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New Adult Fiction - Authors L - O |
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Newest items are displayed first. Click on a title for more information or to place a hold. |
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Land
by Maggie O'Farrell
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomas and
his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomas, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive
any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomas is
unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomas, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home? Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story
of survival, for our times and for all time.
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List of All Possible Desires: A Novel in Stories
by Dylan Landis
In postwar Paris, over the course of one fateful day, a boy's crush on his nanny ignites into a destructive passion that burns into his memory and reveals to him the disquieting world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York City, a naive caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married
woman paralyzed by her recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In the 1970s, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royal family's chaotic jazz-filled townhouse, where music, sex, and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, coming of age in Greenwich Village, inventing herself as an artist
through the tumult of the '70s and '80s. By turns shocking, erotic, and deeply humane, List of All Possible Desires is a haunting portrait of family and history.
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Midnight, at the War
by Devi S. Laskar
Foreign correspondent Rita Das has left New York for the war-torn Middle East, a reassignment she asked for after learning she is
pregnant, but uncertain whether the father is her husband or her lover. As she strives to shed light on the fallouts of the war, Rita finds herself embroiled in her own conflicts with her interpreter and her news editor, her sources and her colleagues. She is unable to accept the loss of her mother and deal with her guilt for not being at her side when she died. Fiercely independent and ambitious (and, in her journalism, deeply humane), Rita is also in denial about her need for intimate human relationships. As she goes into the field to report on the war, she grapples with the physical and emotional tolls of her pregnant body
and a turbulent region where the numbing repetition of war slides suddenly into horror. When her news editor delivers urgent orders for
her to return to New York, Rita is faced with a choice about how she wants to live her life as a journalist and a soon-to-be mother.
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Death of the Soccer God
by Dimitry Elias Léger
Gilbert Chevalier's life is a mid-century miracle: wealthy, handsome, beloved by every woman he meets, and blessed with incomparable talents on the soccer field. And it's all about to end. . . Gil's father
makes him swear off the sport, to focus on his studies. When he leaves the bourgeois comforts of Port-au-Prince high society and moves to the dizzying, jazz-soaked streets of Harlem to attend Columbia University, the promise is broken. Scrimmaging in Central Park, he's spotted by the U.S. National Team's coach and is recruited to play for the Americans in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. And then he flies too close to the sun.
Gil's unraveling is the wild stuff of myth: a plea to God for salvation; secret messages smuggled across continents; lovers shuffled, scorned, and reclaimed; and journeys past the veil between our world and the afterlife. Inspired by the unbelievable yet true story of an intrepid
young Haitian immigrant and energized with the high-voltage fervor of
a packed stadium, Death of the Soccer God is a heady dance between life and death, an answer to the eternal question: can love save us?
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How We See the Gray
by Rachel León
Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress
of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life
begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a
situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside―while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
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Canon
by Paige Lewis
Yara can't comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker--but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks
on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting
mission ahead. Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story.
Desperately seeking the glory of God's approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan
is God's will. As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this
intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new
voice in fiction.
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Babylon, South Dakota
by Tom Lin
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed
to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds.
After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu's farmland and begin building a
missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with
the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America's nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of
power and empire. In the years and generations that follow,
increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm.
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Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You
by Julián Delgado Lopera
Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma’s death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother’s drowning, and for her father to
snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can’t. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas
humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed. From Ignacio’s tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá’s queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to
Valentina the way she once did for the girl’s father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio’s self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.
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Caller Unknown
by Gillian McAllister
There is nothing that Simone won't do for her daughter, Lucy. The two have always been close, and with Lucy about to leave home for university, they depart the UK for a vacation to Texas to spend some quality time together. But when Simone awakens on their first morning
in the desert, Lucy is gone, missing from their rental cabin. In her place is a cell phone, and a voice on the other line issues a shocking ransom demand. Don't tell the police. Come to this location. And be prepared to do a deal. Though Simone's husband urges her to bring in the
authorities for help, she knows she can't take any chances. The kidnappers might kill Lucy if she tells anyone. No mother would take
that risk. Instead, that night, she drives to the isolated meet-up. What she finds there changes everything. The mysterious kidnapper doesn't want money. They want Simone to do something. The unthinkable. A catastrophic chain of events is set in motion, with chilling
consequences that extend beyond Simone and her family. What follows is a heart-pounding journey through the small towns and punishing deserts of remote Texas, in which Simone's courage--and morality--is pushed to the brink as she discovers what it truly means to be a
mother.
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The Divorce
by Freida McFadden
What is a happily ever after really worth? Naomi was living the quintessential love story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, get married, buy a dream house, start a family...Then--he kicks her out, hires the city's best divorce lawyers, drains their accounts, and takes up with a
20-something. It's a brutal end to the story. Naomi should accept
defeat: move into a dingy apartment, get back into the workforce,
and piece together the shattered remains of her life. Except, why
should she?Instead, Naomi fixates on her husband's new girlfriend.
What begins as cynical curiosity soon twists into obsession--and then into something far darker. As Naomi uncovers secrets she never imagined, she realizes her own life may be in danger. But if it keeps her perfect family intact, isn't it worth it?
