In addition to writing novels, I’m also a playwright. Whatever form I work in, I’m drawn to character, drama, and emotion. I aspire to write literary page-turners that feel as rich and complicated as real life. Also, I want the endings of my books to slay readers and break their hearts. Of course, when I say that, I’m not necessarily speaking of sorrow; sometimes your heart breaks from expanding, from a surfeit of feeling. Your heart breaks only to grow larger.
Honey Fasinga, the glamorous daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster, is returning home at last, ready to reckon with her violent past. As a teenager, Honey managed to escape her father’s circle of influence and reinvent herself in a world of art and beauty. Now, in her twilight years, she moves back to NJ. But in her family, nothing has changed. As old cruelties resurface, Honey is no longer sure what she wants—to forgive or to avenge.
According to the publisher, this electrifying literary breakout is a masterful and deeply moving portrait of love in all its forms—a story of female rage that asks the question: what are the limits of compassion in a world gone mad?
This novel is a shattering tale of how a child’s error in judgment changes the lives of everyone around her. When I finished reading it, I was so shocked I started trembling.
The novel is a magic trick—it inspires you with its art, while at the same time making you weep for the fate of its characters.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a…
This novel about an English butler’s lifetime of service and his friendship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, is an absolute stunner.
Near the end of the book, when the butler and the housekeeper run into each other again, years after their service to Lord Darlington, the scene is expertly understated.
This book doesn’t give in to trite sentimentality, but rather, it moves you by its keen understanding of human nature.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on…
This literary rendering of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century comprises fifteen stories. Whenever I read them, I can feel Joyce’s adoration for this city—and the last story, "The Dead," is glorious.
The final line always slays me: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from…
This novel about a fifteen-year-old girl’s affair with an older, wealthy man is a provocative exploration of memory. The novel’s language is arch and lyric, always making me feel as if I’ve been hypnotized.
The book is a love story, but in this story, love doesn’t lead to salvation. Still, the splendid, haunting language lifts the tale into the realm of the mythic.
A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances' coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.
Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.
A sensational international bestseller, 'The Lover' is disturbing, erotic, masterly and simply unforgettable.
In this first-person novel, Ruthie tells the tale of her and her sister’s life after their parents' deaths. Since most of their other relatives are too old to care for them, the girls live with Aunt Sylvie, their mother’s sister. Before staying with the girls, Sylvie had been living as a transient.
In this novel we watch a family disintegrate—but we are also given solace, a sense of the freedom that’s possible when we leave the place we were born.
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized…
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when her secret lover returns and starts asking questions she can’t answer without disaster following.
Bryce Day comes home to Alabama after he’s discharged from the First Alabama Cavalry USA with guilt weighing on his heart. His neighbors won’t cotton to his Unionist bent, and the woman of his heart likely won’t give him a second chance after his silence during the war. Only, she’s hiding something from him.
How can they have any hope of a loving life together with lies and secrets between them?
One terrible lie, a desperate measure to save her past, just might destroy her future…
Award-winning author of historical fiction presents a new novel of love and lies, secrets and sensuality, and the hands of fate weaving it all together.
The American Civil War is finally over and Christmas beckons. Magnolia Merryweather, backyard horse breeder, is eager to celebrate for the first time since the war began even as she continues to grow her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after all the terror of the past four years. She’s preparing to follow in her mother’s matriarchal footsteps,…
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