A Million Heavens
10 best books like A Million Heavens (John Brandon): Familiar, Absolution, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, How to Get into the Twin Palms, Bowl of Cherries, Panorama City, The Book of Jonas, The Listeners, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, The Best of McSweeney's
| Author | J. Robert Lennon |
| ISBN | 1555976255 |
A haunting, enigmatic novel about a woman who is given a second chance—and isn’t sure whether she really wants it.
Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas’s grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her body is more voluptuous; she’s...
| Author | Patrick Flanery |
| ISBN | 0307401278 |
In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.
Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare...
| Author | Matt Bell |
| ISBN | 1616952539 |
In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their...
| Author | Karolina Waclawiak |
| ISBN | 0983247188 |
How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents' Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub...
| Author | Millard Kaufman |
| ISBN | 1932416838 |
Kicked out of Yale at age 14, Judd Breslau falls in with Phillips Chatterton, a bathrobe-wearing Egyptologist working out of a dilapidated home laboratory. There, young Valerie Chatterton quickly leads Breslau away from his research and into, in order: the attic, a Colorado equestrian ranch, a porn...
| Author | Antoine Wilson |
| ISBN | 0547875126 |
With its blend of fool’s wisdom and deeply felt humanity, Panorama City is heir to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Steve Martin’s The Jerk.
From his deathbed*, 28-year-old Oppen Porter—an open-hearted, bicycle-riding, binocular-toting, self-described "slow absorber"—unspools...
| Author | Stephen Dau |
| ISBN | 0399158456 |
An exceptional debut novel about a young Muslim war orphan whose family is killed in a military operation gone wrong, and the American soldier to whom his fate, and survival, is bound.
Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed Muslim country....
| Author | Leni Zumas |
| ISBN | 1935639293 |
Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners explores a far-out world where a patchwork of memory, sensation, and imagination maps the flickering presence of ghosts.
This is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Quinn is thirtysomething, a survivor of a fractured and...
| Author | Patrick Somerville |
| ISBN | 0982580819 |
In this genre-busting book from award-winning novelist Patrick Somerville characters, stories, and stray thoughts revolve around the “The Machine of Understanding Other People,” the story of a Chicago man who is bequeathed a supernatural helmet that allows him to experience the inner...
| Author | Dave Eggers |
| ISBN | 1938073592 |
To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the journal called “a key barometer of the literary climate” by The New York Times and twice honored with a National Magazine Award for fiction, here is The Best of McSweeney’s—a comprehensive collection of the most remarkable work from a remarkable...
| Author | Marco Roth |
| ISBN | 0374210284 |
A frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir
With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician—from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like “De-oxy ribonucleic acid,” or recite a French poem—Marco Roth was able...
| Author | Benjamin Nugent |
| ISBN | 1439136599 |
The critically acclaimed author of American Nerd makes his fiction debut with this romantic tragicomedy about a teenage boy and girl who discover his dad is having an affair with her mom. For readers of Chad Harbach and Jennifer Egan, and fans of filmmakers like Noah Baumbach.At fifteen, Josh Paquette...
| Author | Adam Levin |
| ISBN | 1936365219 |
Adam Levin’s debut novel The Instructions was one of the most buzzed-about books of 2010, a sprawling universe of “death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth” (Rolling Stone).
Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers ten smaller worlds,...
| Author | Katie Arnold-Ratliff |
| ISBN | 1935639072 |
Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into...
The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia...and also, somehow, the story of ten thousand years of Hungarian history. Jessica Anthony, the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, makes an unforgettable...
| Author | Grant Jerkins |
| ISBN | 0425255980 |
Is it true what they say? That we’re only as sick as our worst secret? Because Helen Patrice has one. Last night, she murdered a stranger…
Helen is a recovering alcoholic struggling through a twelve-step program. Now it’s time to make amends for a crime she got away with—a hit and run...
| Author | Kevin Barry |
| ISBN | 1555976514 |
A new book from the winner of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize.
A kiss that just won't happen. A disco at the end of the world. A teenage goth on a terror mission. And OAP kiddie-snatchers, scouse real-ale enthusiasts, and occult weirdness in the backwoods.
Dark...
| Author | Paul Poissel |
| ISBN | 1932416161 |
The Facts of Winter is a series of dreams, all dreamed by people in and around Paris during the winter of 1881. It is historical fiction once removed: an account of events that were imaginary even from the point of view of an invented past — although Poissel claimed (in a letter to his friend Bartholomeo...
| Author | Joshua Mohr |
| ISBN | 0982684894 |
"Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision." —The Wall Street Journal
"At once gripping, lucid and fierce, Damascus is the mature effort of an artist devoted to personal growth and as such contains the glints of real gold." -San Francisco Chronicle
It's...
| Author | Benjamin Percy |
| ISBN | 1555975690 |
A powerful debut novel set in a threatened western landscape, from the award-winning author of Refresh, Refresh.
Echo Canyon is a disappearing pocket of wilderness outside of Bend, Oregon, and the site of conflicting memories for Justin Caves and his father, Paul. It’s now slated for redevelopment...
| Author | Mark Slouka |
| ISBN | 0393348830 |
Warning: this is a guy’s review for guys. Men aren’t supposed to read novels, but it’s been documented that doing so won’t actually kill us. So sensitive souls take note, this review contains some violence and adult language.
First a question: did you ever read Catcher in the Rye? If...
| Author | Sam Savage |
| ISBN | 1566892317 |
Living on a diet of fried Spam, vodka, sardines, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort, Andrew Whittaker is slowly being sucked into the morass of middle age. A negligent landlord, small-time literary journal editor, and aspiring novelist, he is--quite literally-- authoring his own downfall. From his...
| Author | Josh Weil |
| ISBN | 0802122159 |
From celebrated storyteller Josh Weil comes an epic tragedy of brotherly love, a sui generis novel swathed in all the magic of Russian folklore and set against the dystopian backdrop of an all too real alternate present.
Twin brothers Yarik and Dima have been inseparable since childhood....
