The Sleepy Hollow family almanac

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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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Ron Carlson

"In 1999, four friends who once played in a high school band reunite in their hometown, Oakpine, WY--Craig and Frank never left, Mason is back from Denver to sell his parents' home, and Jimmy, who had gone to New York and become a famous novelist, has returned because he is dying."--Library Journal.

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Emily Bitto

On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work at their family home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, makeshift family and longs to truly be part of it. As the years pass, Lily observes the way the lives of these artists come to reflect the same themes as their art: Faustian bargains and spectacular falls from grace. Yet it's not Evan, but his daughters, who pay the price for his radicalism. An engrossing story of ambitions, sacrifice, and compromised loyalties. --

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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"--