Everything Under

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Rachel Kushner

It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed, the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality, thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

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Emma Henderson

On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, eleven-year-old Grace meets Daniel, an epileptic who can type with his feet. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Daniel fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny scraps of paper. Most of all, it is about the love of a lifetime.

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Yann Martel

The High Mountains of Portugal is a celebrated work by Yann Martel (Booker Prize Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

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Philip Hensher

The first Afghan War of 1839 (the English tried and failed to displace a potentate unfriendly to its colonial ambitions) is the subject of this fascinating US debut. Well-known British novelist and journalist Hensher introduces with considerable flair a dauntingly large cast of characters in England and Kabul, with sidetrips to India and Russia, in a flexible omniscient narrator’s voice that frequently underscores his story with pointed sardonic commentary. The most prominent among them include Alexander Burnes, a dashing writer-adventurer lionized in London when his popular Travels into Bokhara and Cabool makes a reigning expert on those far-off lands indispensable to his government; Bella Garraway, the spirited girl who bears Burnes a son, and is thereafter consigned to “seclusion” at her family’s country estate; and Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, the cunning ruler whose “Napoleonic mind” enables him to play off British strategies against those of Imperial Russia, which also has vested interests (and numerous carefully positioned “agents”) in Afghanistan. Hensher surrounds them with literally dozens of other figures whose experiences embody irreconcilable contrasts between the luxuriant exoticism of the East and the brisk pragmatism of the West—contrasts that are, paradoxically, recognized as inherently simplistic clichés, and noted with urbane irony. Introverted military man Charles Masson, a victim of sexual violence who becomes an itinerant avenging angel, evokes the figure of T.E. Lawrence as vividly as Burnes (whom he’ll meet, in several crucially revealing late scenes) suggests that of the demonic globetrotter Richard Burton. Two matching “bores,” British army officers McNaghten and Elphinstone, are deftly employed both to comment on their country’s adventuring and to embody its ghastly consequences. The scheming Amir’s equally amoral favorite son Akbar, the elegant sadist Shah Shujah, and cultivated, Balzac-loving Russian “explorer” Vitkevich all figure importantly in the catapulting events that lead to the rousing and harrowing climax: the bloody siege of Jalabad, and its sorrowful aftermath.[Kirkus Reviews][1] [1]: