
Room
Emma Donoghue
Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper’s yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful — and attempts a nail-biting escape.

The Middlesteins
Jami Attenberg
For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it–and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live.

Don't Tell Anyone
Frederick Busch
This collection of sixteen short stories and a novella are mostly about a man named Willie and his life. The stories are about life itself and all the things that happen too many of us for example: a love lost, a child in trouble, a parent understood, but that never come with directions or guiding principles attached.

Not My Daughter
Barbara Delinsky
In a small coastal town in Maine, a pregnancy pact between three teenage girls puts their mothers’ love to the ultimate test in this emotionally wrenching story of love and forgiveness.

An Accidental Affair
Eric Jerome Dickey
James Thicke is a man whose mysterious past runs as deep as his violent streak. He’s channeled the intensity of his soul into twin passions-success as a screenwriter, and marriage to movie actress Regina Baptiste. In the midst of filming his latest script, starring Regina and leading man Johnny Bergs, James receives a video of his wife caught in the most compromising of situations.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Danielle Evans
Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans’s stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America

Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns
Margaret Dilloway
Enduring a strict schedule that balances her teaching job with the hospital regimen required by her kidney disease, 36-year-old Gal Garner devotes her spare hours to cultivating a new rose variation before her world is upended by the arrival of her teenage niece.

Another Piece of My Heart
Jane Green
Andi is a woman who has spent much of her adult life looking for the perfect man, and at thirty-seven, she’s finally found him. Ethan— divorced with two daughters, Emily and Sophia—is a devoted father and even better husband. Always hoping one day she would be a mother, Andi embraces the girls like they were her own. But in Emily’s eyes, Andi is an obstacle to her father’s love, and Emily will do whatever it takes to break her down.

The Music Teacher
Barbara Hall
Pearl Swain is a recently divorced violin instructor and almost a great violinist who marriage, musical career and various relationships have failed. But when Pearl meets Hallie Bolaris, a promising young musician with a troubled history, she recognizes in her young student a natural ear, and soon Pearl convinces herself that Hallie is the world’s next violin prodigy. She immediately hatches a plan to mentor and train Hallie for the life she herself never had, but Pearl’s interest in her favored student soon diverges from her musical training and builds toward a more disheartening climax.

The English Major
Jim Harrison
Cliff, a sixty-something divorcee is robbed of his farm by his late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife. He decided to takes a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them. Cliff’s adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high school-teacher day’s twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm” in Arizona owned by an old classmate; and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer in San Francisco.

What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal)
Zoë Heller
Sheba Hart — a beautiful and charming bohemian high school art teacher in her early 40s — places her family, career and social status in grave jeopardy through a sexual relationship with 15- year-old Steven Connolly. Sheba’s dowdy colleague and confidant Barbara Covett recounts the story from a deliciously twisted perspective steeped in obsession and jealousy.

True Lies
Margaret Johnson-Hodge
Finally finding someone worth spending her life with, street-wise accountant Dajah Moore, who has been unlucky in love, falls for gorgeous corrections officer Rick Trimmons. Rick’s troubled past comes between them when Gina Alexander, the mother of his four-year-old daughter, tries to shatter their newfound happiness.

Daniel Isn't Talking
Marti Leimbach
After a normal infancy, Daniel is beginning to behave strangely, throwing tantrums, walking on his toes, still seeking his mother’s breast and refusing to talk. As Melanie unravels, Stephen remains in denial, until the dreaded diagnosis of autism is delivered. The marriage falls apart, but Melanie does not. She embarks on a frustrating, heroic mission to get the best treatment for her son, eventually entrusting his care to Andy O’Connor, a behaviorist with a dubious reputation. But his unorthodox methods get results, and soon, a bit too predictably, a romance blossoms between Andy and Melanie.

An Object of Beauty
Steve Martin
Lacey Yeager is an ambitious young art dealer who uses everything at her disposal to advance in the world of the high-end art trade in New York City. After cutting her teeth at Sotheby’s, she manipulates her way up through Barton Talley’s gallery of “Very Expensive Paintings,” sleeping with patrons, and dodging and indulging in questionable deals, possible felonies, until she opens her own gallery in Chelsea.

The Round House
Louise Erdrich
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.

Saturday
Ian McEwan
On a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism–especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war. Saturday magnifies a pivotal moment in history and a day in a man’s life as secure foundations crack and uncertainty rushes in.

Delirium
Laura Restrepo
Aguilar, a former literature professor who now “delivers dog food in order to survive” returns from a trip to find his beloved wife, Agustina, has “transformed into someone terrified and terrifying”; his subsequent investigation into what happened forms the plot of this complex and captivating novel.

My Wife's Affair
Nancy Woodruff
Journalist Peter Martin and his wife former actress Georgie Connolly have moved to London via New Jersey. Georgie lands a role of a lifetime in a one-woman show that just might tear her family a part. Told from the husband’s point of view this tale of love, dreams, obsession and betrayal will have you shocked and wanting more.

Seating Arrangements
Maggie Shipstead
Maggie Shipstead’s irresistible social satire, set on an exclusive New England island over a wedding weekend in June, provides a deliciously biting glimpse into the lives of the well-bred and ill-behaved.

This is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness — and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own.