by Nicholson Baker

Emmett begins getting up very early each cold morning to start the fireplace and sit in front of it. This habit may have started after his wife took the family "to see the sunrise on New Year's morning," and it's going to continue only as long as Emmett's box of matches holds out.

 

179 pages

by Benjamin Anastas

Identical twins Clive and William were born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1965 to suburban nudist-vegetarian parents who had toured Mexico "in search of armed insurrectionists and returned with the perfect dining-room set." Ability was distributed evenly between them, but the uses they made of it were utterly dissimilar.

 

147 pages

by Julian Barnes

Cordially divorced and smugly retired, Tony is yanked out of complacency by a perplexing letter. The recently deceased mother of his disastrous first love has inexplicably bequeathed him the diary of a school friend of his who committed suicide.

 

163 pages

 

 

Following a wayward corgi into the back garden, the queen discovers a bookmobile, and out of politeness borrows a book.  She finds that she really likes reading, and becomes a regular bookmobile patron.  All jolly good, until the she starts shirking her royal duties because she'd rather be reading.

 

120 pages
 

by Sijie Dai

Tracks the lives of two teens, childhood friends who have been sent to a small Chinese village for "re-education" during Mao's Cultural Revolution. Sons of doctors and dentists, their days are now spent muscling buckets of excrement up the mountainside and mining coal. 

 

197 pages

 

by Christine Féret-Fleury

Juliette, a whimsical Parisian, leads a life far too dull for her magical spirit. She has an ordinary office job in real estate and dates men who are positively yawnworthy. Her love of literature and her active imagination, however, set her on a path to becoming a matchmaker between books and readers.

 

175 pages

River of Teeth
by Sarah Gailey

Winslow Houndstooth is assembling a crack team made up of, among others, a sharpshooter, a con woman, a demolitions expert, and an assassin. But don't call it a caper he's plotting; he's running a legitimate operation, employed by the federal government, to take care of a wild hippo problem in southern Louisiana. 

 

175 pages

 

by Kang Han

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.

 

188 pages

by Takashi Hiraide

The husband and wife, who lease a guesthouse on the grounds of an old estate in Tokyo, have lived quietly since quitting their corporate jobs to work as independent contractors, but though they spend more time together in their tiny space, they seem to communicate less and less. 

 

140 pages

by Megan Hunter

London is under water. People are fleeing the city in panic. An unnamed narrator escapes with her husband and new baby to the family farm, where they survive for a brief time before supplies run out. Then, along with many others, they leave their safe surroundings for the uncertainty of life on the road, eventually ending up in a communal encampment.

 

136 pages

 

An epic tale of Idaho Panhandle railroad laborer Robert Grainer. Born in 1886, orphaned by age six and placed with cousins, he's not outwardly remarkable or compelling. He marries Gladys and fathers Kate while working for a timber company, and he witnesses disparate events and characters from influenza epidemics and the advent of automobiles and airplanes to an unscheduled area stop by a young Elvis Presley.

 

116 pages

 

by Cynan Jones

Two quietly, forcefully told tales to offer an indelible portrait of country life. It's not a pretty picture. In one story, a farmer copes with the bone-hard, barely profitable work of raising sheep even as he mourns his wife, lost to a horse's kick. In the second story, a badger baiter deals with his loyal pack of dogs, a policeman who senses he's up to no good, and a badger that fights back.

by Seanan McGuire

Sometimes children disappear, and when they come back, their stories of fantastical lands are too much for their families to handle. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is a place for such "troubled" youth.

 

173 pages

by Sayaka Murata

Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old resident of Tokyo, is so finely attuned to the daily rhythms of Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart -- where she's worked since age 18 -- that she's nearly become one with the store.

 

163 pages

by Jenny Offill

Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling. If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. 

 

179 pages

by Julie Otsuka

In iridescent colors that flicker, blend, and shimmer between light and dark, Otsuka crafts a communal self-portrait of Japanese women who came to America as "picture brides" (mail order brides) for California's Japanese laborers after World War I.

 

129 pages

 

by Max Porter
 

Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar -- a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. 

 

114 pages

by Samanta Schweblin

A tense, sustained dialogue in an emergency clinic somewhere in the Argentinian countryside between a dying woman named Amanda and her dispassionate interlocutor, David, who, we quickly ascertain, is a child but seems to be neither her child nor any clear relation to her. 

 

183 pages

by Justin Torres

Three brothers tear their way through childhood -- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn -- he's Puerto Rican, she's white -- and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.

 

128 pages