National Network for Equitable Library Service

Frances Price--tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature--is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son, Malcolm, is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, they land in their beloved Paris, the City of Lights serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self-destruction and economic ruin--to riotous effect.

Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the three Slocumb women. Now, as the youngest turns fifteen, she's desperate to know who used their yard as a makeshift cemetery, and why. The unlikely matriarch, forty-five-year-old Ginny, doesn't know the truth--she only knows she must do everything in her power to keep it hidden. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, haunted by the choices she made as a teenager, with the answers trapped inside her.

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs.

Two friends, Miles and Jack, head out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country, in this raucous novel about men, women, wine, and human relationships. 

With The North End Poems, his always vivid new collection, Michael Knox has further honed his lucid, accessible style. In the tradition of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje’s classic book-length poem, this at once gritty and tender lyric sequence creates a desperate but surprising narrative that’s reminiscent of David Adams Richards at his very best.

Does one honor one’s country or one’s heart? Malka Marom explores this classic dilemma in her stunningly powerful first novel, an extraordinary tale of people caught up in a violent and seemingly endless historical conflict, compelled by love and grief to transcend it.

Brilliant experimental, surrealist fiction from the award-winning author of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

Entitlement is the tragic, wrenching story of Andy Kronk. After a lifetime intertwined with the Aspinalls, one of Canada’s wealthiest families, Andy has finally forged a clean break. Mere months pass, however, before his past returns, and he finds himself, obediently, digging …

California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own war against the status quo.

Dry Water tells the story of Donald Strand, from the time of his arrival as a ten-year-old orphan at his relatives’ Manitoba farm in 1890 to his apogee as a successful farmer. It recounts the crises he faces during a troubled marriage and the great stock market crash of 1929. His life parallels the growth and development of Manitoba during the same period. Stead considered Dry Water, written in 1934–1935, to be his crowning achievement. He was unable to find a publisher for it during his lifetime, although an abridged edition was published by Tecumseh Press in 1983.