New Fiction

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See (Random House)

Lisa See masterfully creates the story of two Chinese girls, paired as friends for life by a village matchmaker in the early 1800s. They are bonded together as friends to form better marriage possibilities for each, and yet they help one another overcome the harsh realities of their lives. Lily and Snow Flower create a fan during their foot binding and use it to communicate secretly to each other throughout their lives. In the end, it is this fan that helps to tell us the story of these two remarkable women and the bond they shared. -T. Taylor

House of Thieves
by Kaui Hart Hemmings (Penguin)

These skillfully crafted short stories are as compelling as Hawaii itself. Representing much more than just a setting, the author weaves her stories in and through contemporary Hawaii’s history, culture, and landscape. The subtle transition from one story to the next gives the feeling that the various characters have passed one another in the street, at parties or the beach. The human element in each story that Hemmings carefully unfolds with deftness and simplicity gives us an intimate portrait of contemporary Hawaiian life. -A.C. Jennings

The Writing on the Wall
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint)

Sometimes being alone is better. Practicing a life of "emotional celibacy" can provide the proper buffer against life’s cuts and bruises, especially those induced by daily interaction with our fellow human beings. However, invariably, the "right" one slips in and chaos ensues. For Renata, a librarian from Brooklyn with an overwhelming passion for language, that person is Jack, and soon her world, including the world around them, begins to crumble. Using the falling of the Twin Towers as a backdrop, Schwartz has created an emotionally cavernous novel, exquisitely wrought, bringing to light familial tragedy and almost cancerous obsession. -C. Joyner

Divided Kingdom
by Rupert Thomson (Knopf)

In the near future, the government of the United Kingdom enacts a radical social experiment called The Rearrangement. The country is divided into four regions: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic. Families are torn apart based on character type. Children are renamed and relocated; such is the case of Thomas Perry. In order to survive, somewhat contentedly, Thomas forgets much of his past. As an adult, Thomas becomes a civil servant in the Red Zone (Sanguine). When he finds himself traveling to another zone, the life he has created unravels and he can’t resume his previous life lie. -G. Berry

In Perfect Light
by Benjamin Alire Sàenz (Rayo)

Sometimes, when we experience severe loss or trauma, we build emotional walls against feelings that may overwhelm us or to control our oversensitivity to the world. Those selfsame walls often keep out the ones who can help us heal. This is the dilemma of Andres and Grace, Social misfit and jaded counselor, who have numbed themselves to prior tragedies. Soon, their lives spin closer together, revealing secrets and coincidences.

Sàenz’s quiet, jazzy prose entwines the reader’s experiences with those of his characters, creating joys and sorrows indistinguishable from our own; we learn peace comes in silencing the urges that come easy, and in small moments of compassion and surrender. -V. Verano

Mr Muo's Travelling Couch
by Dai Sijie (Knopf)
translated by Ina Rilke

From the author of the unforgettable Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Knopf), this romantic novel focuses on the search for love, the clash of cultures, and the test of beliefs. As expected from Sijie, it is a witty, charming, and lighthearted tale. Recently returned from Paris and studying Freud, Mr. Muo is searching the interior of China for a virgin to offer in compensation for the release of his one true love, who is now a political prisoner. The search teaches him that true love, education, and loyalty are not always as strong as one first believes. –A.P. King

The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman
by Nedjima (Grove)

In her autobiographical novel, The Almond, Nedjma confronts a topic not common in contemporary literature: the sexuality of Muslim women. At once a coming-of-age story and a tale of erotic exploration, The Almond opens a window into an aspect of Muslim culture not often seen or perhaps even imagined. This riveting story focuses on Badra, a young woman who flees her brutal arranged marriage and moves in with an independent and sexually liberated aunt. Now able to live her life the way she chooses, Badra embarks on a love affair and finds pleasures and passion previously unknown to her. -K. Markowitz

The Icarus Girl
by Helen Oyeyemi (Doubleday)

At the beginning of The Icarus Girl, Jessamy, an eight-year-old misfit, goes to Nigeria with her English father and Nigerian mother to meet her mother's family. She meets her first friend there, calls her Tillytilly, then reality slowly goes awry. What unfolds is a frightening story of a life lived between sanity and delirium, , between folk beliefs and clinical analysis, between Yoruba Nigeria and contemporary England. Just as Jessamy is pulled, doubting, between two worlds, so, too, is the reader, as magic, cultural dislocation, and schizophrenia slowly combine. Tightly written, terrorizing, but very human, this is a literary thriller with serious philosophical bones. -M. Helsel

