Contemporary Fiction

An Iraqi-American is the chef at a small Los Angeles café, where Arab-Americans come to feel at home. A folkloric family story is interwoven with this contemporary tale of love, food and home.

The novel on which the popular movie was based, this account of four women's lives in the Depression-era South is humorous, while also threaded with the more serious themes of racism, feminism, and domestic violence.

Summer in a corner of southern Appalachia serves as the setting for the adventures and struggles of three free-spirited women, who have intimate ties to the natural world.

Set in a small town in the plains of Colorado, this novel tells the interrelated stories of eight characters whose lives undergo radical change during the course of one year.

This ‘novel in stories,’ set in small town Maine, centers on Olive Kitteridge, a difficult-to-like retired teacher and her friends and acquaintances. Together they reveal their follies, foibles, difficulties and capacity for change.

An Indian boy, Piscine Patel (aka ‘Pi’) and his zookeeping family are emigrating to Canada. While on a container ship enroute to their new life, an accident at sea leaves Pi and a tiger in a lifeboat floating on the Pacific Ocean.

Interwoven stories of four Latina sisters chronicling their assimilation into the United States and their visits back to the Dominican Republic.

Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is an intersex person, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.