|
|
| Universal Harvester by John DarnielleIn this intricate, disturbing novel, small town Iowa reveals its darker side when video store customers start complaining about creepy footage spliced into their VHS rentals (it's the late 1990s). Jeremy Heldt, working the counter while he waits for something better to come along, reluctantly starts looking into the footage, which draws him into a local, decades-old story of tragedy and loss. But plot isn't the important thing about Universal Harvester -- you'll want to read it for its strong sense of place, its compelling turns of phrase (author John Darnielle is a singer/songwriter), its menacing atmosphere, and for the way it explores the emotional consequences of loss. |
|
|
Every Wild Heart
by Meg Donohue
Nine years ago when Gail’s husband announced that he wanted a divorce, her ensuing on-air rant propelled her local radio show into the national spotlight. Now, “The Gail Gideon Show” is beloved by millions of single women who tune-in for her advice on the power of self-reinvention. But fame comes at a price. After all, what does a woman who has staked her career on being single do when she finds herself falling in love? And is the person who is harassing her in increasingly troubling ways a misguided fan or a true danger to Gail and her daughter, Nic? Fourteen-year-old Nic has always felt that she pales in comparison to her vibrant, outgoing mother. Plagued by a fear of social situations, she is most comfortable at the stable where she spends her afternoons. But when a riding accident lands Nic in the hospital, she awakens from her coma changed. Suddenly, she has no fear at all and her disconcerting behavior lands her in one risky situation after another. And no one, least of all her mother, can guess what she will do next.
|
|
|
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep
by Steven Heighton
Canadian. Elias Trifannis is desperate to belong somewhere. To make his dying ex-cop father happy, he joins the military—but in Afghanistan, by the time he realizes his last-minute bid for connection was a terrible mistake, it’s too late and a tragedy has occurred. In the aftermath, exhausted by nightmares, Elias is sent to Cyprus to recover, where he attempts to find comfort in the arms of Eylül, a beautiful Turkish journalist. But the lovers’ reprieve ends in a moment of shocking brutality that drives Elias into Varosha, once a popular Greek-Cypriot resort town, abandoned since the Turkish invasion of 1974. Hidden in the lush, overgrown ruins is a community of exiles and refugees living resourcefully but comfortably. Thanks to the cheerfully corrupt Colonel Kaya, who turns a blind eye, they live under the radar of the Turkish authorities. As he begins to heal, Elias finds himself drawn to the enigmatic and secretive Kaiti while he learns at last to “simply belong.” But just when it seems he has found sanctuary, events he himself set in motion have already begun to endanger it.
|
|
|
The Wanderers
by Meg Howrey
In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation ever created. Retired from NASA, Helen had not trained for irrelevance. It is nobody’s fault that the best of her exists in space, but her daughter can’t help placing blame. The MarsNOW mission is Helen’s last chance to return to the only place she’s ever truly felt at home. For Yoshi, it’s an opportunity to prove himself worthy of the wife he has loved absolutely, if not quite rightly. Sergei is willing to spend seventeen months in a tin can if it means traveling to Mars. He will at least be tested past the point of exhaustion, and this is the example he will set for his sons. As the days turn into months, the line between what is real and unreal becomes blurred, and the astronauts learn that the complications of inner space are no less fraught than those of outer space.
|
|
| Things We Have in Common by Tasha KavanaghLonely, overweight Yasmin Doner is a high school outcast who desperately wants to fit in but lacks the social skills to do so. Shunned at school and criticized at home, she's built an elaborate fantasy life, which revolves around the most popular girl at school, Alice. After noticing a man lurking near their school, she constructs a new fantasy -- one in which Yasmin becomes a hero after saving Alice from abduction by this man. So Yasmin starts following the stranger, eventually forming a friendship with him. And then Alice actually does disappear. Combining the creep factor and unreliable narrator of classic psychological suspense with the desperately lonely adolescence of a YA novel, this dark tale is a good choice for fans of Sebastian Faulks' Engleby. |
|
|
White Tears
by Hari Kunzru
Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.
