At the heart of this “wonderful” novel are the moving relationships between the estranged members of the Das family (Washington Post Book World). Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women’s college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface, blending into a domestic drama that leads to beautiful and profound moments of self-understanding.Set in the vividly portrayed environs of Old Delhi, “Clear Light of Day does what only the very best novels can do: it totally submerges us. It also takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won’t be able to climb out again” (New York Times Book Review).“Passages must be read and reread so that you savor their imagery, their language, and their wisdom.” ??—?? Washington Post Book World“[A] thoroughly universal tale of unhealable family hurts . . . Distinctively shaded with enticing glimpses of India’s Hindu middle-class in shabby decline.” ??—?? Kirkus Reviews, starred review

    Alone in her room, the young girl retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through a deck of Lotería cards-a Mexican version of bingo featuring bright, colorful images.Neither the social worker assigned to her case nor her Aunt Tencha, who desperately pleads for her niece's release, can cajole Luz to speak. The young girl's only confidant is her journal. Within its pages, Luz addresses an invisible higher power, sharing her secrets.Using the Lotería cards as her muse, Luz picks one card from the deck with each shuffle. Each of the cards' colorful images- mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars-sparks a random memory. Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.A surprising, spellbinding tale richly imaginative and atmospheric, Lotería is an exquisite debut novel from an outstanding new voice in fiction.

    Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

    He travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the west. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Díaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days.Hernán Díaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.

    A lifetime ago. Before the murder of her father. Before she became Kota Rani, the wise regent who rules over Kashmir with a firm hand.As invaders and immigrants disturb the tranquillity of her land, Kota must find a way to protect her people. But at what personal cost? Can she weather the political intrigues and power-play of the court? Will she succeed in preserving the splendour and diversity of her society? Will social hypocrisy and notions of what a woman should be keep Kota from being the sovereign she knows she is?Set in fourteenth-century Kashmir, The Last Queen of Kashmir is the sweeping saga of a civilization in peril. It is also the tale of one of the greatest queens of the land - one that will speak to the men and women of today.

    Henry-prize winner Swamy's debut collection of stories, dreams collide with reality, modernity collides with antiquity, myth with true identity, and women grapple with desire, with ego, with motherhood and mortality. In "Earthly Pleasures," Radika, a young painter living alone in San Francisco, begins a secret romance with one of India's biggest celebrities. In "A Simple Composition," a husband's moment of crisis leads to his wife's discovery of a dark, ecstatic joy and the sense of a new beginning. In the title story, an exhausted mother watches, distracted and paralyzed, as a California wildfire approaches her home. With a knife blade's edge and precision, the stories of A House Is a Body travel from India to America and back again to reveal the small moments of beauty, pain, and power that contain the world.

    In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as "a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways." With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

    from Berkeley and a wild streak, wakes up in jail yet again--after another epic alcoholic blackout. "Okay, what'd I do?"? she asks her lawyer and jailers. "I really don't remember."? She adds, jokingly: "Did I kill someone?"In fact, two Jehovah's Witnesses, a mother and daughter, are dead, run over in Patsy's driveway. Patsy, who was driving with a revoked license, will spend the rest of her life--in prison, getting sober, finding a new community (and a husband) in AA--trying to atone for this unpardonable act.Then, decades later, another unimaginable piece of information turns up.For the reader, it is an electrifying moment, a joyous, fall-off-the-couch-with-surprise moment. For Patsy, it is more complicated. Blame must be reapportioned, her life reassessed. What does it mean that her life has been based on wrong assumptions? What can she cleave to? What must be relinquished?FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDFINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZECHICAGO TRIBUNE FAVORITE FICTION OF THE YEARO, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE TEN TERRIFIC READS OF THE YEARA WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARA KANSAS CITY STAR 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

    In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise; a group of young men who, fearing the end of the world, take fate into their own hands; mental patients who insist that a god still exists; armies taking up the eternal war between fate and free will; and parents who, in the absence of a deity and the “lack of anything to do on Sundays,” worship their children. On the surface, this is a world utterly transformed—yet certain things remain unchanged: protective parents clash with willful, idealistic teenagers; idols are exalted; small-town rumor mills run unabated; and children often don't realize how to forgive their parents until it's too late.In God Is Dead, Currie brings together a prescient satirical gift worthy of Jonathan Swift, the raw appeal of Chuck Palahniuk's blackest comedy, and the thought-provoking ethical questions of Kurt Vonnegut, all with a light touch, empathy, and wisdom that make for an exhilarating reading experience. Offbeat yet accessible, God Is Dead is an exciting debut from a fresh new voice in contemporary fiction.

    Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. Tommy is a lame black boy, cursed with health problems, yet he remains optimistic and strong.After tragedy rips their makeshift family apart, the lives of these boys diverge astonishingly: Eric, the golden youth, is given everything but trusts nothing; Tommy, motherless and impoverished, has nothing, but feels lucky every day of his life. In a riveting story of modern-day resilience and redemption, the two confront separate challenges, and when circumstances reunite them years later, they draw on their extraordinary natures to confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save their lives.

    The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.As the characters--deeply divided by race, religion, and class--tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

    But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a tricky last shift with a near-mutinous staff. All the while, he's wondering how to handle the waitress he's still in love with, what to do about his pregnant girlfriend, and where to find the present that will make everything better. Stewart O'Nan has been called "the bard of the working class," and Last Night at the Lobster is one of his most acclaimed works to date.

    Their illicit affair will forever rupture two households and three families, destroying a stable present built on the repression of a bloody past.In this sweeping novel of modern Pakistan, Uzma Aslam Khan takes us from the stifling demands of tradition and family to the daily oppression of routine political violence, from the gorgeous sensual vistas of the silk farms to the teeming streets of Karachi--stinking, crumbling, and corrupt.

    Much to the anxiety of her parents – the spirited Biji and the doting Baba – Amara leads an unremarkable life. That is, until she marries Harvard-educated millionaire, Prashant Roy. However, this fairy-tale isn’t meant to last, and even as Amara’s marriage collapses, she finds herself returning to the land of her birth, to the small city of Shimla. Here, in a borough grappling with questions of modernity, Amara is caught in a tug-of-war between old beliefs and new ones, between parents who favour obedience and new friends who encourage independent thought. With powerful insights, One and a Half Wife traces the coming-of-age of multiple characters, while re-defining family, relationships and love in contemporary India.

    The characters -- rootless, often en route to someplace else -- find themselves variously attracted to or repelled by unfamiliar landscapes where every object seems strange and every emotion is heightened. Living according to alien rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unexpected ways: in the title story, a young woman who has been involved in an affair with an Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death; the protagonist of 'Outside the Eastern Gate' returns to her childhood home in Delhi to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother.