Lark is a dystopian, darkly comic novel about ageing, memory, fear, desire, and the way a society disposes of old people while pretending to protect them. It is told almost entirely through the voice of Lark, an elderly New York woman whose mind is brilliant, neurotic, funny, spiteful, frightened and increasingly unstable. The story moves […]
This is a historical novel about love, exile, violence, women’s correspondence, marriage, loneliness, and the Portuguese White Fleet cod-fishing world of the early 1950s. It is built around three central figures: Benedito da Silva, called Bene; his wife Maria Lucilia da Silva, called Cilia; and Maria Alvares, a widowed Portuguese shopkeeper in St. John’s, Newfoundland. […]
Clarity is a bleak, comic, morally slippery novel about love, faith, trauma, abuse, memory, and the impossibility of ever knowing the full truth about another person — or even about oneself. Its central figures are Tom Barrie, a melancholy Lutheran minister who loses faith but cannot stop believing; Grace, his brilliant wife; and Bobby/Roberta/Ruby Stjern, […]
This is a quiet, intricate novel about a writer’s life as seen through three moments separated by twenty years: 1980, 2000, and 2020. Its central character is Victoria Gannon, who first publishes as V. Gannon, later becomes “Vicky” among family, and finally is mostly “V.” in the old age of her career. The novel is […]
Jaded is a dark campus novel about desire, manipulation, marriage, art, revenge, and the dangerous imbalance between professors and students. It is set mostly at Kelsey College in New York in 1986, with long returns into the pasts of its three central characters: married professors Sam and Vera Ward, and the young woman who disrupts […]
Tech Wives is a Silicon Valley marriage novel about two women, Sam Yang and Cecily, whose college friendship becomes sisterhood, family, rivalry, and moral reckoning. It moves between their early-1990s friendship at Hamlin College and their lives in 2017–2019 as women married into, or born alongside, enormous tech power. The novel is less about technology […]
Mobile Creatures is a quiet, fragmented, deeply interior novel about grief, widowhood, sisters, childhood trauma, dogs, writing, migration, memory, and the difference between fact and truth. It is narrated by Faith, an American novelist living in Berlin with her elderly dog Sally after the death of her husband, Ronan Sullivan, who was also a writer. […]
The Witch is a dual-timeline gothic thriller set in Woodhaven, Massachusetts, around an old family estate called Pemberton. One timeline follows Julia, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in the present day who returns to the house she has avoided since childhood. The other follows Caroline Eldridge in 1692, a young woman who lived at Pemberton and was […]
This is a grotesque, satirical, erotic horror novel about fine dining, patronage, wealth, exploitation, Asian American ambition, family dependence, and the way appetite turns people into monsters. Its central figure is Jun Li, a young Chinese American chef in New York whose restaurant, À La Belle Étoile, has one Michelin star and dreams of more. […]
Taipei Story is a sharp, painful, funny novel about language learning, diaspora identity, grief, family history, sexual awkwardness, and the fantasy of “reconnecting” with a culture that may no longer exist in the form one imagined. Its narrator is Lily Chen, a Chinese American Yale student who goes to Taipei for a ten-week intensive Mandarin […]