Category
Relating to Religious Groups
Barney's Version 2010
Barney Panofsky—Canadian expat, wily lover of women, writer, television producer, raconteur—is finally putting pen to paper so he can rebut the charges about him made in his rival’s autobiography.
Whether it’s ranting about his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris, his tumultuous three...
Be Near Me 2008
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he...
Bitter Orange Tree 2022
From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in...
The Blood Years 2023
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
The Book Thief 2006
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With...
The Boston Girl 2014
Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take...
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as...
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. Thirty years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an...
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
The Counterlife 1996
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative...
Crash of the Heavens 2026
In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the...
Axon Family, Book 1
Evelyn Axon and her daughter, Muriel, barricaded in their once-respectable house, are surrounded by years of garbage―and plenty of family secrets, to boot. They completely baffle Isabel Field, the social worker assigned to help them. But Isabel has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders...
Everyman 2006
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely...
Family and Friends 1998
In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars.
Presiding over the Dorn...
The Fifth Mountain 2009
In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coelho takes us back to the ninth century, to the turbulent Middle East, where the prophet Elijah is struggling to keep his faith alive in a world of constant upheaval, tyrannical royalty, and pagan gods.
Elijah’s story is a lesson in persistence, an exercise in hope,...
Fire in the Blood 2008
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II. Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its...
On his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic amusement park ride accident in an attempt to save a little girl’s life. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by both loved ones and distant...
For Jews today, the attack on Israel on October 7th has drawn a clear and irreversible demarcation in time. On that day, the Jewish community woke up to an unrecognizable new reality, witnessing the stark rise in modern antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, in its wake. But even in this dark...
The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth....
Four Red Sweaters 2025
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives.
In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning...
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his...
The riveting narrative of an honorable Irish priest who finds the church collapsing around him at a pivotal moment in its history
Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland...
Shaped by hundreds of conversations with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, *The Holy and the Broken* is a shattering cry for peace amidst the holy stones and olive groves of the twice-promised land.
Following the October 7 attack and the subsequent war that tore apart the lives of so many people...
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
J 2015
Kevern Cohen doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions. When the extravagantly beautiful Ailinn Solomons arrives in his village by a sea that laps no other shore,...
Jezebel 2012
A stunning novel about mothers and daughters, about vengeance, and an aging, still beautiful woman on trial for shooting her lover.
In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she remains striking, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting...
Kalooki Nights 2008
Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous...
Killing the SS 2025
Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
In haunting ways, this gorgeous novel prefigures Irène Némirovsky’s masterpiece Suite Française. Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers....
Mitch Albom creates his most unforgettable fictional character—Frankie Presto, the greatest guitarist to ever walk the earth—in this magical novel about the bands we join in life and the power of talent to change our lives.
In his most stunning novel yet, the voice of Music narrates the tale of its...
Manhood for Amateurs 2010
A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane...
Marjorie Morningstar 1992
A starry-eyed young beauty, Marjorie Morgenstern is nineteen years old when she leaves home to accept the job of her dreams--working in a summer-stock company for Noel Airman, its talented and intensely charismatic director. Released from the social constraints of her traditional Jewish family, and...
This classic Christmas story follows white-bearded Kris Kringle as he's asked to fill in for Macy's resident Santa Claus. He—along with children from all over New York City—believes he is the real thing.
As Kris begins to inspire a feeling of true Christmas generosity and joy throughout the city,...
More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili—abandoned by Nina when she was just...
In this novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.
Moving Kings 2018
One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.
The year...
Nine Parts of Desire 1995
Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's...
Operation Shylock 1994
In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own...
Ann Holmes is a fragile teenaged runaway who receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary one morning while picking mushrooms in the woods of North Fork, Washington. In the ensuing days the miracle recurs, and the declining logging town becomes the site of a pilgrimage of the faithful and desperate....
A Place to Hide 2025
Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family, settled into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. Then in 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, he is assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam. Teddy’s job is to process visa...
The Prodigal Child 2021
Set in what was then contemporary Russia at the turn of the century, in a large port town on the Black Sea, The Prodigal Child is a story of a boy with a gift for composing poetry and songs—his inspiration drawn from within—who attracts the attention of a Princess. This wealthy and sophisticated...
The Red Tent 2007
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons.
Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood—the...
Safiyyah's War 2024
Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
Stockholm 2024
Avishay is up for the Nobel Prize for Economics. There’s just one problem—he’s dead. His four closest friends agree that the well-earned prize must stay within his grasp, and so conspire to conceal Avishay’s corpse until the committee’s announcement. The potential of a glorious legacy for their late...
The Traitors Circle 2025
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of...
Vacant Possession 2010
Axon Family, Book 2
Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society's protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her...
The Valkyries 1996
Why is it that we destroy the things we love most? This is the question Paulo Coelho faces in this touching story about his confrontation with his past. In The Valkyries, Paulo and his wife, Cristina, embark on a forty-day quest into the starkly beautiful and sometimes dangerous Mojave Desert, where...
The Wine of Solitude 2012
Beginning in a fictionalized Kiev, The Wine of Solitude follows the Karol family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Hélène grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into a strongwilled young woman. From the hot Kiev summers to the cruel winters of St Petersburg and eventually to...
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Crash of the Heavens November 17, 2026
In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
Conversations With an Executioner August 18, 2026
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
The Traitors Circle October 28, 2025
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of...
A Place to Hide September 2, 2025
Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family, settled into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. Then in 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, he is assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam. Teddy’s job is to process visa...
Killing the SS September 2, 2025
Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
The Holy and the Broken April 15, 2025
Shaped by hundreds of conversations with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, *The Holy and the Broken* is a shattering cry for peace amidst the holy stones and olive groves of the twice-promised land.
