Rental House
By Weike Wang
In the third novel by the author of “Chemistry” and “Joan Is Okay,” Keru and Nate, an interracial, young professional couple, host their parents on consecutive vacations at a rented beach house in New England and a Catskills bungalow. As the visits gradually expose resentments and longings they would rather keep hidden — Keru is the daughter of strict, highly driven Chinese immigrants; Nate is the first in his white, working-class family to earn a college degree — Wang paints an elegantly off-kilter portrait of partnership and its isolations, and of the ungainly, imperfect intimacy of family.
A Century of Tomorrows
By Glenn Adamson
“There seems never to have been a time when people weren’t making predictions about tomorrow,” writes Adamson, a cultural historian and expert on crafts. His book considers many of the “futurologists” who’ve held sway in the United States, including demagogues like Billy Sunday, utopian dreamers like Buckminster Fuller and sci-fi seers like Octavia E. Butler.
Cabin
By Patrick Hutchison
Based on a piece Hutchison wrote for Outside magazine, “Cabin” is the story of the author’s spontaneous decision to move from an urban office job to a dilapidated off-grid cabin in the Pacific Northwest without any survival or carpentry skills. High jinks ensue. To say that he faces a steep learning curve is an understatement; the new homestead isn’t called “Wit’s End” for nothing. A cautionary tale for anyone tempted to get away from it all.
The Rivals
By Jane Pek
The sweetly sardonic amateur sleuth Claudia Lin, who first appeared in “The Verifiers,” returns to solve another mystery when a client of her online-dating detective agency dies in a suspicious accident.
Giant Love
By Julie Gilbert
Edna Ferber published the novel “Giant” in 1952 to “stupendous fanfare and controversy,” her great-niece (and biographer) writes in a book that chronicles the novel’s inspiration and reception, as well as the sweeping film adaptation that starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and a mercurial James Dean, who was killed in a car crash before shooting wrapped.
Havoc
By Christopher Bollen
In this twisty tale of resentment and revenge, a noxious 81-year-old widow who enjoys meddling in other people’s lives (and destroying their personal relationships in the process) moves into a fancy hotel in Luxor, Egypt. But her schemes quickly run into a roadblock in the form of another guest: a malevolent 8-year-old boy.
The Cure for Women
By Lydia Reeder
In an era when the international medical establishment considered women too fragile to be doctors, Mary Putnam Jacobi used a combination of her own strong will and her family’s influence to obtain a medical degree from the Sorbonne, before returning to New York to take on the system. Jacobi didn’t just support other women in joining the medical profession: She won prestigious medical prizes, conducted the first serious research on female reproductive biology, worked with suffragists and revolutionized women’s health care, all while facing down societal challenges and personal tragedy.
The Rest Is Memory
By Lily Tuck
When Tuck came across a New York Times obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took pictures at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, she was struck by his portraits of a teenage prisoner, a Polish Catholic girl named Czeslawa Kwoka. Tuck’s novel imagines Czeslawa’s life before and during the German occupation, from her early years on her parents’ farm to the horrors of the concentration camps.
A History of the Big House
By Charif Majdalani; translated by Ruth Diver
Majdalani captures life on Mount Lebanon in the early 20th century through the stories of the Nassar clan. At the heart of the novel is Wakim Nassar, an enterprising, larger-than-life patriarch who builds a family fortune after being run out of Beirut. The “big house” he founds slides into ruin during World War I, mirroring the political and economic outlook of the region as a whole.
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