Fiction

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny. It has a lot to say about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel. 

Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

In the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes learns that a plane has crashed at a coastal airfield, with neither pilot nor cargo in evidence and a local man found shot dead, but as Winston investigates, a devious challenger threatens his reelectionas sheriff, his daughter returns home with heartbreak of her own, and long-submerged racial bitterness comes to the fore.

Lil and Frank married young, having bonded over how they both lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they'd lost prematurely. Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries-perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know.

The members of a music band in 1967 London navigate the era's parties, drugs and politics as well as their own egos and tragedies while exploring transformative perspectives about youth, art and fame.

Walk, chief of police, is still trying to heal the wound of sending his best friend, Vincent, to prison. And he's in overdrive protecting young Duchess and her brother as their mother self-destructs. But now Vincent is being released, and that means trouble is coming.

After fleeing Vienna, Hedy Bercu, a Jewish woman living on the island of Jersey, is forced to hide in plain sight during the German occupation and to survive must depend on her own courage, her community, and a German soldier she befriends.

Suspended from work amid allegations of sexual misconduct, a virgin computer science teacher is targeted by a sinister predator upon joining an online support group for the involuntarily celibate, before a therapist neighbor's distraught patient goes missing.