November Books We're Buzzing About

Roberts was inspired to write this story, about a young cook employed by an unconventional household, after snooping around Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice as a teenager.

Later, Roberts began researching Guggenheim’s life with the intention of writing a novel. She discovered that Guggenheim had lived in Sussex for a year, very close to where Roberts lives now. When she also discovered that Guggenheim had been frustrated by the lack of finesse in her hired cook’s cuisine and decided to learn to cook herself, she knew she had found her story.

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The prolific author’s latest outing is a novella about one of the leading American stage actors of his generation, Simon Axler. But Axler, now in his sixties, has lost his magic, his talent and his swagger. His wife has gone, his audience has left him and his agent can’t persuade him to make a comeback. Will he find his way back to the stage—and himself?

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All Alison ever wanted was a blissful childhood for her six children, with summers at the beach and birthday parties on the lawn at their family home. With the family au pair, Ingrid, she was worked hard to create a real “old-fashioned family life.” But beneath its postcard sheen, the picture is clouded by a distant father, Alison’s inexplicable emotional outbursts and long-repressed secrets. Now, her adult children must confront the effects of past choices on their current adult lives.

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Fans of Grace Kelly will delight in this new biographer by Donald Spoto, a friend who agreed to wait 25 years after the princess’s death to write her story. Here, he marks her transformation from convent schoolgirl to beloved royal using never-before-published interviews with Kelly herself as well as her friends and colleagues.

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For her new story collection, Monroe rolls out nine tales about the ways in which men and women transcend the circumstances of their lives. A young women reacts to an unusual, humiliating seduction; a russian emigre travels the world to find a place that will employ a female mathematician; a young wife loses her children and finds relief from a surprising source.

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Police officer Jessica Villareal has always played by the book and tried to do the right thing. But as she approaches midlife divorced and estranged from her daughter, she wonders if she ever made a right choice. When she discovers an Iraq war vet and his daughter living off the grid in Oregon, she recognizes her chance to make a difference by doing something she’s never dared—breaking the rules.

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The backdrop for this collection of linked short stories is The Bubble—a neighborhood laundromat in New Orleans. Four unlikely friends pass through as they struggle to live amid poverty and violence. These fragile heroes of the American underclass will redefine your notions of family, redemption and love.

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Forget Angelina Jolie and Warren Buffett—the most significant charitable donor in the world, by far, is the American of modest means. In 2007, small donations from everyday citizens amounted to $229 billion. Give a Little contains stories of remarkable nonprofits and the inspiring ways they use our affordable contributions to make a major impact: a 28 cent delivery kit that saves mothers and babies, a bed net for $10 that prevents malarial infections, a llama for $20 that generates income for an entire family.

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33 great writers, including Amy Bloom, Amy Heckerling, Jay McInerney and Anna Quindlen, on why we read Jane Austen and how she has transformed our lives.

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In the tradition of The Ice Storm, Grodstein’s new novel charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation and himself.

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This novel follows Penelope, whose family begins to unravel after relocating from England to the remote Seychelles islands in 1960. Though she misses England terribly, her husband and two daughters fall in love with this lush colonial outpost in the Indian Ocean. When a Seychelloise beauty sets her sights—and casts her spells—on Rupert, Penelope in turn resorts to local witchcraft in a desperate attempt to save her family.

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Francesca Rivabuona is 55 and drained by her monotonous, sterile Upper East Side existence and her sexless marriage. So when she gets the opportunity to go to Argentina on a last-minute assignment for a well-known travel magazine, she jumps at it. Once there, she makes new friends, begins tango dancing and embarks on a steamy love affair with one of Argentina’s most famous plastic surgeons. As she lets her guard down, she reclaims the passion for life she thought she had forever lost.

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Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham, Anita Shreve, Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates and many others reflect on the people, events and books that have shaped their writing lives.

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Fashion icon, Broadway and Hollywood insider, Mob mistress, confidante to notorious gang members of both the Crips and the Bloods, wife, mother, award-winning journalist, Leon Bing has not followed the typical path through life. In a series of riveting stories of unconventionality, Bing wrestles with the themes of mothers, daughters and reinvention—a concept inseparable from her early life experience and the city she called home.

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For Vesna Maric, the war begins with distant machine-gun fire that sounds like a sewing machine. As it comes closers, her family’s anxiety grows, prompting them to put Maric and her sister on a bus to England. The Bosnian women who board the bus for a four-day trip are in turmoil. They arrive in the vivid green of England’s Lake District and are greeted by volunteers with naive ideas about refugee behavior and appearance.

Maric’s humor and tenderness carry the reader through her love affair with a checkout boy fromt he local grocery store and her eventual moves to larger towns. Interwoven are the stories of other refugees—stories of love, escape and the pain of living in exile.

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