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 […]
Blockbuster is a contemporary Hollywood romance about Eliza Everwood, an ambitious indie filmmaker who does not believe in love stories, despite being the daughter of beloved romance novelist Diane Everwood. Eliza’s mother has built her life and career on happy endings, but Eliza has watched Diane be hurt repeatedly by unreliable men, including Eliza’s father, […]
Percival Everett’s Serious Music follows Arthur Champion, a Black American musician, composer and former conservatory student, through war, racial terror, political conspiracy, exile and artistic recovery. The novel begins with Arthur declaring a philosophy of music: Black music is not merely rhythm, not merely folk expression, not an inferior offshoot of European harmony. It has […]
The novel is set primarily in Kingston, Jamaica, during the late 1990s, a period marked by political violence, gang control of inner-city communities, and deep distrust between ordinary citizens, criminals, and the police. The novel follows several intersecting characters whose lives revolve around one question: what does it mean to disappear in a society where […]
The Unknown unfolds through the perspective of Marin Keane, a struggling, largely anonymous actress whose life abruptly changes when she is cast in her first feature film. Marin has spent years hovering on the margins of success, defined by small theatrical roles and a humiliating pharmaceutical commercial, and she carries deep insecurities about her talent, […]
Red Life is an intense, confessional novel that follows Nina, a thirty-nine-year-old American woman who deliberately leaves her marriage and her life in New York to spend a summer in Paris, convinced that she is not falling apart but acting with intention. From the outset, Nina insists on framing her departure not as a loss […]