Books from United States

The Incendiaries follows three young people whose lives become entangled through grief, faith, love, and radical belief at an elite American university. Phoebe Lin, a Korean American student struggling with guilt over her mother’s death, meets Will Kendall, a former evangelical who has lost his religious faith but falls deeply in love with her. Their fragile relationship is disrupted when Phoebe becomes involved with John Leal, a charismatic former student who leads a secretive religious group with increasingly extreme convictions. As the group’s ideology turns toward violence, Will struggles to understand Phoebe’s choices and uncover the truth behind Leal’s mysterious past. Told through shifting perspectives and an unconventional narrative, the novel explores how grief and the desire for purpose can make people vulnerable to manipulation and extremism. Blending psychological suspense with literary fiction, R. O. Kwon examines the boundaries between faith and fanaticism, love and obsession, and personal conviction and destructive devotion. Set against the atmosphere of an American university campus, the novel asks what happens when the need to believe becomes all-consuming.

The Radiance is a literary novel that explores spiritual awakening, personal identity, and the search for meaning in a fractured contemporary world. The story follows a writer whose life is transformed by a near-fatal hit-and-run accident on a country road. As he struggles to understand what happened, he experiences an unsettling spiritual awakening that blurs the boundary between revelation and madness. Drawn toward a brilliant colleague at a university, the narrator becomes entangled in an intense relationship and a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. As the investigation into his accident unfolds, buried family secrets emerge, forcing him to confront questions about memory, faith, desire, and his own understanding of reality. Moving between rural America and Europe, and exploring the intersections of Islam and Christianity, Akhtar examines the tensions between personal belief and public life. Blending psychological suspense with philosophical reflection, the novel asks whether moments of profound disruption can reveal something meaningful about existence, even when the truth remains uncertain.