Fiction Best Bets

Retired to the English countryside, an 89-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years... more info...

"The quiet lushness of both the concept and the language of this novel are typical of Chabon's fresh, convincing style. What makes it extraordinary, however, is the exactness and care with which he manipulates... more info...

A missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irene Nemirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Francaise Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted... more info...

On the first day of the new year, no one dies. Which is ominous, and causes much consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand,... more info...

Election day in the capital and it rains so hard that no one bothers to come out to vote. When the rain finally stops, voters rush to the polling station as if ordered to appear.When the ballots are counted,... more info...

The novel vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s, tracing it through the guerilla warfare of Bloody Kansas. Ingeniously narrated by the last surviving son of America's most famous and... more info...

Orphaned and anchorless, Silver is taken in by blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew explains the history of Cape Wrath and its founder, Babel Dark,... more info...

Inspiring story of the Biblical prophet Elijah's soul-shattering trial of faith. From the author of the internationally acclaimed "The Alchemist." 245p. more info...

Treading the wafer-thin line between evil and the everyday, the story of the novel centers on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third... more info...

As A.M. Homes incendiary novel unfolds, the technicolor hues of the American good life become nearly hallucinogenic: from a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford-wife... more info...

Winner of the 2007 nobel prize for literature. Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her... more info...

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream - and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward. Frances... more info...

This stunning work of imagination & memory brings to mesmerizing life a vibrant, colorful, thrilling, and dangerous New York City in the earliest years of the 20th century. The novel is the epic saga of... more info...

They came by boat from a starving land - and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains - seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible... more info...

(Contemporary Classics). Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. Buck's... more info...

In this brilliant first collection of eight stories, Ben Fountain rides roughshod over territory originally staked out by Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Wildly plotted, astutely observed, and beautifully... more info...

Now a SHOWTIME Original Miniseries. This long-awaited continuation of the classic miniseries "Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City" discovers the tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for... more info...

In this tour de force, author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment. Her richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune fathoms the intersections... more info...

Merciless take on academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly depicts what can happen when academic politics collides with political correctness. The novel does for creative writing incubators what... more info...

(Vintage Classics). Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. A chance pools win enables him to capture the art student Miranda and keep her in the cellar... more info...

Louis Holland arrives in Boston on a spring of strange happenings - earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with... more info...

XX more info...

Pompous, vain, shallow, inconsiderate, untrustworthy, fickel...linguistics professor Thomas 'Tomcat' Chippering is a man much like any other. But when his serial flirting finally drives his wife into the... more info...

A novel set in heaven, written in the form of the memoir of a murdered 14-year-old girl: "I knew where my body was, but I could not tell them." Watching life on earth continue from a place that resembles... more info...

When Pat - on her second gap year and a source of some worry to her parents - is accpeted as a new tenant at number 44, she isn't quite sure how long she'll last. Her flatmate Bruce, a rugby-playing chartered... more info...

(The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series). This installment in the lives of McCall Smith's extended Botswana family teaches the importance of trust, love, and what really makes a good husband. 212p. more info...

(The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Vol. 3). The irrepressible Precious Ramotswe faces supreme problems at home and at work. With her detective agency in financial turmoil, Mma Ramotswe takes the... more info...

It's going to take all her intuition and eminent sensibility for Precious Ramotswe - Botswana's only, and finest, female private detective - to crack her hardest case yet: the decade-old disappearance... more info...

A sexual liason during an October blizzard jeopardizes the lives and situations of more than just the two people who finally can no longer resist each other. A National Book Award Finalist. more info...

Flora Tristan, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and a French mother, grows up in poverty and journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. In 1891, Flora's grandson, the struggling painter... more info...

Virginia Woolf's haunting novel tells the story of the all-too-brief life of Jacob Flanders, from his childhood in Scarborough through his student years at Cambridge and his bachelor days in London to... more info...

Depicting Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and brought international acclaim. In "Hardboiled & Hard Luck," the best-selling author Banana Yoshimoto delivers two tales of resonant grace,... more info...