Here Is Where We Meet
by John Berger (Pantheon)

In writing and drawing, in big cities, mountain villages, pasts and great presents, John Berger has been "meeting" readers and helping readers meet the world for over fifty years. He has done this in essay collections and in an underestimated body of fiction. This luminous new book lies in the borderland between fiction and memoir—a visceral rendering of the present and dreamy, imaginative musings on the past, and sometimes both—as when he talks to the dead among us. A true storyteller speaks to the dead as much as to the living. John Berger is one of the truest. -R. Simonson

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards (Viking)

On the night of a ferocious snowstorm, nurse Caroline Gill is the only one on hand in the clinic to help her boss, Dr. Henry, deliver his own children. Born first is a boy—perfect, with a mass of dark hair—then a girl, with the same hair and, obviously, with Down syndrome. Making a snap decision, he tells his wife their daughter died in birth and instructs Caroline to take the girl to an institution. She does not, and the deception that begins on that snowy night in 1964 comes to a stunning conclusion two decades later in this heart-wrenching tale of love. -H. Myers

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)

The border country between Texas and Mexico serves as setting (if not wholly drawn character for Cormac McCarthy's first book in seven years, but no winsome boys gallop away here. Menace stalks, mayhem follows. A man absconds with illicit booty and the chase is on. Choice and fate are characters, but so is a sheriff, the most complex, adult, doubt-plagued character McCarthy has created in years. Stark and stunning the language is here (and the bloodletting, too), harkening to old ways with words, yet cast in manner fresh and original. This is a work of genius. -R. Simonson

Desertion
by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Pantheon)

We are all running from something. No matter what the situation is, there is always an alternative that seems more appealing. The characters in Gurnah's seventh novel, despite differences in age, gender, and race, are unified in the desire to abandon what they have to seek something better.

Through narrative that impeccably changes to voice the characters' different attitudes and aspirations, we watch them escape convention to find what they desire. Encompassing nearly one hundred years on the eastern coast of Africa, Desertion is an epic of the human experience to question our place and seek another that truly fits our essence. -J. Zaidi

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown)

George Santayana coined the adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Now, Elizabeth Kostova has given a new slant to the old saying…those who choose to chronicle history are, well, doomed. Kostova submerges her readers in the richly detailed lives of historians, secret societies, transcontinental warmongering, and an antique printing press run by the mostly unlikely of historical and literary figures. Basing much of the novel's skeleton on fact, our fearless author deftly weaves a legend thousands of years old though the fabric of history to create a completely original epic nightmare. -C. Joyner

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
by John Crowley (William Morrow)

What strikes the reader immediately is Crowley's sheer audacity—to write a novel that purports to be written by one of the most famous writers in the English language takes a lot of chutzpah. What's more, Crowley was not satisfied with simply ghostwriting for Byron; he added two other strands to his work—the semibiographical commentary of Ada, Byron's daughter, on the novel, and the e-mail of several people in the contemporary world who are rediscovering the book. It's bizarre, bewildering at times, and beautiful. This is a novel written by a master at the top of his form. -W.S. Bigler

Novel
by George Singleton (Harcourt)

Gruel, South Carolina, may appear to be a fictitious town created by an author who is a little unbalanced. However, it is my duty, being from the Deep South, to inform you...Singleton is completely sane. Southern ingenuity (a phenomenon not unlike the stray bolts of electricity that kill cattle) strikes at the most inopportune times and often produces the most unfortunate of business endeavors. Novel showcases the Gruel Inn Writer's Retreat, the Gruel Bakery, and the end all of weight-loss fads, the Sneeze 'n' Tone. Singleton pistol-whips the reader with black humor in almost every sentence and is truly worth reading. -C. Joyner

