The Adults
10 best books like The Adults (Alison Espach): This Is Not Your City, Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction, The Bee-Loud Glade, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, Everything Beautiful in the World, The Architect of Flowers, Swimming Sweet Arrow, Little Known Facts, In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter
| Author | Caitlin Horrocks |
| ISBN | 1932511911 |
Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in...
| Author | Elissa Schappell |
| ISBN | 0743276701 |
Elissa Schappell's Use Me introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, whose "sharp, beautiful, and off-kilter debut" (Jennifer Egan) garnered critical acclaim and captivated readers. In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, her highly anticipated follow-up, she has crafted another provocative,...
| Author | Steve Himmer |
| ISBN | 0984510583 |
Meet Finch, a corporate drone and blogger who invents words and imaginary lives, but none as surreal as the life he's about to lead as a decorative hermit. Meet Mr. Crane, an eccentric billionaire whose whims and moods change as often as the landscape outside his employee's cave. Join them both as they...
| Author | Ron Currie Jr. |
| ISBN | 0670025348 |
In this tour de force of imagination, Ron Currie asks why literal veracity means more to us than deeper truths, creating yet again a genre-bending novel that will at once dazzle, move, and provoke.
The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.’s new novel has a problem—or rather, several of them....
| Author | Lisa Levchuk |
| ISBN | 0374322384 |
Lately I feel like an astronaut out on a space walk – constantly praying the tube attaching me to the ship doesn’t snap and send me flying into outer darkness.
The only good thing about having a mother with cancer is that people are willing to let you get away with pretty much anything. Like...
| Author | William Lychack |
| ISBN | 0618302433 |
Acclaimed for The Wasp Eater, his first collection of stories, Lychack focuses now on a fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone and a gifted eye, he examines the dark and unfathomable moments in the most committed relationships; the small distances that stretch into miles between...
| Author | Maureen Gibbon |
| ISBN | 0316355569 |
Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes...
| Author | Christine Sneed |
| ISBN | 1608199584 |
The people who orbit around Renn Ivins, an actor of Harrison Ford-like stature--his girlfriends, his children, his ex-wives, those on the periphery--long to experience the glow of his flame. Anna and Will are Renn's grown children, struggling to be authentic versions of themselves in a world where...
| Author | Katie Roiphe |
| ISBN | 0812992822 |
This powerful collection of essays ranges from pop culture to politics, from Hillary Clinton to Susan Sontag, from Facebook to Mad Men, from Joan Didion to David Foster Wallace to—most strikingly—the author’s own life. For fans of the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Jonathan Lethem.
Named...
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter
| Author | Michael J. White |
| ISBN | 0399155902 |
A smart, darkly funny, yet poignant debut novel about coming of age without coming undone.
Seventeen-year-old George Flynn-an all-around decent guy-has just moved with his family to Des Moines, a place where he knows no one and is pretty much nobody. Despite this inauspicious start to his junior...
| Author | Matthew Aaron Goodman |
| ISBN | 1416562036 |
In this poignant tale of self-discovery, a young man struggles to survive the New York City housing projects in the face of familial, communal, and personal devastation. Born to a thirteen-year-old in the bathroom of his family's small apartment, Abraham Sing leton enters a world laden with the obstacles...
| Author | Carolyn Cooke |
| ISBN | 0307594734 |
From the O. Henry Award–winning author of the story collection The Bostons—a New York Times Notable Book, Los Angeles Times Book of the Year and winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers—an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.
It’s...
| Author | Terese Svoboda |
| ISBN | 0803226829 |
Young Harriet’s father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian—and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet’s story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange...
| Author | Benjamin Hale |
| ISBN | 0446571571 |
Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia...
| Author | Jesse Browner |
| ISBN | 1609450515 |
Jesse Browner's dazzling new novel records a single day in the life of Wes, a seventeen-year-old who attends Manhattan's elite Dalton School and lives in Greenwich Village in a dilapidated town house with his terminally ill mother, distant father and beloved younger sister. In the course of one day...
| Author | Jo Ann Beard |
| ISBN | 0316084476 |
The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of IN ZANESVILLE is a late bloomer. She is used to flying under the radar-a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent.
Luckily,...
| Author | Ida Hattemer-Higgins |
A ferociously intelligent debut novel about a young amnesiac’s descent into madness in contemporary Berlin, and a country wrestling with its dark past.
A young woman named Margaret stumbles one morning from a forest outside Berlin, hands dirty, clothes torn. She can remember nothing...
| Author | Louise Dean |
| ISBN | 1999856562 |
An Oprah Book of The Week.
Meet Ken. He's obsessed with death, planning his own funeral and desperate to die in the bosom of his family. Unfortunately for Ken, that's the last place his family wants him.
His oldest son Nick left home over twenty years ago and reinvented himself. At forty,...
| Author | Blake Nelson |
| ISBN | 0983723206 |
Andrea Marr heroine of the classic 90's novel Girlis back. And she's at college!
Imagining a typical J. Crew/college catalogue” experience, Andrea leaves Portland to attend prestigious Wellington College in Connecticut. Surrounded by the best and the brightest, she works hard to...
| Author | Ashley Prentice Norton |
| ISBN | 0547840047 |
As addictive, decadent and delicious as chocolate itself
Set in 1980s Chicago and on the East Coast, this electric novel chronicles the relationship between an impossibly rich chocolate heiress, Babs Ballentyne, and her sensitive and bookish young daughter, Bettina. Babs plays by no one’s...
| Author | Laurie Colwin |
| ISBN | 0060958987 |
Laurie Colwin's books tend to be like Sofia Coppola movies: heavy on atmosphere, thin on action. People decry her work for its lack of a linear, fast-pulsing plot. But this is exactly the reason I love it. "A Big Storm" isn't about a chain of events; it's a cross-section of place, time, circumstance. It's...
| Author | Corinne Demas |
| ISBN | 0761373039 |
I think that the marketing of this book is extremely misleading. It looks like a young adult book, with the intense, older-looking model on the front cover, and the synopsis does not mention that Irene is only 13. Once you open up the book, however, it is clear that Irene is young. I would not have read this...
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children
| Author | Sarah Braunstein |
| ISBN | 0393076598 |
In New York City, a girl called Leonora vanishes without a trace. Years earlier and miles upstate, Goldie, a wild, negligent mother, searches for a man to help raise her precocious son, Paul, who later discovers that the only way to save his soul is to run away. As the narrative moves back and forth in time,...
| Author | Alexander Maksik |
| ISBN | 1848545703 |
Set in an international high school in Paris, You Deserve Nothing is told in three voices: that of Will, a charismatic young teacher who brings ideas alive in the classroom in a way that profoundly affects his students; Gilad, one of Will's students who has grown up behind compound walls in places like...
| Author | Lenore Zion |
| ISBN | 0983693269 |
Jane lived happily in Miami Beach with her father until his failed suicide attempt and relocation to a mental hospital forced her into the foster care system. By chance, Jane is assigned to foster parents in central Florida who are deeply involved in the Second Day Believers&mdasha cult focused...
