Adult

This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, The Possibility of an Island is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of the world’s most innovative writers.

The Overlords appeared over every city --- superior to humankind. There only demands were to unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. Humankind agreed and a golden age began. Yet man ceases to strive for creative greatness and a malaise settles over the human race.

When Pontius Pilate is appointed Prefect of the troublesome territory of Judea, his wife, Claudia, does what she has always done: she makes the best of it. But unrest is brewing on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and Claudia will soon find herself and her beloved husband embroiled in controversy and rebellion. Might she find peace and rest in the teaching of the mysterious Jewish Rabbi everyone seems to be talking about?

As a teenager pretty much left to raise herself while her parents struggle to do the same, Lucy Diamond is a narrator with a radiant yet guarded heart. As she races at breakneck speed toward womanhood, everything is at stake for her, producing an urgency and dread that she holds at bay with humor and grace. But, while Lucy charges ahead, her mother’s youth is fading, providing juxtaposition steeped with tension and love.

Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers’ wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS is the story of how a family, a town, and then a nation mourns and finds the strength to move on.

Today’s women, we’re told, have more options in exercising their desire than ever before in history. And yet the way we talk about desire is virtually as constrained as it was for the Victorians. There’s an essential paradox at the heart of female sexuality: What we demand in our public lives is often in direct contrast to what we crave in our intimate lives. In the tradition of Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Angel has forged a path through cliché, convention, and secrecy, and the result is a searching and idiosyncratic account of her studies in sex as an academic and of her experiences of sex as a woman.
 

Conrad has just returned home to Katonah, New York, after four years in Iraq, and he’s beginning to learn that something has changed in his landscape. Something has gone wrong, though things should be fine: he hasn’t been shot or wounded, and never has had psychological troubles. But as he attempts to reconnect with his family and his girlfriend and to find his footing in the civilian world, he learns how hard it is to return to the people and places he used to love.