Following the October 7 attack and the subsequent war that tore apart the lives of so many people...
Four Red Sweaters March 18, 2025
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives.
In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning...
Stockholm December 17, 2024
Avishay is up for the Nobel Prize for Economics. There’s just one problem—he’s dead. His four closest friends agree that the well-earned prize must stay within his grasp, and so conspire to conceal Avishay’s corpse until the committee’s announcement. The potential of a glorious legacy for their late...
For Such a Time as This September 24, 2024
For Jews today, the attack on Israel on October 7th has drawn a clear and irreversible demarcation in time. On that day, the Jewish community woke up to an unrecognizable new reality, witnessing the stark rise in modern antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, in its wake. But even in this dark...
Zahav Home September 10, 2024
Since opening Zahav (the beloved, award-winning, and critically acclaimed restaurant in Philadelphia that serves a powerfully flavorful menu inspired by modern Israeli cuisine) fifteen years ago, co-owners chef Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook have learned at least two things: cooking at home isn’t...
Safiyyah's War May 7, 2024
Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
The Forbidden Daughter April 23, 2024
The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth....
The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz February 20, 2024
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
The Blood Years October 10, 2023
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
Bitter Orange Tree May 10, 2022
From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in...
The Prodigal Child October 19, 2021
Set in what was then contemporary Russia at the turn of the century, in a large port town on the Black Sea, The Prodigal Child is a story of a boy with a gift for composing poetry and songs—his inspiration drawn from within—who attracts the attention of a Princess. This wealthy and sophisticated...
More Than I Love My Life August 24, 2021
More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili—abandoned by Nina when she was just...
Miracle on 34th Street October 23, 2018
This classic Christmas story follows white-bearded Kris Kringle as he's asked to fill in for Macy's resident Santa Claus. He—along with children from all over New York City—believes he is the real thing.
As Kris begins to inspire a feeling of true Christmas generosity and joy throughout the city,...
Moving Kings August 7, 2018
One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.
The year...
A History of Loneliness May 10, 2016
The riveting narrative of an honorable Irish priest who finds the church collapsing around him at a pivotal moment in its history
Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland...
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto November 10, 2015
Mitch Albom creates his most unforgettable fictional character—Frankie Presto, the greatest guitarist to ever walk the earth—in this magical novel about the bands we join in life and the power of talent to change our lives.
In his most stunning novel yet, the voice of Music narrates the tale of its...
J September 1, 2015
Kevern Cohen doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions. When the extravagantly beautiful Ailinn Solomons arrives in his village by a sea that laps no other shore,...
The Boston Girl December 9, 2014
Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take...
The Wine of Solitude September 18, 2012
Beginning in a fictionalized Kiev, The Wine of Solitude follows the Karol family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Hélène grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into a strongwilled young woman. From the hot Kiev summers to the cruel winters of St Petersburg and eventually to...
Jezebel May 1, 2012
A stunning novel about mothers and daughters, about vengeance, and an aging, still beautiful woman on trial for shooting her lover.
In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she remains striking, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting...
All Our Worldly Goods September 6, 2011
In haunting ways, this gorgeous novel prefigures Irène Némirovsky’s masterpiece Suite Française. Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers....
In the Garden of Beasts January 1, 2011
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
Every Day Is Mother's Day August 31, 2010
Axon Family, Book 1
Evelyn Axon and her daughter, Muriel, barricaded in their once-respectable house, are surrounded by years of garbage―and plenty of family secrets, to boot. They completely baffle Isabel Field, the social worker assigned to help them. But Isabel has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders...
Vacant Possession August 31, 2010
Axon Family, Book 2
Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society's protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her...
Manhood for Amateurs May 11, 2010
A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane...
Witz May 11, 2010
By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish...
Barney's Version May 4, 2010
Barney Panofsky—Canadian expat, wily lover of women, writer, television producer, raconteur—is finally putting pen to paper so he can rebut the charges about him made in his rival’s autobiography.
Whether it’s ranting about his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris, his tumultuous three...
The Fifth Mountain February 10, 2009
In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coelho takes us back to the ninth century, to the turbulent Middle East, where the prophet Elijah is struggling to keep his faith alive in a world of constant upheaval, tyrannical royalty, and pagan gods.
Elijah’s story is a lesson in persistence, an exercise in hope,...
Moses, Man of the Mountain December 30, 2008
In this novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.
Fire in the Blood July 15, 2008
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II. Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its...
Kalooki Nights April 22, 2008
Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous...
Be Near Me April 14, 2008
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he...
The Red Tent August 21, 2007
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons.
Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood—the...
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas September 12, 2006
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as...
Everyman May 9, 2006
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely...
The Book Thief March 14, 2006
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With...
The Five People You Meet in Heaven March 1, 2006
On his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic amusement park ride accident in an attempt to save a little girl’s life. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by both loved ones and distant...
Our Lady of the Forest July 27, 2004
Ann Holmes is a fragile teenaged runaway who receives a visitation from the Virgin Mary one morning while picking mushrooms in the woods of North Fork, Washington. In the ensuing days the miracle recurs, and the declining logging town becomes the site of a pilgrimage of the faithful and desperate....
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street September 1, 2003
When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the...
The Gospel According to the Son September 7, 1999
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his...
Family and Friends January 12, 1998
In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars.
Presiding over the Dorn...
The Counterlife August 6, 1996
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative...
The Valkyries August 2, 1996
Why is it that we destroy the things we love most? This is the question Paulo Coelho faces in this touching story about his confrontation with his past. In The Valkyries, Paulo and his wife, Cristina, embark on a forty-day quest into the starkly beautiful and sometimes dangerous Mojave Desert, where...
Nine Parts of Desire December 1, 1995
Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's...
Operation Shylock March 15, 1994
In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own...