Long lost av Harlan Coben

 

Myron hasn’t heard from Terese Collins in years. Not since their affair ended without explanation. He’s had no contact with her since, so her call catches him off guard. She’s in Paris, she says, in trouble and only Myron can help. Terese tells him a sad story she’s never before revealed: a good marriage, her struggles to get pregnant, the happiest moment of her life when her only child was born, the day everything she’d ever loved was taken from her. As the years passed Terese heard nothing from her ex-husband, until the phone call that brought her to Paris. But on arrival, Terese finds her husband has been murdered, leaving her as a prime suspect.

Belong to me av Marisa de los Santos

 

 

Cornelia finds herself a shunned outsider among the community’s perfect blond matrons. Particularly unwelcoming is her tightly wound neighbour Piper, who is as sharp-tongued as she is judgmental about fashion, flowers and childrearing. Cornelia does begin a fledgling friendship with another newcomer, Lake, a waitress who has moved from California to enroll her genius 13-year-old son Dev in a special school after his previous school punished him for being too smart. Dev suspects there might be more to the move, that Lake may be moving them closer to the mystery father he’s never met. As much as Cornelia likes Lake, she senses Lake holding back at crucial moments and responds in kind. Meanwhile, Piper turns out to be a far more complicated woman than she seems on the surface. She drops everything (but her children) to care for her best friend Elizabeth, who’s in the last stages of cancer. By the time Cornelia succeeds in becoming pregnant, she and Piper have grown surprisingly close, each opening her heart a little to the other.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

 

 

 

From the moment of its publication in 1961, ”Revolutionary Road” was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It’s the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

When we were orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

 

Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents’ alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.

The heart is a lonely hunter by Carson McCullers

 

 

 

Carson McCullers was all of twenty-three when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her ”the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced.” Available now for the first time on audio from Caedmon and HarperAudio, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells an unforgettable tale of moral isolation in a small southern mill town in the 1930s.

Brideshead revisited by Evelyn Waugh

 

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and exquisitely beautiful Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian’s magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants. But he also discovers a world where duty and desire, faith and happiness are in conflict.

Lord of the flies by William Golding

 

 

The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.

Special topics in calamity physics by Marisha Pessl

 

 

 

‘It had been almost a year since I’d found Hannah dead, and I thought I’d managed to erase all traces of that night within myself. I was wrong.’ ”Special Topics in Calamity Physics” is a mesmerizing debut. As teenager Blue van Meer tells her story we are hurled into a dizzying world of murder and butterflies, womanizing and wandering, American McCulture, the Western Canon, political radicalism and juvenile crushisms. Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class (with hand-drawn Visual Aids), Blue’s wickedly funny yet poignant tale reveals how the imagination finds meaning in the most bewildering times, the ways people of all ages strive for connection, and how the darkest of secrets can set us free.

The right attitude to rain by Alexander McCall Smith

 

 

The key to contentment in the Scottish climate is the right attitude to rain – just as in life the key to happiness lies in making the best of what you have. Bruised in love by her faithless Irish husband, Isabel Dalhousie is a connoisseur of intimate moral issues: she edits a philosophical journal and spends a great deal of her time considering how to improve the lives of those around her. There is her housekeeper Grace, whose future she must secure; her niece Cat, who is embarking on a new relationship with a dubious workaholic mummy’s boy; and even an American couple newly arrived in Edinburgh on a tour. And then there is Jamie, Cat’s ex-boyfriend, a handsome, gifted musician fourteen years Isabel’s junior, with whom she is slowly and hopelessly falling in love.

To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee

 

 

Lawyer Atticus Finch defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic, Puliter Prize-winning novel¿a black man charged with the rape of a white woman. Through the eyes of Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unanswering honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930’s.