Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on the Wall Street Journal, covering stories from some of the world's most troubled areas, including Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, was set during the English plague year of 1666, and became an international bestseller. She lives with her husband and son in rural Virginia and is currently a fellow at Harvard University.
The Names (2025) Florence Knapp "A magnificent novel, thrumming with life in all its pain and precariousness, yet suffused with the glorious possibilities of love and redemption."
The Human Scale (2025) Lawrence Wright "In this lacerating novel, Wright draws on years of experience in Israel and Palestine to forge a layered tale of intrigue and betrayal. It is a novel of hard truths; a bitter indictment of the corrupt, cruel leaders on both sides who have caused immeasurable suffering."
Easy to Slip (2025) Cal Hoffman "An uncle's sudden stardom has unforeseen effects on his nephew's family. As his celebrity soars, an impressionable boy must grapple with new definitions of success and an unbearable pressure to be special. When he arrives at college in the gritty New York of the 1970s, his mind is overrun by malevolent voices and visions. Raw, brave, and gripping, Easy to Slip is an uncommon exploration of adolescence, psychosis, and recovery."
Too Soon (2025) Betty Shamieh "Too Soon braids the lives of three passionate Palestinian women as they move through a turbulent century. From a sparkling harborside home in Jaffa in the forties, to the slums of Detroit in the sixties and the stages of contemporary New York theater, each generation must contend with patriarchy within her community and prejudice from outside it. A deft, honest novel that refuses to shun complexity as it explores the costs of love and motherhood."
We Burn Daylight (2024) Bret Anthony Johnston "Symphonic and suspenseful, We Burn Daylight reimagines events at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. In an epic act of empathy, Bret Anthony Johnston inhabits every point of view, from doomed devotees to perplexed law enforcement, and even manages to infuse the tragedy with moments of poignant, very human, humor."
The History of Sound (2024) Ben Shattuck "Exquisitely crafted, deeply imagined, exhilaratingly diverse, The History of Sound places Ben Shattuck firmly among the very finest of our storytellers."
The Glassmaker (2024) Tracy Chevalier "This charming fable is at once a love story that skips through six centuries, and also a love song to the timeless craft of glassmaking. Chevalier probes the fierce rivalries and enduring loyalties of Murano's glass dynasties, capturing the roar of the furnace, the sweat on the skin, and the glittering beauty of Venetian glass."
Leaving (2024) Roxana Robinson "What does love demand of us, and who must pay the price? Leaving is a searing interrogation of honor and passion. It dissects the hidden cost of the choices we make, and the consequences with which we must endeavor to live."
The Last of What I Am (2023) Abigail Cutter "What really haunts us--our own mistakes, or the weight of history? Based closely on the true story of her own uncanny encounters in an inherited antebellum Virginia farmhouse and old letters she found there, Abbie Cutter has crafted a novel that plumbs the painful history of a common soldier in the Civil War and the burdens he cannot set down. A riveting read, rich in historic detail and moral complexity."
Mobility (2023) Lydia Kiesling "State Department brat Bunny Glenn, Mobility's hapless, sometimes feckless, protagonist, likes her lip gloss and her Louboutins, and isn't likely to let vaguely leftish views stand between her and her rise in the oil industry. But this sly bildungsroman has subterranean intent. A masterpiece of misdirection and a cautionary tale for our times."
Do Tell (2023) Lindsay Lynch "Gossip columnist Edie O'Dare has enemies and sources, but no friends in a Golden Age Hollywood whose gleam is tarnished by exploitation, cruelty and betrayal. Like a latter-day Cecil B. DeMille, Lindsay Lynch deftly directs her large cast of morally complex characters to illuminate issues of fame and notoriety as relevant now as they were almost a century ago."
The Sun Walks Down (2022) Fiona McFarlane "Quite simply, the best novel I've ever read about 19th-century Australia. A tense search for a lost child unfolds with rising dread against a landscape of harsh and radiant beauty, amid lives as tangled as barbed wire."
Fencing with the King (2022) Diana Abu-Jaber "Fencing With the King is a delicate arabesque of intertwining family relationships. Moving through the bouganvillia-splashed villas of upper-class Jordan, a poet raised in America struggles to decode her father's world of allusion, indirection and heartbreaking secrets. The novel probes the cost of exile and voluntary expatriation, asking: When is inheritance a blessing, and when is it merely a burden?"
A Dream Life (2022) Claire Messud "Witty, arch and acutely observed, A Dream Life expertly captures the excruciating insecurities of class in our supposedly classless society."
The Stone Loves the World (2021) Brian Hall "A brilliant, brainy book about physics, astronomy, video games and the American Century. Hall’s intricate family saga charts vast social shifts even as it maps the emotional ups and downs of vivid individual lives. His characters' considerable smarts can’t save them from the mess of their emotional mistakes, but how they deal, and how they heal, gives the novel its irresistible narrative power."
Painting the Light (2021) Sally Cabot Gunning "If The Widow’s War identified Sally Gunning as a masterful new voice in historical fiction, Bound confirms her place as one of the very best in the field . . . Her Satucket novels are destined to become classics."
The Dictionary of Lost Words (2021) Pip Williams "Inspired by a wisp of fact—a single word accidentally omitted from the Oxford English Dictionary—Pip Williams has spun a marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress. This is a novel that brings to light not only lost words but the lost stories of women’s lives. It is at once timely and timeless."
On The Same Page (2018) N D Galland "N. D. Galland has created a delectable romantic comedy set in her home town of Martha’s Vineyard long after the summer crowds have departed. With a satirist’s eye and a pitch-perfect ear for the social nuances of small-town life, it’s Pride and Prejudice for the Bumble generation."
Eternal Life (2018) Dara Horn "An elegant musing on sacredness, history, and purpose that is, at the same time, a deliciously romantic, highly suspenseful page-turner."
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2017) Aharon Appelfeld "As its title suggests, there is a dazed, dreamlike quality to the prose of this bildungsroman, in which a masterly English translation by Jeffrey M. Green manages to retain the direct, concrete quality of the original Hebrew as well as its austere poetry."
Useful (2015) Debra Oswald "Brimming with insight, mesmerizing, and above all, true."
The Railwayman's Wife (2014) Ashley Hay "Exquisitely written and deeply felt, The Railwayman's Wife is limpid and deep as the rock pools on the coastline beloved by this book's characters and just as teeming with vibrant life. Ashley Hay's novel of love and pain is a true book of wonders."
The Possibility of You (2012) Pamela Redmond "The Possibility of You is an exploration of love and family, of race and of relationships... Complex and compelling and compulsively readable."
The Call (2011) Yannick Murphy "This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny, and profoundly moving. It's about family, community, the human bond with animals, and - oh yeah - spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy's achievement and I plan to recommend it to everyone I know."
The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (2010) (Satucket, book 3) Sally Gunning "Beautifully researched and ardently imagined, Gunning's writing is so vivid you can taste the salt in the Cape Cod air... Her Satucket novels are destined to become classics."
The Night Journal (2006) Elizabeth Crook "A vividly imagined and emotionally unsparing account of lives both damaged and redeemed by love."
Mahjar (2005) Eva Sallis "In Mahjar, Sallis wields her great gifts of empathy and eloquence to render human beings in full unflinching detail. It is a book of journeys, passionate and powerful."
