From the Orange Prize-nominated author of

The Observations

comes an absorbing, atmospheric exploration of one young woman’s friendship with a volatile artist and her place in the controversy that consumes him. Jane Harris’s

Gillespie and I

presents a strongly voiced female protagonist evocative of Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp, who offers a keen sensibility, deeply felt observations, and poignant remembrances of the world of a young artist in turn-of-the-century Glasgow in this fantastic work of historical fiction. London’s

Sunday Times

calls

Gillespie and I

“a literary novel where the storytelling is as skilful as the writing is fine.” Fans of

The Piano Teacher

and

The Thirteenth Tale

will find it irresistible and unforgettable.

A man seeks to rediscover his broken Midwestern community in a novel that “brims with grace and quirky charm” by the author of Peace Like a River (Bookpage). Movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Though Virgil survives, his language and memory are altered. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together the past. He is helped by a cast of curious locals—from a stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son, to the vanished man’s enchanting wife, to a local journalist who is Virgil’s oldest friend. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a journey into the heart of America’s Upper Midwest.

The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of 

Exit West

and

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Moth Smoke

, Mohsin Hamid’s deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an uncommonly gifted and ambitious young literary talent to watch when it was published in 2000. It tells the story of Daru Shezad, who, fired from his banking job in Lahore, begins a decline that plummets the length of Hamid’s sharply drawn, subversive tale.

Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke was ahead of its time in portraying a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia then familiar to the West. It established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination and the premier Pakistani author of our time, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK!

• A "gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary"  (

USA Today

) about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise

—

to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies

—

and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely

—

an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor

—

has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines,

A Burning

is an electrifying debut.