red Leather Diary, page 13 [...]

The years of Scarlet’s migration, through the decade of the 1990s up to this cool and puzzling spring of 2002, were relatively quiet ones for Addie. Had her mother somehow been holding her breath, reining herself in, waiting to see how far south, and now how near to this overdeveloped coastline, Scarlet would fly? [...]

My father stepped back and examined me. Whereas Serena Jane possessed the limbs and features of a vain little pixie, my physiognomy brought to mind the heaviest and roundest of objects - a cannonball, perhaps. Something impervious to smashes and collisions. Since I began walking at the unprecedented age of seven months, I had [...]

You just remember a few of the ripples, not the whole of the river. I don’t know any writers, but I think that’s what all stories are about, the ripples moving away down some vast river, and the words we find to describe those moments are in the river too, swirling together and then [...]

He tugged out the photograph, tugged with trembling hands, and set it down on the bar top. And he looked at it and saw that it had faded. All the once-bright colors were vanishing, leaving only a trace of themselves, tinged with green, with the bluish green of the sky…when evening was coming…the sky [...]

When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and become one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century of man. The century, more specifically, of the [...]

Sebastian Barry’s fourth novel opens in an Irish mental hospital with the voice of Roseanne McNulty who, in the 100th year of her life, has decided to write her memoir and hide it beneath the floorboards of her room. As Roseanne revisits the past, the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital is being dismantled due to safety concerns. Roseanne’s psychiatrist Dr. Grene is attempting to evaluate the patients to determine if they can be set free, or must be re-committed in the new hospital. The story alternates between Roseanne’s memories of her past and Dr. Grene’s written thoughts in the present. As the novel progresses, the mystery of Roseanne’s life unfolds and Dr. Grene uncovers a secret in his own life[...]

“But if I’m not to be a priestess,” I asked him, “where will my place be in Thebes?” I held my breath, waiting for the right answer to come, willing it into his heart. Then he took me in his arms and brushed his lips against mine.  “With me,” he said firmly. “As my [...]

It was just after dark in a lonely reach of the South Pacific. As we sped westward, the ocean floor was a mile below us - or it was supposed to be. Like when microphone feedback suddenly fills an auditorium until you must cover your ears, a deafening shrill exploded through the boat. It [...]

North to Alaska the land rises gently from the Arctic Ocean and an ice pack that extends over the pole and beyond. South of Patagonia, it plunges into the Drake Passage at Cape Horn. Six hundred miles away is Antarctica. Start at one of these ends of the earth - if only in your mind [...]

When Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff - a radical American lawyer - at a party in London in 1962, she is a shy and unsure young woman. But years later, now married to Joel and living in New York City, Audrey has remade herself into a brash, foul-mouthed liberal who views the world cynically and lashes out at everyone around her. When Joel collapses from a stroke and lapses into a coma, Audrey is forced to face not only her out of control temper (and the consequences of it), but her loyalty to a serial adulterer whose shadow she has always lived within [...]

A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don’t have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son. -From An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, page 6-
Author Elizabeth McCracken lived briefly in France, with her husband, [...]

These were adults with too much time on their hands. And didn’t they know that the projector, sound system, and speakers were all Japanese? Their dancing shoes were probably from Mexico or China. America’s jobs were going elsewhere and Americans were just dressing up and playing like kids. Gas prices were high. General Motors [...]

Everybody lies. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Clients lie. Even jurors lie. There is a school of belief in criminal law that every trial is won or lost in the choosing of the jury. I’ve never been ready to go all the way to that level but I do know that there is probably no [...]

Jars line my cellar shelves. Some are filled with fists of yellow-veined tomatoes. Others hold small onions and chopped leeks, white pearls floating in an opaque sea. Sometimes the light falls on a jar of boiled quail or the slick, dark meat of a rabbit. There are unexpected moments when I see the slit [...]

Mike got up off the floor and sat on the sofa while he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, as if increasing the blog flow to the brain might help solve his problem. And it was then that the word containment entered his mind. And with that word, moral, [...]

Two women were standing on high places, shielding their eyes from the blazing sun with their hands, peering into the distance in search of messengers from the battlefield. Each knew that her life depended on the outcome of the battle; but their lives depended on opposite results. -From The Triumph of Deborah, page 1-
The [...]

She had conceived children in that house, suffered a miscarriage in that house, brought her babies home there, argued with her husband there, made love, rejoiced, despaired, sipped tea, and gossiped and sobbed and counseled and blessed her friends there, walked the halls with sick children there, and scrubbed the worn brick of the kitchen [...]

We must set our children free from our adult agendas and our frenetic, goal-oriented pace. The path that we have accepted for ourselves is the wrong path for children. Children do need a foundation upon which to grow and children do need their parents. They need to belong to a community, not an interest group. [...]

From medieval times, Guernica was a crossroads of the old Roman Way and the Fish and Wine Route that wound through the hills inland from the sea. Intersecting them both was the pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela. For centuries, representatives of the region met under the Guernica oak to shape laws that outlawed torture [...]