Kingsolver manages to make her characters simultaneously believable individuals, and embodiments of a generation.
The crime was set up to look like a burglary gone wrong, but the police realised that the murderer had to be one of the household.
With the full complement of Homesian injuries, accidents and illnesses, these stories are at once melancholy and absurd.
If social politics dominates these stories, national politics nibbles at the edges of them.
Elif Batuman's novel follows an 18-year-old aspiring writer through her first year at Harvard.
Since Barack Obama declared that America has an "empathy deficit", empathy has become a political buzzword. But is it always a force for good?
April Ayers Lawson’s debut collection is both forensic and mysterious.
Eimear McBride's second novel deserves all the success of her first.
Like Shriver's previous offerings, The Mandibles: a Family – 2029-2047 takes on a difficult topic: this time, American debt.
I sat with two of the organisers, debating whether all members of the extended Archer family were insufferably smug. “Pat and Tony can get in the sea,” one of them said, cheerfully.
