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Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a "e;divided, downtrodden people."e;

A Times Literary Supplement's Book of the Year 2020A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good?These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time.World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

From Paul Beatty, the author of the Man Booker Prize winner The Sellout, comes Tuff, a novel as fast-paced and hard-edged as the Harlem streets it portrays.Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston "Tuffy" Foshay is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of earning millions from his idea for Cap'n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and he married his wife, Yolanda, over the phone from jail.He's funny and fierce, frustrated and feared. And when Tuff decides to run for City Council, this dazzling novel goes from astoundingly funny to acerbically sublime. By turns profound and irreverent, and populated with a hilarious supporting cast, Paul Beatty's Tuff is satire at its razor-sharp best."An extravagant, satirical cri de couer...Beatty's blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence has a kind of transfixing power." -The New York Times Book Review"Masterfully conceived and highly entertaining...Richly textured and unforgettable."-The Boston Globe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Self, The New York Public Library, Town & Country, Wired, Boston.com, Happy Mag, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, Chatelaine, The Undefeated, Apartment Therapy, Brooklyn Based, The End of the World Review, Exile in Bookville, Lit Reactor, BookPage, i-DA FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Barack ObamaA BEST BOOK FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS: AV Club, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine/The Strategist, The RumpusWINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardAN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER * LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven LeilaniΓÇÖs first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." ΓÇöJazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book ReviewΓÇ£An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class thatΓÇÖs blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.ΓÇ¥ ΓÇöMichelle Hart, O: The Oprah MagazineNo one wants what no one wants.And how do we even know what we want? How do we know weΓÇÖre ready to take it?Edie is stumbling her way through her twentiesΓÇösharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriageΓÇöwith rules.As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics werenΓÇÖt hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into EricΓÇÖs homeΓÇöthough not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven LeilaniΓÇÖs Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her lifeΓÇöher hunger, her angerΓÇöin a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

The first behind-the-scenes account of life with the legendary ravens at the world's eeriest monumentThe ravens at the Tower of London are of mighty importance: rumor has it that if a raven from the Tower should ever leave, the city will fall. The title of Ravenmaster, therefore, is a serious title indeed, and after decades of serving the Queen, Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife took on the added responsibility of caring for the infamous ravens. In The Ravenmaster, he lets us in on his life as he feeds his birds raw meat and biscuits soaked in blood, buys their food at Smithfield Market, and ensures that these unusual, misunderstood, and utterly brilliant corvids are healthy, happy, and ready to captivate the four million tourists who flock to the Tower every year. A rewarding, intimate, and inspiring partnership has developed between the ravens and their charismatic and charming human, the Ravenmaster, who shares the folklore, history, and superstitions surrounding the ravens and the Tower. Shining a light on the behavior of the birds, their pecking order and social structure, and the tricks they play on us, Skaife shows who the Tower's true guardians really are-and the result is a compelling and irreverent narrative that will surprise and enchant.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother is multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk's honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsThe experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion. In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk's account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone."e;Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary-sort of Apocalypse Baby Now...A Life's Work is wholly original and unabashedly true."e;-The New York Times Book Review

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.

From the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a lively tour through Japan, Korea, and China, exploring the intertwined cultures and often fraught history of these neighboring countries.There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, is the enmity between these three "tiger" nations, and what prevents them from making peace. Currently China's economic power continues to grow, Japan is becoming more militaristic, and Korea struggles to reconcile its westernized south with the dictatorial Communist north. Booth, long fascinated with the region, travels by car, ferry, train, and foot, experiencing the people and culture of these nations up close. No matter where he goes, the burden of history, and the memory of past atrocities, continues to overshadow present relationships. Ultimately, Booth seeks a way forward for these closely intertwined, neighboring nations.An enlightening, entertaining and sometimes sobering journey through China, Japan, and Korea, Three Tigers, One Mountain is an intimate and in-depth look at some of the world's most powerful and important countries.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 ΓÇ£[A] sweeping and authoritative history" (The New York Times Book Review), Black Wave is an unprecedented and ambitious examination of how the modern Middle East unraveled and why it started with the pivotal year of 1979. Kim Ghattas seamlessly weaves together history, geopolitics, and culture to deliver a gripping read of the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between between Saudi Arabia and Iran, born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy. With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became mortal enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and distorted religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led to IranΓÇÖs fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, the assassination of countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS.Ghattas introduces us to a riveting cast of characters whose lives were upended by the geopolitical drama over four decades: from the Pakistani television anchor who defied her countryΓÇÖs dictator, to the Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings all the way to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Black Wave is both an intimate and sweeping history of the region and will significantly alter perceptions of the Middle East.

Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR and Lit Hub. A Los Angeles Times Bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice"In The Cactus League [Emily Nemens] provides her readers with what amounts to a miniature, self-enclosed world that is funny and poignant and lovingly observed." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book ReviewAn explosive, character-driven odyssey through the world of baseballJason Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming apart at the seams. And the coaches, writers, wives, girlfriends, petty criminals, and diehard fans following his every move are eager to find out whyΓÇöas they hide secrets of their own.Humming with the energy of a ballpark before the first pitch, Emily Nemens''s The Cactus League unravels the tightly connected web of people behind a seemingly linear game. Narrated by a sportscaster, GoodyearΓÇÖs story is interspersed with tales of Michael Taylor, a batting coach trying to stay relevant; Tamara Rowland, a resourceful spring-training paramour, looking for one last catch; Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent grappling with his decline; and a plethora of other richly drawn characters, all striving to be seen as the season approaches. ItΓÇÖs a journey that, like the Arizona desert, brims with both possibility and destruction.Anchored by an expert knowledge of baseballΓÇÖs inner workings, Emily Nemens''s The Cactus League is a propulsive and deeply human debut that captures a strange desert world that is both exciting and unforgiving, where the most crucial games are the ones played off the field.

Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates PrizeLonglisted for the Gordon Burn PrizeA New York Times Notable Book of 2020A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBCIn the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desireSofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place heΓÇÖs come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer studentΓÇÖs confession recalls his own first love, a strangerΓÇÖs seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth GreenwellΓÇÖs beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared ΓÇ£an instant classicΓÇ¥ by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review"AndrewsΓÇÖs writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna OΓÇÖBrien . . . What makes her novel sing is its universal themes: how a young woman tries to make sense of her world, and how she grows up."ΓÇôPenelope Green, The New York Times Book ReviewThis ΓÇ£luminousΓÇ¥ (The Observer) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her motherIt begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us.From that first immaculate, fluid connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in northern England, the one constant in LucyΓÇÖs life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her mother''s lessons in womanhood shape LucyΓÇÖs appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life.At university in glamorous London, LucyΓÇÖs background sets her apart. And then she is finished, graduated, adrift. She escapes to a tiny house in Donegal left empty by her grandfather, a place where her mother once found happiness. There she will take a lover, live inside art and the past, and track back through her memories and her motherΓÇÖs stories to make sense of her place in the world.In ΓÇ£a stunning new voice in British literary fictionΓÇ¥ (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica AndrewsΓÇÖs debut honors the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother. Intricately woven in lyrical vignettes, Saltwater is a novel of becoming-- a woman, an artist-- and of finding a way forward by looking back.

A renowned journalist and one-time economics editor of The Economist presents an unconventionally accessible, story-driven look at how forgotten corners of the globe hold vital clues to the world's economic future.

A 2020 LOCUS AWARD FINALISTJeff VanderMeer''s Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of EarthΓÇöall the Earths.A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

NOW AN 8-EPISODE FREEVEE TELEVISION SERIES! ΓÇö From the iconic musicians Tegan and Sara comes a memoir about high school, detailing their first loves and first songs in a compelling look back at their humble beginnings.High School is the revelatory and unique coming-of-age story of Sara and Tegan Quin, identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, who grew up at the height of grunge and rave culture in the nineties, well before they became the celebrated musicians and global LGBTQ icons we know today. While grappling with their identity and sexuality, often alone, they also faced academic meltdown, their parentsΓÇÖ divorce, and the looming pressure of what might come after high school. Written in alternating chapters from both Tegan''s and SaraΓÇÖs points of view, the book is a raw account of the drugs, alcohol, love, music, and friendship they explored in their formative years. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, High School captures the tangle of discordant and parallel memories of two sisters who grew up in distinct ways even as they lived just down the hall from each another. This is the origin story of Tegan and Sara.

An ordinary friendship between two extraordinary women

The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in AmericaAt the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb-which, as the church's Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church's leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point-and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life.A gripping memoir of escaping extremism and falling in love, Unfollow relates Phelps-Roper's moral awakening, her departure from the church, and how she exchanged the absolutes she grew up with for new forms of warmth and community. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, Phelps-Roper's life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.

A CULT MASTERPIECE—THE ADVENTURE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED JOHN HUSTON''S CLASSIC FILM, BY THE ELUSIVE AUTHOR WHO WAS A MODEL FOR THE HERO OF ROBERTO BOLAÑO''S 2666.Little is known for certain about B. Traven. Evidence suggests that he was born Otto Feige in Schlewsig-Holstein and that he escaped a death sentence for his involvement with the anarchist underground in Bavaria. Traven spent most of his adult life in Mexico, where, under various names, he wrote several bestsellers and was an outspoken defender of the rights of Mexico''s indigenous people. First published in 1935, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Traven''s most famous and enduring work, the dark, savagely ironic, and riveting story of three down-and-out Americans hunting for gold in Sonora.

A sweeping work of historical fiction from the New York Times–bestselling author Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel is a spellbinding story of art and love.For more than thirty years, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging for mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments in desperate need of restoration, as well as Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of moviemaking, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through early cinema. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Two books in one in a flip dos-à-dos format: The story of Aleksandar Hemon’s parents’ immigration from Sarajevo to Canada and a book of short memories of the author’s family, friends, and childhood in SarajevoIn My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents’ immigration to Canada—of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, he portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother’s lonely upbringing, his father’s fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course—his parents, sister, uncles, cousins—and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few befuddled Canadians.My Parents is Hemon at his very best, grounded in stories lovingly polished by retelling, but making them exhilarating and fresh in writing, summoning unexpected laughs in the midst of the heartbreaking narratives. This Does Not Belong to You, meanwhile, is the exhilarating, freewheeling, unabashedly personal companion to My Parents—a perfect dose of Hemon at his most dazzling and untempered in a series of beautifully distilled memories and observations and explosive, hilarious, poignant miniatures. Presented dos-à-dos with My Parents, it complements and completes a major work from a major writer.In the words of Colum McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon is, quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation.” Hemon has never been better than here in these pages. And the moment has never been more ready for his voice, nor has the world ever been more in need of it.

A 2019 NPR Staff PickA timely argument for why the United States and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrantsThere are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and controversy than immigration. But do we really understand it? In This Land Is Our Land, the renowned author Suketu Mehta attacks the issue head-on. Drawing on his own experience as an Indian-born teenager growing up in New York City and on years of reporting around the world, Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. As he explains, the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. Mehta juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of laborers, nannies, and others, from Dubai to Queens, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. But Mehta also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swaths of the world: When todayΓÇÖs immigrants are asked, ΓÇ£Why are you here?ΓÇ¥ they can justly respond, ΓÇ£We are here because you were there.ΓÇ¥ And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and a literary polemic of the highest order.

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of award-winning, bestselling author Kate AtkinsonΓÇÖs debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a deeply moving and deeply funny family story of happiness and heartbreak National Bestseller Winner of the Whitbread Book of the YearA New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearRuby Lennox begins narrating her own life at the moment of her conception and from there takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a girl determined to learn more about her family and the secrets it keeps. Kate AtkinsonΓÇÖs dazzling first novel, named the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year in England, is a darkly comic, deeply moving story of family heartbreak and happiness.

A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern familyClare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past. In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.