In Ameera Patel’s novel "Outside the Lines", narcissism and addiction blur the lines of reality. Drug dealers kidnap Cathleen, but her distracted, middle-class family fails to notice her disappearance. Meanwhile, the family’s... Read More

Based on the early life of Bob Dylan, Baron Wormser’s "Songs from a Voice" is a meditation on the nature of poetry and identity in the evolving culture of America’s mid-twentieth century. Abe grows up in lower middle class Jewish... Read More

Inès Bayard’s novel This Little Family, translated from French, is about the devastating aftermath of a rape. Raised in a loving household outside of Paris, Marie moves into the city as an adult. She works, dines out, and promenades... Read More

When Jeremy meets Alexandra, he believes her light may be enough to eclipse the shadows of his past. Once an operative in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Jeremy was given a new identity as a social worker, counseling clients and... Read More

Imagination is a lifeboat, and complacency an albatross, in Lydia Millet’s visionary novel A Children’s Bible. A gaggle of families converge at an ocean-adjacent mansion for a summer of revelry and reconnections, bringing with them... Read More

In Anna Dorn’s "Vagablonde", Prue, a Los Angeles lawyer, hopes to wean herself off of various psychotropic prescriptions. Prue is also an aspiring rapper, despite the fact that she is bourgeois and has “the coloring of a Nazi.” As... Read More

Whatever wilds you conquer or quests you undertake, the most complicated excavations are those that are internal; so a team of adventurers learns in Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s breathless and heartbreaking novel, "A Hundred Million Years... Read More

Sharon Harrigan’s "Half" mimics the triumphant defects of every family in its excavations of the peculiar remains of one. Narrated through the entwined perceptions and insights of identical twins, seldom heard by anyone other than the... Read More