Beyond Bestsellers - Fiction, Summer 2018

Beyond Bestsellers - Fiction, Summer 2018

July - September 2018 Issue

       

 

See also:

Anwar, Arif. The Storm. 
In this multigenerational novel, an orphan, whose village in Bangladesh has been destroyed by a cyclone, grows up to attend graduate school in America, and eventually has a family of his own.

Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. 
An old man looks back on his first relationship – an affair he had when he was nineteen years old and fell in love with a much older married woman.

Boast, Will. Daphne. 
The main character of this novel has a rare medical condition, cataplexy, which causes her to have paralyzing seizures when she experiences emotions; she manages her life by tightly controlling her activities, until she meets a free-spirited man who becomes interested in her.

Broder, Melissa. The Pisces. 
A young woman who breaks up with her longtime boyfriend joins a therapy group to deal with her subsequent depression, and then meets a man on the beach who turns out to be a merman.

Carey, Peter. A Long Way from Home. 
A married couple and their neighbor form a team to compete in a cross-country car race in Australia in the 1950’s; as they head into the outback, they leave the white world they know behind and discover how their country has mistreated the Aboriginal people.
 
Castillo, Elaine. America Is Not the Heart. 
In this multi-generational family saga, a former revolutionary leaves the Philippines and moves to California in the 1990’s to live with her aunt, uncle, and niece.

Chamoiseau, Patrick. Slave Old Man. 
This short allegorical novel from the island of Martinique tells the story of an elderly black man, a slave all his life on a sugar plantation, who escapes to the woods, where he is pursued by his master’s vicious dog.

Davies, Carys. West. 
A farmer in early Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania, intrigued by the discoveries of huge animal bones in frontier Kentucky, leaves his farm and young daughter behind to ride west in the hope of finding giant monsters still living.

Forna, Aminatta. Happiness. 
After a psychiatrist from Ghana and an American biologist meet by chance in London, the two work together to try to find a teenaged boy who may have been apprehended by immigration officials.

Gabel, Aja. The Ensemble. 
This is the story of four talented San Francisco musicians who form a string quartet in the 1990’s, and stay together for the next eighteen years.

Heti, Sheila. Motherhood. 
The narrator of this unusual book is a writer who anguishes and obsesses over the decision of whether or not to have a child.

Jacobs, Nova. The Last Equation of Isaac Severy. 
After a famous mathematician dies, his granddaughter receives a cryptic letter from him, asking her to find and deliver his final equation to a colleague.

Johnson, Chelsey. Stray City. 
A woman from Nebraska, whose family disowned her when she came out as a lesbian, makes a new family for herself in Portland, Oregon, in the late 1990’s.

Kauffman, Rebecca. The Gunners. 
Five childhood friends who grew up together in Buffalo, New York, are reunited fifteen years later after the suicide of one member of the group.

Kushner, Rachel. The Mars Room.
A San Francisco woman who worked as an exotic dancer ends up in prison, with a life sentence, for murdering a man who was stalking her.

Mangan, Christine. Tangerine. 
In this suspense novel, a woman who has married and moved to Tangiers is surprised when her manipulative college roommate, once her best friend, suddenly turns up.

McAllister, Tom. How to Be Safe. 
After a mass shooting at a public high school, a suspended teacher is wrongly identified as a suspect.

McGuane, Thomas. Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories. 
This is a collection of previously-published stories, plus eight new ones, by an author from Montana whose dark and funny tales portray people’s misunderstandings and confusions.

McLain, Paula. Love and Ruin. 
This is a fictionalized portrait of the journalist, Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.

Offutt, Chris. Country Dark. 
A young man returns to Kentucky after serving in the Korean War, marries a woman he meets on his way home, and supports his growing family by delivering moonshine for a friend, until a social worker tries to take his children away. 

Ondaatje, Michael. Warlight. 
A man looks back on his childhood, and tries to understand what really happened when his parents suddenly went away from London in 1945, leaving him and his sister behind.

Onuzo, Chibundu. Welcome to Lagos. 
A group of deserters from the Nigerian army, joined by two women escaping abuse, travel to the capital city of Lagos, and get tangled up in a former Education Minister’s scheme to redistribute money to schools.

Orange, Tommy. There There. 
This novel tells the stories of twelve Native Americans whose lives intersect with each other as they gather in Oakland, California, for the city’s first Big Oakland Powwow. 

Pava, Sergio de la. Lost Empress. 
In this lively novel centered on football and Paterson, New Jersey, a woman, whose family owns the Dallas Cowboys, inherits a minor indoor team rather than the Cowboys when her father dies.

Poeppel, Amy. Limelight. 
After a family moves from Dallas to New York City, everything seems to go wrong for them until the wife accidentally meets a spoiled popular singer.

Sarvas, Mark. Memento Park. 
An American actor’s life is disrupted when he learns that a valuable painting, which was stolen from his Hungarian-Jewish family during World War II, has been found and is being restored to them.

Sittenfeld, Curtis. You Think It, I’ll Say It: Stories.
This is a collection of ten insightful and funny short stories, which take place in contemporary America and have middle-class professional women as their protagonists.

Thompson-Spires, Nafissa. Heads of the Colored People: Stories. 
This is a collection of eleven edgy short stories which explore issues of race and class through a variety of contemporary settings and unusual characters,. 

Wideman, John Edgar. American Histories: Stories. 
This is a widely-varied and inventive collection of short stories, some contemporary, and some reimagining personalities and events from American history. 

Winthrop, Elizabeth H. The Mercy Seat. 
In this novel, set in a small town in Louisiana in 1943, townspeople wait for midnight, the time set for the execution of a young black man wrongly convicted of raping a white woman.

Wolitzer, Meg. The Female Persuasion. 
A college freshman, who has been groped at a frat party, is inspired to stand up for herself after meeting a famous feminist; after she gets a job working for the feminist’s foundation, she begins to question some of its practices.