Contemporary Fiction

The Half Orphan's Handbook

It’s been three months since Lila lost her father to suicide. Since then, she’s learned to protect herself from pain by following two unbreakable rules:

1. The only people who can truly hurt you are the ones you love. Therefore, love no one.

2. Stay away from liars. Liars are the worst.

But when Lila’s mother sends her to a summer-long grief camp, it’s suddenly harder for Lila to follow these rules. Potential new friends and an unexpected crush threaten to drag her back into life for the first time since her dad’s death.

Migrations

Franny Stone cannot be contained. In a bleak near-future, she is a wanderer and a sleepwalker, a swimmer and a bird lover. Born in Australia, raised in Ireland by her mother while knowing nothing of her father, she ends up back in Australia with her paternal grandmother. Returning as an adult to Ireland, she works as a cleaner at a university, where Niall Lynch, a famous professor of ornithology, willingly succumbs to her dangerous bewitchment. Their shared ardor for the wild turns tragic as the sixth extinction accelerates.

The Authenticity Project

A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts "The Authenticity Project"as he titles a slim green notebookand begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London.

Fiona and Jane

Who knows you better: you or your best friend? Close friends Fiona and Jane—or Jane and Fiona—are constant presences in each other’s lives, sometimes from afar, sometimes in each other’s faces. From childhood through early adulthood, the two Taiwanese American young women scramble though the obstacle courses of their lives, each negotiating complicated family circumstances and carrying the weight of secrets kept from them and secrets they keep from others.

A Good Neighbor

The single mother of a mixed-race college student and a thriving business owner with a troubled daughter clash over a historic oak tree on their property line and the blossoming romance between their children.

Dear Edward

Twelve-year-old Eddie Adler is flying with his family from New York City to Los Angeles, a temporary relocation for his mother's television writing job. As he and his brother fight over who gets the window seat, their parents worry how the boys will cope with the move. The 216 passengers aboard their plane include a soldier returning from Afghanistan, an unexpectedly pregnant woman hoping for an engagement ring from her new boyfriend, and a dying tycoon.

The Resisters

An audacious wonder of a novel about baseball and a future America,. The time: Some thirty-five years hence. The place: AutoAmerica--governed by "Aunt Nettie," an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water. The people: Divided into the angelfair "Netted," whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned "Surplus," whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living in plastic houses that talk and multi-colored houseboats at the water's edge. Neither group is happy.