Thoughtful Gifts for Fiction Readers

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts. An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown — and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.

Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love. This spellbinding novel traces three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

A “tender, beautiful and radiantly outraged” (The New York Times Book Review) novel that follows a year of seismic romantic, political, and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf, from the acclaimed author of Girl at War. 

Our unnamed narrator works as an Interpreter for the International Court. She is a woman with many languages, identities, and stories, but is finally looking for a place to call her home. If only it could be that simple …

Meet Elizabeth Zott: a “formidable, unapologetic and inspiring” (PARADE) scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show in this novel that is “irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat” (The New York Times Book Review).

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America.

A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both — the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki.

Two estranged siblings delve into their mother’s hidden past — and how it all connects to her traditional Caribbean black cake — in this immersive family saga, “a character-driven, multigenerational story that’s meant to be savored” (Time).

An exhilarating debut novel following members of a Dominican family in New York City who take radically different paths when faced with encroaching gentrification.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. From the author of Exit West comes a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.

A disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who, quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, has to find her way back home in this sparkling adult debut from national bestselling author Ashley Poston.

Award-winning author Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel grounded both in the contemporary era and in the uncannily familiar era of the Black Plague. Companion Piece stands apart from her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith’s groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times.

Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity.

The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose — wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned — Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

From the bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man’s life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.

The bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

A “dazzling, cinematic, intimate, lyrical” (Roxane Gay) epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina.