This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...

Whether he is deliriously funny or philosophically profound, as a novelist and a playwright Michael Frayn has concerned himself with the ordinary life lived by erring humans, which is always more extraordinary than people think. InMy Father's Fortune, Frayn reveals the original exemplar of the extraordinary-ordinary life: his father, Tom Frayn. A clever lad, a roofing salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted...

In 1993, twelve-year-old Becca, who struggles with a anxiety disorder, visits her divorced father in Vienna, Austria, where she befriends a Muslim refugee fleeing the Bosnian genocide.

"Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood. Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax's life. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam, about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions, struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge...

Deals with an all-bachelor family in North London disrupted by the return of the eldest son and his wife from America.

Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father—whom he’d been led to believe was dead—is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him...

"A lyrical and unique memoir, from one of our finest writers, proving that life can be as strange as fiction. Howard Norman's life has been framed by five incidents of 'arresting strangeness,' each given its chapter -- and each chapter yielding clues to the improbable trajectory of a fascinating life. First, a portrait, both harrowing and humorous, of a Midwest boyhood summer under the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. Later, he spends...

"Acclaimed author Kent Nerburn creates an incisive character study of a Native American elder, against the unflinching backdrop of contemporary reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas. Nerburn draws us deep into the world of this elder, identified only as Dan, as we journey to where the vast Dakota skies overtake us and the whisperings of the wind speak of ancestral voices. As this spellbinding story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently...

"Professor Richard Alpert's star fell fast. To the dismay of his wealthy Boston family, he got fired from Harvard over experimental use of psychedelics with his psychology students. In 1967, he traveled to India to lick his wounds and find himself. And he did, at Neem Karoli Baba's ashram, in a direct encounter with unconditional, unlimited divine love. He returned to America as Baba Ram Dass, countercultural activist for expanded human consciousness....