The Realm of Last Chances

The Winter War

Philip Teir · 298 pages

On the surface, the Paul family is living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife, Katriina, has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show.

Bright, Precious Days

Jay McInerney · 397 pages

"The crowning achievement from the preeminent writer of his generation: following Brightness Falls and The Good Life, Bright, Precious Things builds on a series increasingly akin to John Updike's Rabbit novels but with a long-standing if weathered couple at its heart. Russell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the New York dream: book parties one night and high-society charity events the next;

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

The Lonely Polygamist

Brady Udall · 608 pages

Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all mid-life crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart

Five Days

Douglas Kennedy · 416 pages

For twenty years, Laura has been a good wife and mother. She's supported her husband through redundancy, she's worried about her son, she's encouraged her daughter. She has been constant, caring and selfless. She's stopped thinking about her own dreams, the places she'd like to go and the books she'd like to talk about. But a chance meeting with a man in a hotel lobby - and the five days that foll

The Land of Steady Habits

Ted Thompson · 272 pages

Newly retired, with his sons fully grown and graduated from college, Anders Hill leaves his wife of more than forty years, buys a condo, and seeks freedom, but discovers that the world he left behind may be what he was seeking all along.

The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Solar

Ian McEwan · 296 pages

Michael Beard ist Physiker und Frauenheld. Er hat den Nobelpreis erhalten, doch ist er alles andere als nobel: Im Beruf ruht er sich auf seinen Lorbeeren aus, privat hält es ihn auf Dauer bei keiner Frau. Bis die geniale Idee eines Rivalen für Zündstoff in seinem Leben sorgt. In Solar geht es nicht nur um Sonnen-, sondern auch um kriminelle Energie.

The Doctor's Daughter

Hilma Wolitzer · 288 pages

Alice Brill struggles to come to terms with the hidden truths of her life--her unrealized aspirations as a writer, her lackadaisical marriage, her troubled younger son, and her father, who is slipping into senility in a nursing home.

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver · 436 pages

Written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Orange Prize-winning author of The Lacuna and million-selling The Poisonwood Bible, and brought to you by FaberShop, Flight Behaviour is a novel about catastrophe and denial. On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the

While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer · 560 pages

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty. Their friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their tal

Asterios Polyp

David Mazzucchelli · 344 pages

Asterios Polyp, its arrogant, prickly protagonist, is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new.

The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Summerlong

Dean Bakopoulos · 354 pages

The tensions beneath the surface of Claire and Don Lowry's seemingly contented marriage explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small Midwestern town over the course of a long, hot summer, as they discover that married life is not what they had predicted.

A Spot of Bother

Mark Haddon · 368 pages

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. "The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely." Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.At 61, George is settling down t

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Rebecca Miller · 239 pages

Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the po

Empire Falls

Richard Russo · 483 pages

"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke o

The Lay of the Land

Richard Ford · 496 pages

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Ghosts of Manhattan

Douglas Brunt · 275 pages

It's 2005. Nick Farmer is a bond trader with Bear Stearns clearing seven figures a year. The novelty of a work-related nightlife centering on liquor, hookers, and cocaine has long since worn thin, though Nick remains keenly addicted to his annual bonus. But the lifestyle is taking a toll on his marriage-- and on him. When a nerdy analyst approaches him with apocalyptic prognostications of where Be

This is Where I Leave You

Jonathan Tropper · 376 pages

International bestseller Jonathan Tropper joins Dutton with the book his fans in the trade have been waiting for him to write: an uproarious, sophisticated, and deeply moving breakout novel.Those who have already discovered Jonathan Tropper have called his novels "hilarious, but emotion-packed,"1 "fantastically funny,"2 "surprisingly moving,"3 and "utterly magnificent."4 With his Dutton debut, Tro

Breathing Lessons

Anne Tyler · 328 pages

While driving to the funeral of a friend, a couple married twenty-eight years examine the expectations and disappointments of their marriage.

Us

David Nicholls · 416 pages

"David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his enormously popular New York Times bestseller, One Day, to a compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together--and what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart. Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that,