Virtual Book Display: Contemporary Fiction

135 pages

A short, spellbinding novel about Tom Birkin, a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter--and fully embrace--normal life, spends the summer in an idyllic English village restoring a newly re-discovered medieval mural. Along the way he makes friends and finds consolation in the work of uncovering the mysterious mural.

130 pages

Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he'd had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

164 pages

2017 Finalist for Literary Fiction, Foreword Reviews
Best Fiction Books of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books
One of 19 Books You Should Read This September by Chicago Review of Books

The small plains town of Ingleside, Nebraska, is populated by down-on-their-luck ranchers and new money, ghosts and seers, drugs and greed, the haves and the have-nots. Lives ripple through each other to surprising effect, though the connections fluctuate between divisive gulfs and the most intimate closeness. At the center of this novel is the story of Teensy and his daughter, Luann, who face the loss of their land even as they mourn the death of Luann's mother. On the other end of the spectrum, some townspeople find enormous wealth when developers begin buying up acreages. When Glory Days--an amusement park--is erected, past and present collide, the attachment to the land is fully severed, and the invading culture ushers in even darker times.

In Glory Days Melissa Fraterrigo combines gritty realism with magical elements to paint an arrestingly stark portrait of the painful transitions of twenty-first-century, small-town America. She interweaves a slate of gripping characters to reveal deeper truths about our times and how the new landscape of one culture can be the ruin of another.

149 pages

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

The prize-winning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia   Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel--the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles--Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines.

In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation--of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.

"From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity's beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory." --Anna Summers, from the Introduction

132 pages

February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi officials is being held in secret in the plush lounge of the Reichstag. They are there to extract funds for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its Chancellor. This opening scene sets a tone of consent that will lead to the worst possible repercussions.  

March 12, 1938, the annexation of Austria is on the agenda: A grotesque day intended to make history--the newsreels capture a motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But behind Goebbels's splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria. The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss--a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, and vulgar threats--all reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character or the determination of a people that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff.

159 pages

Summer 1946. A man in his thirties is sailing on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, hoping to put off the inevitable return to work. Dropping anchor in a small port, he meets the owner of a nearby villa who invites him to stay in his waterside mansion. The sailor is lodged in a guest room previously occupied by a now deceased bishop related to his host. The two men form an uneasy bond, recognizing in each other a shared taste for idling and erotic adventure. They soon set sail together, but sudden tragedy puts an end to their revels and shatters the tranquility of the villa.

A sultry, stylish psychological thriller executed with supreme literary finesse

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" - the basis for Sarah Polley's film Away From Her -- her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

219 pages

The Wife is the story of the long and stormy marriage between a world-famous novelist, Joe Castleman, and his wife Joan, and the secret they've kept for decades. The novel opens just as Joe is about to receive a prestigious international award, The Helsinki Prize, to honor his career as one of America's preeminent novelists. Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, finally decides to stop.

Important and ambitious, The Wife is a sharp-eyed and compulsively readable story about a woman forced to confront the sacrifices she's made in order to achieve the life she thought she wanted.