|
|
|
The Forgotten Girls
by Owen Laukkanen
Canadian. She was a forgotten girl, a runaway found murdered on the High Line train through the northern Rocky Mountains and, with little local interest, put into a dead file. But she was not alone. When Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere of the joint FBI-BCA violent crime force stumble upon the case, they discover a horror far greater than anyone expected—a string of murders on the High Line, all of them young women drifters whom no one would notice. But someone has noticed now. Through the bleak midwinter and a frontier land of forbidding geography, Stevens and Windermere follow a frustratingly light trail of clues—and where it ends, even they will be shocked.
|
|
| All Our Wrong Todays: A Novel by Elan MastaiTom Barren lives in a world where clothes are recycled and refashioned onto your body each day, you yourself are micro-steam-cleaned as you sleep, driverless flying cars are the norm, and avocados are always perfect. It's 2016, and war is nonexistent, thanks to an unlimited power source created in 1965. But that all changes when Tom, a total underachiever, accidentally erases that picture-perfect version of reality in one very stupid, grief-fueled time-travel mishap that lands him in our less-than-ideal 2016, where he discovers an unexpected and wonderful version of his own life at the expense of the utopia he destroyed. A clever, witty take on time travel, this enjoyable debut sparkles with pop culture references and is more about love than science. |
|
| The Refugees by Viet Thanh NguyenAuthor Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel The Sympathizer won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal, among other accolades; readers hungry for more will appreciate the eight stories collected here, written before The Sympathizer was published. While the stories, mostly set in the Vietnamese community in California, represent Vietnamese refugee experiences in the U.S., the topics they explore -- relationships, grief, the desire for fulfillment -- "transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals" (Kirkus Reviews). Check them out if you're interested in sympathetic characters, cultural dislocation, or the experiences of refugees. |
|
| The Animators: A Novel by Kayla Rae WhitakerIn this much-anticipated debut, two women who met in a college art class (and instantly became best friends), try to make a go of it as animated cartoonists. Sharon, who narrates, has always been the calming presence, while Mel, charismatic, confident, and openly gay, is a creative whirlwind. Ten years after they graduate, the consequences of their success nearly destroy their partnership (frequently drunk or high, Mel flames out spectacularly, while Sharon suffers a debilitating stroke). With realistic characters you'll empathize with even as they make calamitous decisions, The Animators is alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming, passionate and funny as it documents how artists create art out of pain. |
|
Recent Short Story Collections
|
|
| For a Little While: New and Selected Stories by Rick BassAuthor Rick Bass' many skills include a gift for establishing place -- most of his stories are set in the mountains of the West or in the Deep South, in rough little towns or windswept plains or not-so-tidy suburbia. His depictions of the forces of nature (another favorite topic) range from sudden blizzards to runaway horses, each offering a different kind of danger. His characters are finely nuanced, whether he's writing about grieving middle-aged men or skittish young women. And while this collection offers 18 previously published stories, there are also seven new ones waiting to be discovered. |
|
| A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey FordAuthor Jeffrey Ford explores the underlying darkness of daily life via the 13 alarming, thought-provoking stories collected in A Natural History of Hell. Using humor, literary allusions, folklore tropes, and science fiction settings, Ford lets his imagination shine in ways designed to unsettle. He satirizes parenting in an account of a teenager's exorcism ("The Blameless"), chillingly depicts a required-open-carry high school ("Blood Drive"), and invents a world in which angels offer protection -- at a cost ("The Angel Seems"). Fans of Aimee Bender's equally inventive and darkly comic short stories or of Neil Gaiman's work in general will enjoy these twisty, creepy, and sometimes disturbing thrills. |
|
| The Pier Falls: And Other Stories by Mark HaddonAnd now for something completely different. (Or at least that may be what you'll be saying to yourself as you move between stories set in the Victorian era, a Martian settlement, and a remote island, among other locales.) Stranded princesses, beachside disasters, junk-food addictions, mysterious strangers -- no matter the vehicle, author Mark Haddon depicts violence, horror, or despair with distinctly dark British humor. If you don't mind a few unhappy endings, or elements of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, this collection is undeniably entertaining. |
|
| What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: Stories by Helen OyeyemiIn this "beguiling" (Booklist) collection, the stories seem as if they could be modern fairy tales or folklore, so magical are some of their settings: there are echoes of Pinocchio in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?"; "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose" is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Along with striking imagery and surreal occurrences, the collection has a shared theme of locks and keys that winds throughout the loosely connected stories, which offer a diverse array of characters, each seeking something they may never be able to find. |
|
|
|
|
|