| 1. |
and the mountains echoed
Khaled Hosseini. Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.
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| 2. |
the luminaries
Elanor Catton. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly, the great weight of the book shifting quickly from right hand to left, a world opening and closing in front of us, the human soul revealed in all its conflicted desperation. I mean glory. And as for the length, surely a book this good could never be too long.
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| 3. |
now and at the hour of our death
JSB Morse. A novel novel that plunges into the facinating yet often taboo subjects of science and faith and makes a case for modern miracles.
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| 4. |
how the light gets in
Louise Penny. Penny writes with grace and intelligence about complex people struggling with complex emotions. But her great gift is her uncanny ability to describe what might seem indescribable – the play of light, the sound of celestial music, a quiet sense of peace.
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| 5. |
the ocean at the end of the lane
Niel Gaiman. i thought of turning around, then, as i drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field, of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed, but i was curious." Neil Gaiman's first adult novel in nearly eight years leads us into a farm at the end of the lane, a trio of surreally strange female neighbors, and a mystery that we too cannot ignore. An evocative, lyrical fantasy by a master of the craft.
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| 6. |
lexicon
Max Barry. I don't know how you could craft a better weekend read than this novel of international intrigue and weaponized Chomskian linguistics. It's the perfect mix of philosophical play and shotgun-inflected chase scenes. Like someone let Grant Morrison loose on the Bourne identity franchise.—Austin Grossman, author of Soon I Will Be Invincible
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| 7. |
the storyteller
Jodi Picoult. Sage Singer befriends an old man who's particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses his darkest secret - he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard. Complicating the matter? Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.
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| 8. |
me before you
Jojo Moyes. Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane.
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| 9. |
the goldfinch
Donna Tartt. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and determined to avoid being taken in by the city as an orphan, Theo scrambles between nights in friends’ apartments and on the city streets. He becomes entranced by the one thing that reminds him of his mother, a small, mysteriously captivating painting that soon draws Theo into the art underworld.
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| 10. |
the house girl
Tara Conklin. Virginia, 1852. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.
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