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Dolly All the Time
by Annabel Monaghan
If they start by pretending, can they end with something real? Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn't solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her
dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she comes
across Stewart Whitfield--annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family--with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it's in her nature to help. But Stewart's proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as public dinners and high-society benefits turn into sunset
boat rides and kisses that hit her bloodstream like a ghost pepper,
Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful. She's never relied on anyone besides herself--can she really start now?
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A Little Bit Bad
by Cassandra Neyenesch
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she's pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he's fifteen years younger, she's terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day?
How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be
the mother her children deserve? And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?
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Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
by Mónica Ojeda
In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long,
retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa
fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker
at play behind the festival's so-called celebration of life. Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future. Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.
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Dear Monica Lewinsky
by Julia Langbein
Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears—powerful,
radiant, wise, and witty—and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998.
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Transcription
by Ben Lerner
The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail
from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the
air when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he
is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a
burning world.
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Permanence
by Sophie Mackintosh
Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they
have been stealing away from their respective lives, leaving no trace of their relationship behind. Their time together is always excruciatingly sweet and all too short. Until one day they wake up in an apartment neither of them recognizes, with no memory of how they got there.
They find themselves in a new, unnamed city, a self-contained
sanctuary where adulterers live openly as couples. Here there are fountains and old town squares and perfect cafes with checkered tablecloths. Ripe fruits wait on the counter each morning, invisible threads bind each lover to the other, and their primary responsibility is
to enjoy one another. Contact with the real world is impossible and the city's whims are mysterious--but now those stolen afternoons never
have to end. How much would you sacrifice for a life you never thought possible? And how long can you stay in paradise before the cracks start to show? An exploration of desire, novelty, and choice, Permanence explores the tantalizing quandary of what, if anything, can withstand
the daily toll of forever.
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Chasing the Clouds Away
by Debbie Macomber
Maisy Gallagher has her own dreams, but when her father passes away, she selflessly sets them aside to help her family. Despite knowing it
was the right thing to do, she can't help but wish for the road not
taken. Chase Furst, the hardened heir to a financial empire, is, on the other hand, primarily focused on his own life and on his work as a bank executive. His childhood was marred by his mother's struggle with addiction, and left him cynical and emotionally distant. But then Chase meets Maisy, a beautiful woman full of optimism and kindness who can see past his defenses. To his surprise and annoyance, she offers to help him during a time of need, and declines his offer of payment. Instead, she asks him to pay it forward--and not with money or a quick fix, but through an act of true selflessness. At a loss, Chase doesn't know
where to begin.
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Whidbey
by T. Kira Madden
Birdie Chang didn't know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She's a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend's eyes--and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who's now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution
and plan for revenge. But Birdie isn't the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There's also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women
have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on
Whidbey, she finally cracks the book's spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin's loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered. Calvin's death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate
search for answers.
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Down Time
by Andrew Martin
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him―despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and
disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope. Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals
in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own
alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious
university near Harvard Square―yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and
a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives
they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and
being good as the earth whirls to its end.
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Underlake
by Erin L. McCoy
Twelve years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become
a marine biologist. Now she’s returned, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she’ll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger, May, appears at her door, insisting that her daughter who ran away is under the nearby lake—alive. It turns out the small-town legend is true: Three decades ago, the entire valley was flooded to build a dam, but the people who lived there refused to leave. These “refugees of a world obsessed with change” now inhabit an underwater realm. To find the missing girl, Otta and May come face-to-face with communities that have lived in isolation for decades, breeding extremes of delusion and nostalgia. As they push their bodies to the mortal limit, the women must confront the fear, control, and suspicion born of the misguided quest to construct a purer world.
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The Last Letters of Sally and Walter
by Cammie McGovern
As a new resident of Golden Grove, an independent living community
for active seniors, Sally wants to do everything in her power to start off on the right foot. But between navigating unspoken social rules of the community and leaving two struggling adult children back at home, fitting in becomes harder than she expected. So when she sees flyers advertising the Scrabble Club, she thinks she might as well give it a try. She quickly realizes her faux pas when she walks into the library to find just one man, Walter Kretzer, who has a reputation for being a bit intense. Walter has taken his Scrabble club a pinch too seriously in the past, but when he meets Sally, with her golden-flecked eyes and
sensible style, and discovers she is something of a prodigy at the game, he can't help but feel his fate is about to change. As he draws Sally into the world of high-stakes Scrabble tournaments, his feelings for her
grow and inspire him to take a hard look at his life. When the truth about Sally's reasons for moving to Golden Grove are suddenly
exposed, Walter finds himself with the gumption to make his last
chapter in life the best yet.
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Under Water
by Tara Menon
After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife's research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle's parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its
reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized
as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can't outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss. Years later, Marissa is back
in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city
and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.
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Cousins from a Distant Sun
by Tamar Myers
Archaeologist Ruth Baker is in Peru for a new dig, but discovers more than she bargained for--a secret community of giant supernatural beings hiding in the mountains. The Wanami were originally kidnapped from Earth by aliens thousands of years ago to work on planet Qoom. Eventually they were shipped back and lived happily alongside the Inca civilization--until they were forced to take refuge in the treasure-filled caves beneath the Incan monuments they helped to build. Now, a new threat has emerged--and Ruth is the only thing that stands between them and real extinction Can she persuade the outside world to help ensure their survival, or will the human lust for gold cause her efforts to backfire spectacularly?
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