Books from United States

In 1950s Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, twin brothers Marion and Shiva Stone are born from a secret relationship between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at a mission hospital. Their mother dies during childbirth, and their father disappears, leaving the twins to be raised by two devoted doctors who become their adoptive parents. Growing up surrounded by the world of medicine, the brothers develop an extraordinary bond and a shared fascination with surgery. But as Ethiopia approaches revolution, their lives become entangled in forbidden love, jealousy, and betrayal. A devastating rupture drives Marion into exile in the United States, where he must confront the past he has tried to escape. When circumstances eventually bring him back to the world of his childhood, he faces the people and choices that shaped his life—and discovers that healing some wounds requires more than surgical skill. Spanning continents and decades, Cutting for Stone is an epic story of brotherhood, sacrifice, and the complicated ties between parents and children. Abraham Verghese combines the intimate drama of a family saga with the intricate world of medicine, exploring how love, loss, and the accidents of birth can shape a person’s destiny.

Set in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones follows fifteen-year-old Esch Batiste and her three brothers as they navigate poverty, family tensions, and the looming threat of a devastating storm. Living with their father in a neglected community, the siblings struggle to prepare for the hurricane while confronting their own emotional and personal challenges. Esch, who is pregnant and quietly in love with her brother’s friend, finds parallels between her experiences and the mythological story of Medea. As the storm approaches, the family must rely on one another to survive. Through vivid storytelling and lyrical prose, Jesmyn Ward explores the bonds of family, the resilience of marginalized communities, and the enduring power of love amid hardship. The novel portrays the devastating intersection of poverty, race, and environmental disaster while celebrating the strength of those who endure.

Kate Moore appears to have built a comfortable new life in Luxembourg. After her husband accepts a lucrative job abroad, she leaves Washington, D.C., behind and settles into the routines of expatriate life: school drop-offs, coffee mornings, and weekend trips around Europe. But Kate is hiding a dangerous secret about her past, and the ordinary life she has constructed is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. When Kate begins to suspect that another American couple in Luxembourg are not who they claim to be, her suspicions grow. Her husband is also behaving strangely, and his work for an undisclosed banking client raises questions she cannot ignore. As she investigates the people around her, Kate discovers that the lives of the expatriates in her seemingly peaceful community are far more complicated than they appear. Moving between the polished world of international professionals and the shadowy realm of espionage, Pavone builds a suspenseful story of deception, double-crossing, and hidden identities. The novel explores how people reinvent themselves when they move abroad, whether it is possible to escape one’s past, and how secrets can undermine even the closest relationships. The Expats won both the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel in 2013.

After a devastating accident kills his mother, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker finds himself clinging to a small, captivating painting that connects him to her. As he grows older, the artwork draws him into a world of wealth, deception, and the criminal art trade. Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this sweeping novel explores grief, obsession, and the mysterious ways beauty can shape a life.

Jevick, the son of a pepper merchant, grows up listening to stories about Olondria, a distant land where books are abundant and literacy is prized. When his father dies, Jevick takes over the family’s annual trading journey and finally visits the country he has long imagined. Enchanted by its cities, literature, and elaborate traditions, he feels he has entered a dream. But his happiness is shattered when the ghost of an illiterate young woman begins to haunt him. Desperate to escape the apparition, Jevick seeks help from Olondria’s religious authorities, only to become entangled in a conflict between rival religious factions. To find freedom, he must uncover the dead woman’s story and confront the boundaries between the living and the dead, belief and knowledge, and personal experience and inherited tradition. Blending lyrical prose, immersive world-building, and philosophical reflection, Sofia Samatar’s award-winning debut is both an intricate fantasy adventure and a meditation on the transformative power of literature. It explores how stories shape our understanding of other people—and how reading can become an act of wonder, possession, and liberation.

