Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

    Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?

    With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.

    Melissa (Mel), still ringless after dating the same man for six years, deserves the engagement ring charm. The red hot chili pepper would be perfect for Seema, who is in love with her best male friend Scott, but can't seem to make their relationship more than platonic. And recently laid off journalist Nic wants the shovel, which symbolizes hard work, to help her get her career back on track. Nic does everything she can to control who gets which silver keepsake - as well as the future it represents. But when the charmed cake is mysteriously shifted from the place settings Nic arranged around it, no one gets the charm she chose for them. And when the other party guests' fortunes begin coming true, Mel, Seema, and Nic can't help but wonder.... Is the cake trying to tell them something?

    Based on Stephen Clarke's own experiences and with names changed to "avoid embarrassment, possible legal action, and to prevent the author's legs being broken by someone in a Yves Saint Laurent suit," A Year in the Merde provides perfect entertainment for Francophiles and Francophobes alike.

    Celia Lytton is the beautiful and strong-willed daughter of wealthy aristocrats and she is used to getting her way. She moves through life making difficult and often dangerous decisions that affect herself and others-her husband, Oliver, and their children; the destitute Sylvia Miller, whose life is transformed by Celia's intrusion; as well as Oliver's daunting elder sister, who is not all she appears to be; and Sebastian Brooke, for whom Celia makes the most dangerous decision of all. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of London and New York in the First World War, No Angel is, as British Good Housekeeping wrote, "an absorbing page-turner, packed with believable characters and satisfyingly extreme villains, eccentrics, and manipulators." Readers of Maeve Binchy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Anita Shreve will fall in love with this epic, un-put-downable novel.With more than 3.5 million copies sold, Penny Vincenzi is one of the world's preeminent writers of popular fiction-and American readers no longer have to miss out on the fun. With the publication of No Angel, a novel introducing the engaging cast of characters in the Lytton family, Overlook opens a thrilling new dimension to this author's already illustrious career.

    When she's encouraged to join her fitness-fanatic best friend's running club - by none other than its gorgeous new captain - she finds a mysterious compulsion to exercise.

    He spends his nights meticulously archiving the traces his long-absent mother left behind. He spends his days plotting with his only friend, Sunny, trying to contrive ways to protect himself from neighborhood bullies and an abusive father. But the stories they tell and the realities they live are painfully far apart, and when Sunny is forced to move away, Bobby fears he has no one else to turn to.Then Bobby encounters two outcasts like himself: Rosa, a girl with a red tricycle who collects names in her notebook and whose disability invites the scorn of the same bullies that haunt Bobby; and Val, her mother, a lonely divorcee who cleans the town's mobile library for work. They connect deeply, filling the gaps in each other's lives, but the bond between the older woman and young boy also draws the town's suspicion and outrage, as rumors begin to fly about the nature of their relationship. Val loses her job, Bobby is beaten severely by his father, and, with worse sure to follow, they abscond with Rosa in their sixteen-wheel bookmobile, embarking on a picaresque adventure that comes to rival those in the classic books that fill their library on wheels.

    At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention.As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen.Tender and profound, The Only Story is an achingly beautiful novel by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human heart.

    A Half Forgotten Song is by turns haunting, heartbreaking and joyous.1937. In a village on the Dorset coast, fourteen-year-old Mitzy Hatcher has endured a wild and lonely upbringing, until the arrival of renowned artist Charles Aubrey-along with his exotic mistress and their daughters-changes everything. Over the next three summers, Mitzy sees a future she had never thought possible, and a powerful love is kindled in her. A love that grows from innocence to obsession; from childish infatuation to something far more complex. Years later, a young man in an art gallery looks at a hastily-drawn portrait and wonders at its intensity. The questions he asks lead him to a Dorset village and to the truth about those fevered summers in the 1930s.

     When our hero, Victor, needs a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his wife after deciding to pen a book about moving to Greece, he dusts off his original name of V.D. Bucket, the name he was stuck with after being abandoned in a bucket as a baby. As Victor adapts to his adopted homeland he battles an obsession with the exacting hygiene standards he demanded during his illustrious career as a public health inspector against the rather less exacting standards of rural Greece. His attempts to master the complexities of the language lead to a number of embarrassing misunderstandings. Crossing paths with the local undertaker, Spiros, was a stroke of good luck for Victor and Marigold, since he just happened to have a house to sell in the charming Greek mountain village of Meli. Of course Spiros didn’t explain the strange arrangement of an Albanian living in the stone shed at the bottom of the garden, or mention the old lady’s next door filthy habit of burning plastic every morning. He also failed to mention his late uncle had plunged to his death from the roof terrace, but did a wonderful job of selling them on the spectacular views. If you’re a fan of Greek travel and culture, then this book is a must.

    Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten.Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four.The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time.Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.Source: john-irving.com

    David Lodge, portraying two American and British professors who replace one another at their respective institutions, gives greed, pettiness, and pretense full rein.

    One mental breakdown and some random suicidal thoughts later, she’s just starting to get the hang of this widow thing. She can now get her two girls to school, show up to work, and watch TV like a pro. The only problem is she’s becoming overwhelmed with being underwhelmed. At least her textbook illustrating job has some perks—like actually being called upon to draw whale genitalia. Oh, and there’s that vegetable-gardening class her boss signed her up for. Apparently, being the chosen illustrator for a series of boutique vegetable guides means getting your hands dirty, literally. Wallowing around in compost on a Saturday morning can’t be much worse than wallowing around in pajamas and self-pity. After recruiting her kids and insanely supportive sister to join her, Lilian shows up at the Los Angeles botanical garden feeling out of her element. But what she’ll soon discover—with the help of a patient instructor and a quirky group of gardeners—is that into every life a little sun must shine, whether you want it to or not…READERS GUIDE INCLUDED*HelloGiggles**Bustle

    Tony’s dealing with divorce and a weight problem.  Novelist Sean is up against a serious case of writer’s block and a shock announcement from his “perfect” new girlfriend. Their parents have a new lodger, Gervase—why is Bernie, their mother, so keen to give this unsavory waif a home?  And what is the real reason for kid brother Ned’s surprise return from his travels in Australia?A Friend of the Family is a hilarious, dead-on-target story from the bestselling author of Thirtynothing and Ralph’s Party.