Bookworm

Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls – about a boy facing tremendous conflict with a bully at school, well-meaning inattentive teachers, and a dying mother – was actually already a story begun by another writer, who died before finishing it.

Rabih Alameddine's The Angel of History takes place as much in the protagonist's head as it does in a psych ward where he checks himself in for a bit of rest while he battles the voices in his head.

Mitch Sisskind's Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight is a distillation of nearly fifty years of brilliant comic writing.  

When novelist Peter Orner's father died, he found himself unable to write. At the same time, his marriage fell apart. He consoled himself by reading and started to write responses to the literature that gave him comfort. 

Rapper, poet, playwright and now novelist, Kate Tempest always knew she would write The Bricks that Built the Houses as an accompaniment to the characters in her record Everybody Down. (Rebroadcast)

TC Boyle's The Terranauts centers around eight earth explorers who lock themselves up in E2, a biodome created to mimic earth and test the viability of a self-sustained environment. But what happens between the eight terranauts and their mission control has a bigger impact on sustainability than science had counted on.

Tessa Hadley's book, The Past, has at its center a summer vacation home, and the four middle-aged siblings who come together to decide whether to sell it or not. 

Ann Patchett's latest novel, Commonwealth, follows fifty-two years in the life of a large family. The idea of the book came to her because as a bookstore owner, she saw that what was missing from the shelves was the story of a big, modern family.

The hero of Here I Am is a pun-loving television writer who is pummeled by the loss of everything he values.  This novel expands a family crisis into a global crisis which threatens the state of Israel.

Nicholson Baker's Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids was born of a desire to write a book articulating his theories about education – theories based on having had kids in school. Realizing his premise was weak, as he'd never been a teacher, he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime by becoming a substitute teacher. 

Since memory is not only malleable but unreliable, which version of the truth will prevail?

Another Brooklyn, award-winning Young Adult novelist Jacqueline Woodson's first novel for adults in twenty years, tells the story of childhood friends as they grow into women. 

An ugly young dwarf girl transforms first into a beauty, then into a tall woman, then into a wolf. 

In Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengele conducted horrifying physical and psychological experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Affinity Konar's Mischling (meaning mixed blood) is the story of twin sisters who find themselves imprisoned in Dr. Mengele's "zoo."

Adam Fitzgerald's poetry in George Washington: Poems comes across as playful while exploring the concept of Americana and what that means. 

Krys Lee's first novel dramatizes boundaries and borders – not just political ones but those that complicate human relationships.  

A married couple wind up in a wasteland of foreclosed houses and abandoned homes.

Tom McCarthy's Satin Island features a protagonist who, as his company's corporate anthropologist, has been given the enormous task of compiling a report summing up the modern era.

In his travels to more than 100 countries – some dangerous, some surprisingly not – Tom Lutz finds that the more places he goes, the more the world leaves him a little bit lost.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, the "fictions" in She  weave together a composite view of Los Angeles.