What if your art were celebrated only when people believed it had been created by a man? Harriet Burden is a fiercely intelligent artist who has spent years watching the New York art world overlook her work. After the death of her husband, she decides to conduct an audacious experiment: she secretly recruits three men to present her artwork as their own, concealing her identity behind their names. When the exhibitions receive the recognition she has long been denied, Harriet finally reveals the truth. But instead of winning acclaim, she encounters disbelief—and her final collaborator, the enigmatic artist Rune, refuses to acknowledge her role. Told through diaries, interviews, reviews, and conflicting recollections assembled after Harriet’s death, The Blazing World becomes a literary puzzle in which the truth depends on who is telling the story. As the relationship between Harriet and Rune grows increasingly dangerous, questions of authorship, gender, power, and perception take centre stage. Intellectually playful and psychologically intense, Siri Hustvedt’s novel challenges the assumptions that determine whose creativity is valued and whose voice is believed. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, it is a provocative exploration of what it means to be seen—and what happens when recognition comes too late.

Seven Shakespearean acting students. One elite conservatory. A friendship that ends in murder. Oliver Marks has just been released from prison after serving ten years for the death of one of his closest friends. Now, the detective who helped put him behind bars wants to know what really happened. A decade earlier, at the secluded Dellecher Classical Conservatory, Oliver and six fellow actors were inseparable, their lives blurring the line between the roles they played onstage and the people they became off it. But when fierce rivalries turn into jealousy, betrayal, and violence, their final year takes a deadly turn. Dark, atmospheric, and steeped in Shakespeare, If We Were Villains explores the dangerous consequences of obsession and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

It’s 1995, email is new, and Harvard freshman Selin Karadağ is trying to figure out how language, love, and life actually work. The daughter of Turkish immigrants, she befriends a charismatic Serbian classmate and begins exchanging increasingly mysterious emails with Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student. When their ambiguous relationship follows her from university to the Hungarian countryside, Selin finds herself navigating first love, cultural misunderstandings, and the bewildering transition to adulthood. Witty, intellectually curious, and quietly moving, The Idiot captures the awkward beauty of becoming yourself when you have no idea who that person might be. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it is a coming-of-age story for readers who think too much and feel more than they can explain.

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show naively assumeded had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

A Place for Us explores the complicated bonds of an Indian-American Muslim family as its members navigate the tensions between cultural heritage, religious expectations, and personal freedom. The story begins at the wedding of Hadia, the eldest daughter of Rafiq and Layla, whose decision to marry for love rather than tradition reflects her determination to live on her own terms. The occasion also brings home her estranged younger brother, Amar, who returns to the family after three years of separation. Through shifting perspectives and memories, Mirza gradually reveals the events that fractured the family. Rafiq and Layla emigrated from India to the United States hoping to give their children better opportunities while preserving their cultural and religious traditions. Yet their children’s experiences of growing up between two cultures create tensions that neither generation knows how to resolve. Hadia seeks independence, Huda follows her sister’s example, and Amar struggles with questions of faith, belonging, and his father’s expectations. With tenderness and psychological insight, Mirza examines how love can coexist with disappointment, how silence can deepen family wounds, and how difficult it can be to understand those closest to us. The novel offers a nuanced portrait of the immigrant experience, exploring the challenge of building an identity that honours one’s heritage without sacrificing individuality. Ultimately, it asks whether a family can find its way back to one another after years of hurt and misunderstanding.

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.

Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción has never dreamed of leaving the Dominican countryside, but when Juan Ruiz, a man twice her age, offers to marry her and take her to New York City, her family sees an opportunity for a better future. On New Year’s Day in 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and arrives in Washington Heights, where she finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage with a controlling and unfaithful husband. Lonely and struggling to adapt to life in a new country, she begins to imagine a future beyond the narrow role expected of her. When Juan returns to the Dominican Republic amid growing political turmoil, Ana discovers new freedoms through English lessons, friendships, and an unexpected romantic connection with his younger brother, César. But her growing independence clashes with her family’s hopes and the sacrifices expected of her. Set against the backdrop of the Dominican Civil War and the Dominican immigrant community in New York, Dominicana is a moving coming-of-age story about migration, womanhood, and the courage to claim a life of one’s own.