Of Wind and Dust is a historical family saga about three women bound to the same Chinese patriarchal household: Yook Lan, the first wife; Mary, the Indigenous Suquamish second wife; and Guai Fong, the younger third wife. It moves between Toi Shan in southern China, Puget Sound in Washington Territory, Seattle, Hong Kong, and the […]
This novel is about the first years of long-term dialysis in Seattle and the secret lay committee that chose which kidney-failure patients would receive treatment when there were too many dying people and too few machines. It is also a story about guilt, class, race, marriage, medicine, faith, power, and the unbearable burden of judging […]
Heart of the Wild is a survival novel, family drama, and coming-of-age story set in 1972 in the mountains of western North Carolina. It follows fourteen-year-old Emma McKinney, her mother Jenny, runaway Becky Ralston, and a watching hawk whose presence turns the forest into something both real and mystical. The book is about what it […]
Bright Monday is a reflective, elegant, memory-driven novel about ageing, old desire, marriage, literary reputation, dogs, translation, AIDS, Covid, and the way the past can return at the exact moment when one thinks it has become harmless. Its narrator is Adam, an American writer and professor in late middle age. He is married to Robert, […]
Laurel, in her mid-thirties, arrives at the Mcmurdo Antarctic Research Station not as a mycologist researching mushrooms and fungi, but as a kitchen worker, scrubbing pots and floors. She is sunk in grief, although we do not discover until more than a third of the way into the novel that she is mourning her eight-year-old […]
Mexicali is a long historical novel about the borderlands between California, Arizona, Texas, and northern Mexico; about family inheritance; and about whether a violent, evasive, self-inventing man can ever be understood truthfully by his descendants. Its central figure is Odd Slade, a drifter, gambler, opportunist, gunrunner, border entrepreneur, father, coward, survivor, and sometime rescuer. The […]
Rabbit Rabbit is a romantic, emotionally warm novel about chance, timing, motherhood, grief, friendship, and the difficulty of choosing one life when another suddenly appears. Its heroine, Billie, is a thirty-nine-year-old film editor in Los Angeles who decides, on New Year’s Eve in Florence, that she is going to have a baby on her own. […]
Wife & Wife opens in 2011 with eighty-one-year-old Ruth Wolfe standing outside the New York City Clerk’s Office on the first day same-sex marriage is legal in New York. She watches gay couples emerge newly married, applauded by supporters and heckled by protesters. The sight stirs in her wonder, fear, envy, and disbelief: after a […]
Charlotte Cane is a literary psychological novel about fame, memory, authorship, exploitation, ageing, #MeToo, and the stories people tell about harm in order to survive it. Its protagonist, Charlotte Cane, is a sixty-four-year-old celebrated fiction writer whose new collection has unexpectedly been longlisted for a major literary prize. On the surface, she is enjoying a […]
Eternal Glow is a satirical horror-thriller about beauty culture, Mormon social pressure, female friendship, shame, vanity, and revenge. The narrator is Celeste Harper, a Utah Latter-day Saint wife and mother who is terrified of being ordinary, ageing, poor, exposed, or socially cast out. She lives in a world where spiritual virtue and physical perfection are […]