Starting over

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Mary-Beth Hughes

From the outside in, the Devlin family lead almost perfect lives. Dashing father Nick is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and entertains, while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are broken by the death of their little boy, Cubbie. When Nick's older brother, Lionel, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cutthroat world of cosmetics, Nick's sudden rise to the top brings the Devlin family to a fresh start in London, where they join the ranks of the city's social elite. But as the veneer of their glamorous new life abroad starts to wear thin, the Devlin family are further fragmented by betrayals and become victims of the cruelest kind of hurt.

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Jay McInerney

"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; jobs they care about (and actually enjoy); twin children, a boy and a girl whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in Tribeca and summers in the Hamptons. But all of this comes at a high cost. Russell, an independent publisher, has cultural clout but minimal cash; as he navigates an industry that requires, beyond astute literary taste, constant financial improvisation, he encounters an audacious, expensive and potentially ruinous opportunity. Meanwhile, instead of seeking personal profit in this incredibly wealthy city, Corrine is devoted to feeding its hungry poor, and they soon discover they're being priced out of their now fashionable neighborhood. Then Corrine's world is turned upside down when the man with whom she'd had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11 suddenly reappears. As the novel unfolds across a period of stupendous change including Obama's historic election and the global economic collapse he inherited the Calloways will find themselves and their marriage tested more severely than they ever could have anticipated"--

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Kate Pullinger

"From the award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing comes a compelling novel that explores the complexity of modern life and the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together. Spring 2010. Harriet works in local radio in London, England. When a volcano erupts in Iceland and airspace shuts down over Europe, stranding most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes the opportunity to take on a larger role at the station. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York, travels to Toronto to stay with an old flame. Their teenage son Jack, liberated from normal life by the absence of airplanes, takes an unexpected risk and finds himself in trouble. Meanwhile, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a labor camp in Dubai, and Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her father to a sudden heart attack. Two years later, their lives intersect dramatically when Yacub, a stowaway, falls out of the landing gear of an airplane and onto Harriet's car in a supermarket parking lot. Yacub's sudden arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events, ultimately drawing them closer to one another. Winner of Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for her debut American novel, The Mistress of Nothing, which Good Housekeeping called "scorchingly powerful," Kate Pullinger draws on real-life accounts of airplane stowaways as the basis for a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections"--

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Emma Donoghue

Sumac Lottery is nine years old and the self-proclaimed "good girl" of her (VERY) large, (EXTREMELY) unruly family. And what a family the Lotterys are: four parents, children both adopted and biological, and a menagerie of pets, all living and learning together in a sprawling house called Camelottery.