A single unicorn, convinced she is the last of her kind, leaves the safety of the forest to discover what happened to other unicorns.

Three apparently separate family tragedies — a child's disappearance, a domestic killing, and an inexplicable murder — form the puzzle around a private investigator who reconstructs lives through interviews, documents, and visits.

A contemporary publishing editor wrestles with a missing final chapter and a real-life death tied to a recently published mystery novel.

Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg, occupies himself by researching a centuries-old royal mystery: whether King Richard III was truly guilty of the crimes long attributed to him.

A woman embedded in high society navigates the pressures of reputation, money, and marriage as private desires and public judgment intersect. The immediate pressure is how social expectations and limited economic choices shape personal decisions and lead to moral and material consequences.

Set on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, the novel follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man shaped by crushing poverty and social isolation.

Four very different people converge in an Italian villa during the later stages of World War II: a severely burned, anonymous patient; the Canadian nurse who tends him; a Sikh sapper; and a Canadian thief.

An intimate retelling of the Cupid-and-Psyche myth presented as a long first-person accusation by Psyche’s elder sister, Orual. The narrator addresses her perceived wrongs and the gods while reconstructing family rivalries, love, and spiritual puzzlement within a primitive, Hellenistic-adjacent kingdom.

A mystery told through several first-person documents and witness statements: an artist-teacher becomes entangled with a disturbing female figure and a dispute over inheritance and identity.

Two contrasting societies — one organized around communal, anarchist principles and the other structured by more conventional hierarchy and market relations — come into contact.

Set around a haunted house in a rural or small-town environment, the narrative tracks how ordinary family life and local routines come under threat from uncanny, element-linked forces.

A middle-class African-American husband and father who has long believed he once cheated death faces renewed danger when his family becomes the target of racist threats. As external menace grows, his mental stability frays and supernatural phenomena begin to blur the line between waking life and the world of the dead.

A first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.

Anne Elliot, a woman in her late twenties, confronts the social consequences of having broken an earlier engagement after others persuaded her to do so.

A middle-aged man discovers a diary that takes him back to his thirteenth year at the turn of the twentieth century; through that recovered record he reconstructs a formative episode in which a naïve boy becomes entangled in adult secrets and social expectations.

An energetic near-future story that interleaves a fast-paced real-world plot with a pervasive virtual-reality environment and a memetic/linguistic threat.

Penelope tells her side of the Odyssey: a conversational, retrospective account that revisits her marriage, life after Odysseus’s departure, and the aftermath of his return, while a Greek chorus of her twelve maids interrupts with short, varied genres to offer alternate viewpoints and collective voice.

A tightly plotted political thriller about a professional assassin hired by a dissident French paramilitary group to carry out a high-profile killing. The book sets up a procedural duel between the lone contractor's meticulous preparations and the official security forces racing to identify and stop him.

A sweeping, literary account of cancer treated as a historical subject: how clinicians, researchers, and institutions have identified, named, studied, and attempted to treat cancer over decades and centuries.

An extended piece of narrative journalism that follows postwar U.S. test pilots and the first astronauts selected for Project Mercury, probing why these men accepted extreme danger and how American aviation and space culture valorized risk.

Mary Karr recounts her 1960s childhood in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas, centered on a troubled family life and the group of men her father called the Liars' Club.

On a forested alien world, an occupying human logging colony treats the native population as subjugated labor. Tensions escalate after an especially brutal crime, and a native leader mobilizes resistance against the colonists.

A woman linked to an academic community returns to a college where puzzling acts and a climate of fear have erupted; an investigator connected to her seeks to discover who is behind the incidents and why.

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration in the United States operates as a contemporary racial caste system—what she terms the "New Jim Crow."