The colder months imply holiday chaos. And when we’ve put away our fine table
linens, traded our sparkly outfits for comfortable sweaters, and layered up our beds
and couches with cozy blankets and throws, there’s no better accessory to curl up
with than a great book and hot cup of tea.
We’ve curated six reads that you’ll be happy to hibernate with while they whisk you
away on exciting escapes, intriguing journeys, and sweet dreams.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Gail Honeyman ’s debut novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is quirky, hilarious, and is soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon. It has also been a consistent favorite on the New York Times Bestseller list, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, and British Book Awards Book of the Year. Eleanor Oliphant struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life, where weekends mostly consist of frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling IT guy from her office, whose big heart will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
When it was first published in 1943, The Fountainhead - containing Ayn Rand ’s daringly original literary vision with the seeds of her groundbreaking philosophy, Objectivism - won immediate worldwide acclaim.
This third novel of Rand’s and instant classic is the story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Unsheltered by Barbara KingsolverThe New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize— Barbara Kingsolver returns with her timely novel, Unsheltered.
This is a compulsively readable, intertwined story of two families who live in different centuries, on the same street corner in Vineland, New Jersey, and how they navigate what seems to be the end of the world as they know it.
Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own.
In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.
Severance by Ling Ma
In Ling Ma ’s award-winning debut novel, Severance, is an offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire.
Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood. Self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, devoted to routine, and navigating the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, and watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.
So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.
Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene
Contributing writer and former Senior Editor at Pitchfork, Once More We Saw Stars is Jayson Greene’s first book and a moving, transcendent memoir of the loss of a child and the survival of love in the wake of unimaginable tragedy.
Two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting chatting with her grandmother on a park bench in New York when a brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead and strikes her unconscious. As she is rushed to hospital in the hours before her death Once More We Saw Stars leads us into the unimaginable.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Winner of the ALA Alex Award and Women’s Prize for Fiction Nominee, Maria Semple’s novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, has been adapted for the silver screen featuring a cast including Cate Blanchette, Judy Greer, and Kristen Wiig scheduled to premiere in 2019.
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence - creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.