New Fiction: explore family, morality, and consequences in elite NYC

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman  

A devastating exploration of the blurring boundaries of privacy and the fragility of self, a clear-eyed portrait of modern life that will have readers debating their assumptions about family, morality, and the sacrifices and choices we make in the name of love.  

15-year-old Jake wakes up one morning after an unchaperoned party and finds an email in his in-box from an eighth-grade admirer. Attached is a sexually explicit video she has made for him. Shocked, stunned, maybe a little proud, and scared - a jumble of adolescent emotion - he forwards the video to a friend, who then forwards it to a friend. Within hours, it's gone viral, all over the school, the city, the world.

The ensuing scandal threatens to shatter the Bergamots' sense of security and identity, and, ultimately, their happiness. They are a good family faced with bad choices, and how they choose to react, individually and at one another's behest, places everything they hold dear in jeopardy.

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day at the Beach, P.S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, and the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. 

A staff favorite - now in paperback

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell 

"Brilliant, funny, original . . . also creepy and sinister . . . Karen Russell's Swamplandia! is every bit as good as her short stories promised it would be. This book will not leave my mind."
-Stephen King 

If you haven't yet visited Swamplandia!, now's perfect time to tuck this warm-weather read into your beach bag. 

The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park,is no longer #1 in the region. Ava's mother has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to their competitor in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.

Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. 

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker's debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. Three of her short stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes. She is the author of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. 

Paperback fiction from an Irish literary star

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes 

A wry and life-affirming tale 

Marian Keyes's inimitable blend of rollicking humor, effervescent prose, and captivating stories that deal with real-life issues have won readers around the globe. Her new novel The Brightest Star in the Sky, features seven neighbors whose lives become entangled when a sassy and prescient spirit descends on 66 Star Street to radically transform at least one person's life in the Dublin town house. With the comic appeal of Nick Hornby's novels and delicious drama akin to Jane Green, The Brightest Star in the Sky will keep readers guessing, laughing, gasping, and in tears until the very last page.

Marian Keyes is the international bestselling author of ten novels, including, most recently, This Charming Man, and two autobiographical works. She was born in Limerick, and currently lives in Dún Laoghaire with her husband.