98 Reasons for Being
by Clare Dudman (Viking)

It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In the 1850s the inmates of a German insane asylum occupy the hell designed for them by the best intentions of nineteenth-century medicine. Obsessive-compulsives, Alzheimer's sufferers, epileptics, and depressives alike suffer the various "cures" of the times: electroshock therapy, isolation, slave labor, bloodletting, and even a little poisoning. When all this fails to revive Hannah Meyer, a catatonic young woman, the asylum's physician tries an early version of talk therapy. Though fictitious, this story, based on the life of physician Heinrich Hoffman, gives a glimpse into the prejudices and true madness of the times. -T. Hayes

Freddy and Fredericka
by Mark Helprin (PenguinPress)

Mix timeless storytelling and a humorous satire of the British Royal Family's most embarrassing couple and you have Helprin's newest novel, a hilarious farce that mocks the modern-day monarchy. Freddy is the Prince of Wales, and just about everyone questions his ascension to the throne. Fredericka is his wife, a woman more interested in public opinion than in her duties as the up-and-coming queen. They are sent to conquer the contemporary United States in order to claim the throne. What Helprin does so well is to create a delightful tale that features the resilience of the human spirit and the devotion of the heart. -A.P. King

What Casanova Told Me
by Susan Swan (Bloomsbury)

Susan Swan has written a romance—not to be confused with a romance novel. It is the story of Luce Adams, descendent of Asked For Adams, the niece of President John Adams. A journal and letters come into the possession of Luce Adams that connect her distant cousin, Asked For, intimately to Giacomo (Jacob) Casanova. An archivist by profession, Luce is drawn into discovering the true nature of Asked For's relationship to Casanova. Swan's book is the perfect mix of fact and fiction, told with great verve. -G. Berry

Bodies in Motion
by Mary Anne Mohanraj (HarperCollins)

This seductive collection of short stories explores the struggles, ambitions, and successes of many family members as they face both future and past. Set in the modern United States and traditional Sri Lanka, these artistically written stories weave through each other, and through time, place, and theme. When finished, you realize the stories are able to stand alone as well as join together intricately in a strong, solid collection that tests the definitions of love, sex, gender, and place. The stories represent Mohanraj's successful attempt to shape and define generations—individually and together. This book is a rare and delightful find. -A.P. King

Pocketful of Names
by Joe Coomer (Graywolf)

Hannah lives alone on the small Maine isle of Ten Acres No Nine, which she inherited from her quirky great-uncle Arno after his death. A successful artist, she lives simply, using much of the detritus that washes up on her beach in her art. Her solitude is whittled away, first, by a dog that washes up on her shore, and then by a teenage boy, Will, sent to live with Hannah by her estranged sister. Coomer explores notions of solitude and family in this artful and graceful novel. -H. Myers

The Hill Road
by Patrick O'Keeffe (Viking)

In the four novellas that comprise The Hill Road, a young boy tries to separate the truth from the legend surrounding the death of a soldier returned from the Great War nearly two generations earlier; a young woman unknowingly falls under the spell of a man who had betrayed her deceased sister years before; a suddenly wealthy farmer disappears, leaving no trace but a parcel filled with his own clothes and a cryptic note. In his first work of fiction, O'Keeffe explores the secrets and dreams of a handful of people in rural western Ireland—a small plot of geography made immense by layers of history, memory, and family. -N. Entrikin

Specimen Days
by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Walt Whitman and the island of Manhattan provide the underpinnings of Specimen Days. Three enigmatic characters are woven into the triptych form that Michael Cunningham has made his own. They shift shapes and variants of the same names in a historical novella of industrial nineteenth century New York, a gritty police procedural set in our terrorized age, and an eerie apocalyptic peek into the future. Cunningham intertwines Whitman's language and vision with his to show the dreadful vulnerability of children and their threatened innocence in the most American of all our cities. -J. Brown

The Queen of the South
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Putnam)

In a departure from his historically based adventures, Pérez-Reverte shifts his focus to Spanish and Central American drug cartels and one woman's trans-Atlantic odyssey. Theresa Mendoza flees Mexico after her boyfriend is caught double-crossing his bosses in a local cartel. Arriving in Spain, survival is her principal concern. Yet as the years pass and her sphere of influence grows, her lust for revenge begins to intensify. The pages quickly turn as the bewilderment and fear of the hunted grow into the calculated malice of the hunter, forcing you to continually reexamine what it is you think you know about the characters. -J. Zaidi