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.

Set in the U.S. before the Civil War, the novel follows African American characters whose private relationships and household lives intersect with the broader realities of slavery and escape.

A crime reporter becomes personally entangled when a close relative's death points to a pattern of murders; he pursues leads that connect newsroom sleuthing to federal investigations.

A long-form investigation into how island size, isolation, and landscape change shape species distributions and drive extinctions.

A Jesuit-led mission makes contact with an alien civilization and returns with consequences that force survivors to reckon with faith, morality, and trauma. The novel frames its central pressure around human responses—religious, ethical, and personal—to an otherworldly meeting and the costs that follow.

Set across expansive technological futures, the novel follows the emergence and journeys of intelligences—biological, engineered, and fully virtual—grappling with identity, survival, and exploration.

A contemporary marriage is strained when one partner harbors a secret tied to unnatural longevity. The setup places trust, love, and the ethical cost of living beyond normal limits against everyday domestic pressures, with a central tension anchored in secrecy and its consequences for a family and a community.

A nonlinear novel centered on fraternal twins whose childhood in a small Kerala town is shaped by family tensions, the arrival of an outsider cousin, and a social order marked by caste and colonial legacies.

A compact, chart-driven field guide for observers aiming to find Messier objects throughout the year. It provides diagrams and night-by-night planning material focused on stars, clusters, galaxies, and nebulae so observers can locate and log deep-sky targets across seasons.

Set in a near-future, economically collapsed Toronto, the novel follows characters navigating a city left to decay after officials abandon it.

Set around 1959 and the Congo's decolonization era, the novel follows an American missionary household transplanted into a rural African village.

A nested, epistolary metafiction: an editor-like narrator assembles and annotates a manuscript about a documentary called The Navidson Record, which recounts a family's discovery that their house contains impossible interior spaces.

An upper-class girl makes a misjudgment with far-reaching consequences; the novel follows the fallout across pre-war, wartime, and later life, and includes a self-aware reflection on writing and responsibility.

A biographical memoir by Paula Fox that collects memories and impressions from her early life and career as an American novelist. The book orients around formative childhood experiences and episodes from a writer’s life, using anecdote and recollection to sketch how personal history shaped a literary trajectory.

An Indian boy named Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel survives a long sea voyage after a shipwreck and is forced to share a lifeboat with zoo animals, most notably a Bengal tiger.

An aging Midwestern couple prepares for a final family Christmas while their three adult children, each entangled in personal and professional crises, converge around longstanding resentments and private failures.

Set in a Regency-era social world, the novel follows an adult romantic pairing over a pivotal summer that tests affection, propriety, and personal change.

Set in Victorian-era Britain, the novel follows characters entangled in theft, deception, and social constraint in London. The central pressure revolves around trust and betrayal among people on different rungs of the social ladder, where schemes and personal desires collide and reshape relationships.

Light stages several linked strands: high-tech spacefaring and scientific work, characters wrestling with gender and identity, and a persistent thread involving serial violence. The novel frames these pressures against questions about consciousness, causality, and human meaning across near-future and cosmic contexts.

A multigenerational family saga that traces a Greek-American family's migration, domestic life, and inherited biology which shapes one child's unusual development.

A 15-year-old math-minded narrator who describes his world through exact observations decides to investigate the mystery of a neighbor's dead dog. The investigatory quest exposes family tensions and forces the narrator to navigate social rules and sources of fear while trying to hold to his own systems of logic.

A collection of reflective natural-history essays focused on mosses and their place in forest ecosystems. The book links careful field observation of bryophytes to explanations of their biology and roles in plant ecology, while connecting those details to cultural and life-history perspectives about plants.

A U.S. Marshal travels to a remote island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is also a serial killer.

Angela Toussaint returns to her late grandmother’s home in a small Washington town and confronts a legacy of grief, violent history, and supernatural threat tied to that house.