The novel centres on the lives of Polly, Dennis, Adrian and Angela as they comically come to terms with changing mores and their beliefs.

    Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle's wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives - or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, Jane Smiley in The New York Times Book Review called The Road to Wellville "a marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end."

    One hundred years later, his descendant Fortis James (Lick) Holden grows up in a life of poverty in Mount Marter, Louisiana with his grandmother, mother, half-sisters, and stepsister, the beautiful fair-skinned “quadroon” Sylvie Black. At the age of ten shows his skill with playing the coronet, but when he runs afowl of the law he is sent away to reform school. There he joins a band and learns to play with his “head, chops, and heart” from a man called the Professor.The story then shifts to present-day Zimindo, now the fictional African nation of Zambawi, and follows the reactions of chief Tongo, his argumentative pregnant wife Kudzai, and Musa, his zukulu, to the arrival of the African-American archaelogist from Northwestern University named Olurunbunmi (Bunmi) Durowoju (formerly Coretta Pink). She has excavate the remains of an old tribal village nearby and turned up a fantastic tribal headdress but needs Tongo’s permission to take it, which he refuses (hoping to sleep with her in exchange), but his wife intervenes, and when he goes to Musa for advice the shaman tells him he can’t help, because he is about to embark on a journey…Meanwhile in 1912 Lick returns from reform school and begins making a name for himself among the juke joints of his small home town. He soon travels to New Orleans at the height of its jazz age glory at the suggestion of a local star (and also to search for the missing Sylvie), but his connection doesn’t pan out—though a young Louis Armstrong takes him under his wing, which transforms his sound, but he departs the Big Easy once he hears that Sylvie has returned to his hometown, abandoning the prostitute he married.Back in 1998, a black Englishwoman, Sylvia di Napoli is boarding a plane bound for New York, to untangle the secret of his ancestry. Born of two ostensibly white parents, she had run away from her angry father’s household as a teenager, becoming a prostitute before deciding that she wanted to turn her life around and become a singer. She meets an Englishman named Jim on the plane who she tells her story to Jim over the course of the planeride and at a bar in New York. He decides to join her in meeting her great uncle in Harlem.In 1920 Mount Marten, Louisiana, Sylvie Black has become a prostitute for the young white gentlemen of the town, while Lick searches for her in between infrequent performances. Lick encounters her at a dance but she leaves him for the young white man she came with.In 1998 New York, Jim and Sylvia meet with Fabrizio Berlone, her long-lost grand uncle, who reveals the mystery of her racial heritage: her grandmother was a mixed-race blues singer named Sylvia who was passing for white and gave birth while in New York. They head to Chicago in search of her great aunt (where Musa the zukulu has also turned up) and go to the Apostolic Church of All Saints, where the pastor reveals that her great aunt has been survived by a daughter: Coretta Pink. They head to her office at the university, where they are informed that she is in Africa, but Musa is there to meet them.Back in Zambawi, Kudzai abandons Tongo in a fury and he makes a rash pass at Bunmi, who rejects his moves with a swift knee to the groin—but after Tongo agrees to let her take the mask, she relents. But six months later, after Musa has returned to the village Tongo reveals he did not sleep with her, and Kudzai has returned to the village with a son, now named Tongo.Six months earlier in New Orleans, Jim, Sylvia, and Musa, frequent an “Irish” bar where a blues guitarist named Fortnightly plays. There Jim reveals his jealousy at Sylvia’s attraction to Musa and Musa reveals that Fortnightly is Fortis Holden Jr.Back in 1920 Mount Martin, LA, Sylvie seeks out Lick and stays with him for five days but leaves to return to her white lover, and sees Lick on the side and begins performing with his band. But when she becomes pregnant, they decide they must leave. Fortis Holden Jr. explains the rest of the story to Jim, Sylvia, and Musa in 1998 New Orleans, and tells of how Sylvie’s white lover comes to kill Lick, Sylvie goes to New York and becomes the wife of the Italian man who Sylvia knows as her grandfather. After an ugly bout of jealousy, Jim reveals his love for Sylvia, and months later Sylvia meets Bunmi to complete the circle and the story.

    In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.

    It is not a case history or study. I like to think it is a hymn to reality." —Joanne Greenberg

    (Nancy Pearl)

    Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate, and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our time.

    “They are both brilliantly original and outsiders,” the narrator tells us. “They are both besotted with mathematics. But for all their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unaltered by any of their dramas . . . Against indifference, I want to tell their stories.” Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each man’s achievement and demise: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, would starve himself to death; Turing, arrested for homosexual activities, would be driven to suicide. And they meet as well in the narrator’s mind, where facts are interwoven with her desire and determination to find meaning in the maze of their stories: two men devoted to truth of the highest abstract nature, yet unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own lives.A unique amalgam of luminous imagination and richly evoked historic character and event—A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a story about the pursuit of truth and its effect on the lives of two men. A story of genius and madness, incredible yet true.

    Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible.

    Its architectural treasures crumble—foundations shift, marble ornaments fall—even as efforts to preserve them are underway. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective—inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city—while gradually revealing the truth about the fire.In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to reveal a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting. The fire and its aftermath serve as a leitmotif that runs throughout, adding the elements of chaos, corruption, and crime and contributing to the ever-mounting suspense of this brilliant book.

    In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

    Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives...

    William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism, and abject poverty.Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk

    He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, since she walked out when he was a child. But then one day there she is, all over the news, throwing rocks at a presidential candidate. The media paints Faye as a militant radical with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother never left her small Iowa town. Which version of his mother is the true one? Determined to solve the puzzle--and finally have something to deliver to his publisher--Samuel decides to capitalize on his mother's new fame by writing a tell-all biography, a book that will savage her intimately, publicly. But first, he has to locate her; and second, to talk to her without bursting into tears. As Samuel begins to excavate her history, the story moves from the rural Midwest of the 1960s to New York City during the Great Recession and Occupy Wall Street to the infamous riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, and finally to Norway, home of the mysterious Nix that his mother told him about as a child. And in these places, Samuel will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about his mother--a woman with an epic story of her own, a story she kept hidden from the world.

    The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and of society.