"Nothing short of astonishing." - New Yorker "A thing of beauty-lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations." - Los Angeles Times The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life. For all of...

"Call me Ishmael". So begins Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's epic account of the last voyage of the ill-fated whaling ship Pequod, and its captain's obsessive pursuit of the legendary white whale that maimed him years before. Melville's classic novel has given American literature some of its most iconic characters. Inspired by the real-life ordeal of the crew of the whaling ship Essex--who, in 1819, were set adrift in the heart of the sea for eighty-nine...

Set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s, Noah Bly's evocative debut explores prejudice, loss, and redeeming courage through the prism of an unlikely friendship. When fifty-four-year-old Julianna Dapper slips out of a mental hospital in Bangor, Maine, on a June day in 1962, it's with one purpose in mind. Julianna knows she must go back to the tiny farming community in northern Missouri where she was born and raised. It's the place where she...

Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition.

As accomplished Manhattan psychologist Sam James gets pulled into the twisted past of a patient no other therapist is willing to treat, she analyzes her life and confronts her own mental turmoil.

"Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past....

On their first date, Mina told Oscar that she was bisexual, vegetarian, and on meds. He married her anyhow. A challenge to be met. She had low days, sure, but manageable. But now, maybe not so much . . . Mina is standing on the George Washington Bridge late at night, staring over the edge, when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the policeman she's not about to jump, but he doesn't believe her. Oscar is called to pick her up.

As Hillary works in the miniature village, allegedly built by elves, in Sara-Kate's backyard, she becomes more and more curious about Sara-Kate's real life inside her big, gloomy house with her mysterious, silent mother.

A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest...

The love of two sisters, one of them mentally ill. The sick one exhibits volatile emotions and bizarre reactions, reads horror comics and mutilates toys. The healthy one tries to make her normal to save her from an asylum, but it does not work.