To read Jeanette Winterson is to love her. Best known as the author of such provocative novels as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry, the fierce, curious, brilliant British writer is winningly candid in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

An Asian-American family's struggle with identity.

South African Richard Mason is the rare novelist who can write a very sexy book that never quite turns prurient.

In this fictional retelling of the Trojan War, military heroics are subsumed into a timeless love story.

Jaz and Lisa Matharu travel to the California desert for the most ordinary of reasons: a vacation meant to repair their fraying marriage. But there's nothing ordinary about what they encounter.

For all its period detail, this debut seems remarkably modern in its depiction of love and politics—proof that a historical novel can be educational and entertaining, and nothing like homework.

A new book by Eric G. Wilson (Sarah Crichton/FSG) that explains our morbid (but oh-so-human) obsessions and why we can't ever seem to look away from disasters.' '

Handled the right way, just about anything can be made interesting. Geologists have proved this true of dirt, and now so does Lucy Worsley with the likes of forks, bathtubs, stoves, and bedposts.

Everything we love in a thriller—obsessive passion, haunting secrets, a shocking ending—is here, set among the creepily atmospheric ruins of a 16th-century English garden.

In this brilliantly inventive novel, memory and imagination blur as a young Bosnian man living in Southern California recalls life in his disintegrating homeland.

How not to offend in tricky social and business situations (stashing the smart phone is just the beginning), by a writer who's as cheekily charming as he is helpful.

Romance blooms as the Romanov Empire crumbles, in a mesmerizing novel narrated by the daughter of infamous Russian mystic Rasputin.

A wedding reception, a carful of drunken guests, a girl killed on the side of the road—so begins a novel spanning 25 years of a family's haunted life.

A revealing look at the singer's hit songs, famous friends (Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty), rocky marriage to James Taylor, and struggle to hold on to stardom in late middle age.

German exiles living in London begin a perilous mission to stop Hitler's reign, in this enthralling historical novel.

A young woman's memoir about finding the courage to break with a cloistered community.

Stories that explore the visceral connection between women—a vet disfigured by a wolf hybrid, an activist torn between a man and a menagerie—and animals.

A psychic attacked by her jealous mentor discovers the depth of her powers in this gripping novel.