Adult

On a small snow-covered island lives 12-year-old Minou, her philosopher Papa, Boxman the magician, and a clever dog called No-Name. A year earlier, Minou's mother left the house wearing her best shoes and carrying a large black umbrella. She never returned. One morning, Minou finds a dead boy washed up on the beach. Her father decides to lay him in the room that once belonged to her mother. Can her mother’s disappearance be explained by the boy?

One manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Amina leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. For Amina, the decision echoes the arranged marriages of her home country, while George finds Amina “straightforward” and likes that she “doesn’t play games.” Yet each is hiding something from the other.

In FARTHER AWAY, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. These pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing.

Justine Nolan is a documentary film maker who lost her beloved grandmother a decade ago --- the person who was the only source of love and comfort in her life. But when Justine inadvertently opens a letter addressed to her mother, she discovers that not only is her grandmother alive, but that her mother has deliberately estranged the family from her.

Nobody knows the nuts and bolts of home repair quite like Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree, ex–Wall Streeter turned proud owner of an 1823 Federal-style house in Eastport, Maine. But when a killer with a screw loose sets his sights on Jake, her newest renovation project becomes a dire matter of life and deck.

On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton receives the news that his brother, not seen for years, has been killed in combat in Iraq. For Jack and his wife, Ellie, this will have unexpected, far-reaching effects. For Jack in particular, it means a crucial journey: to receive his brother’s remains and to confront his most secret, troubling memories.

Broken from growing up in one of North Korea’s forced-labor camps, Gi has learned to cope with pain by retreating into a realm of numbers and calculations. She becomes enamored of the brash and radiant Il-sun. But Il-sun’s pursuit of a better life imperils both girls when her suitor spirits them across the Demilitarized Zone and sells them as sex workers.

When 19-year-old Marian Sutro joins the British forces during World War II, her directive is hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris to persuade a friend --- a research physicist --- to join the Allied war effort, a mission that could change the course of the war.