Counterpoint: 634 books

**“This thoroughly enjoyable historical mystery provides plenty of surprising plot turns and will appeal to readers who enjoyed Ian McEwan’s early novels.” —**Library Journal Winter 1944: northern Italy is a battlefield, with Communist partisans locked in vicious conflict with the forces...

Everyone wants to write a book. Arlette Rosen knows this and earns her living helping strangers with their book ideas: books about Derrida and dieting, books of psychic exercises, a compendium of Alzheimer's jokes, and of course, an infinite number of books about love. Enter Harbinger Singh: a tax lawyer...

Mark Perdue has so many problems that when he starts feeling chest pains on the tarmac at LAX, it dawns on him that a heart attack might be an efficient way out. Once an eminent physicist, he hasn’t published or had a new idea in a decade. The younger professors at UC Berkeley pity him, and he’s...

November 2004: George W. Bush is re-elected. Five days later, Alan Meister, a New York professor of philosophy, is diagnosed with lymphoma-not that he can prove the two are connected. While coping with the rigors of chemotherapy, Alan begins work on a long-postponed book titled The Health of a Sick Man,...

These three novellas each shimmer with exactitudes of falling out of love and falling into death, as existence at critical moments renounces normal life for moments of absolute desire. These are narratives of obsession and calamity. Lovers and wives are at the edge of themselves, saying the unsayable,...

It's southern California in the early Sixties, and Charlotte is a teenager, which is bad enough. She also has strange grandparents, with whom she lives, a schizophrenic ventriloquist alcoholic mother who appears and disappears regularly from her life, and only vague information about the father who died...

From the author hailed by Newsweek as "a writer of great daring and skill to match" comes a brilliant, wholly original novel about the freedoms and imprisonments of desire. The Physics of Sunset is a spellbinding and fearlessly accurate portrait of the complex erotics of modern married life.

England, 1870: His health failing, his most important work all but done, Charles Dickens is readying himself for the final bed. But there is still one more story that he must tell. As a young journalist just getting his start, Dickens encountered a story that would affect him for the rest of his life. As...

On an Oregon ranch, a young woman struggles to overcome the past: “An eloquent meditation on patterns of grief, loss, and silence between generations” (Publishers Weekly).   Avery is no stranger to the weight of loss, the way it shapes and defines the expanse of a life. The death of her sister,...

There is a sorry lack of smart, relatable books for fathers on the marketplace, particularly ones that avoid tired stereotypes or outdated family roles. McGlynn's memoir is a welcome, heart-warming and unsentimental side of fatherhood—one that goes all too often unheard and uncelebrated, even in...

“A California woman fights to recover from resurfaced memories of childhood abuse . . . powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful.” —Kirkus Reviews The novel opens with Barbara, who, after remembering incidents of torture at the hands of her father, has quite literally broken down....

A tennis pro tries to escape the shambles of his life and recapture his glory days: “Brown may be the John Updike for a new generation” (Library Journal, starred review). Slow Smith is in a slump. He’s a professional tennis player stuck in his hometown, serving to an empty court. His...

“Mix Nabokov’s Pale Fire with James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia” for an anarchic comic novel by a Donald Barthelme Prize-winning author (Jim Krusoe). English professor Paul McWeeney’s sister has written a book accusing their late father of murdering Elizabeth Short in the notorious...

Erin McGraw is a former B&N Discover writer, a repeat winner of the Pushcart Prize, Claire Messud described Erin McGraw’s last collection of stories as “At once laugh-out-loud funny and utterly serious, [exploring] life’s profundity through its quotidian details.” This is even more...