Such an enjoyable fiction collection! This is a book to learn from and appreciate. Reading it will enrich your life, which is something one can only say about the best literature. Amor Towles is a masterful storyteller. The writing is clear and unassuming and each of the narratives is dramatic, well-paced, and solidly built. Towles doesn't rely on cheap effects and there is so much quiet wisdom in these stories. The best thing about them is the characters, however: sympathetic, plausible, complex people whom the author presents fairly and without judgement, and whom, by the end of each story, you really feel you've come to know. Short fiction is such a difficult art to pull off, like the most delicate and technically difficult of magical tricks. It really has to come alive on the page, and it has to both disrupt and reestablish equilibrium in the span of a very limited number of pages. The fact that Towles performs it again and again in this volume is evidence (together with his fantastic novels) that he's well on his way to becoming an American fiction writer for the ages. Highly recommended!
“A knockout collection. ... Sharp-edged satire deceptively wrapped like a box of Neuhaus chocolates, Table for Two is a winner.” —The New York Times
“Superb ... This may be Towles’ best book yet. Each tale is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and, most of all, heart.” —Los Angeles Times
Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.
Hoo boy. This is the kind of book that you pick up and start reading and can't put down and wish you could. Extremely well-written, and at the same time hard to read because it just feels all too familiar and plausible. I imagine many people won't want to read it, but if you've got a tolerance for the dark side in your reading and are a fan of experiencing alternate futures, this one is not to miss. While it offers a distinctive take on the future, Prophet Song feels like one of the most lyrically dark and cautionary dystopian novels to hit the shelves since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Highly recommended.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A prophetic masterpiece." — Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she…
Another great Peter Heller book, with the author's trademark skills in creating a suspenseful, page-turning novel in a wilderness setting on full display. This one struck me as particularly good, in part because of the focus on Yellowstone's wolves. I actually learned a lot on that score, and it was heartening to see the complexity and profundity of a wilderness animal's existence so fairly and thoroughly drawn in the pages of a popular novel. I don't know any other writer who's done this so well, actually. And in terms of this novel's philosophical underpinning, its emotional charge, and its beautiful prose, which is both lyrical and sensorily immersive, this has to rank among Heller's best. Most highly recommended!
The best-selling author of The River returns with a vibrant, lyrical novel about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park who likes wolves better than most people. When a clandestine range war threatens his closest friend, he must shake off his own losses and act swiftly to discover the truth and stay alive.
“A good story that’s intertwined like leaves afloat in a river with the current of Heller’s descriptive powers… Filled with Heller’s lush writing… Powerful.” –Denver Post
Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up…
With humanity facing imminent extinction, a team of scientists uses technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth’s future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches in vain for remnants of the human race. Meanwhile, back in 2068 A.D., the team’s head physicist and its doctor lead a small crew of survivors on a sailing voyage to a small volcanic island north of Sicily on a harrowing quest for a second viable test subject. A finalist for the 2023 Prism Prize for Climate Literature, the novel features a scientifically plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a deep-future wilderness setting, and a search for spiritual meaning across the inconceivable vastness of geological time.
