literary fiction

Nobel laureate José Saramago's final novel sends the Bible's first murderer time-traveling through Genesis and beyond - witnessing Abraham, Sodom, the Tower of Babel, Jericho, Job, and Noah's Ark - in a sustained, blasphemous prosecution of the God of the Old Testament.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that weaves together interconnected stories about a group of characters connected to the music industry, exploring themes of time, memory, and aging through an innovative narrative structure.

In the summer of 1944, a polio epidemic sweeps through Newark's Jewish community. Playground director Bucky Cantor watches helplessly as children in his care fall ill - then flees to a mountain camp where he believes he brings the disease with him, destroying his life with guilt.

On the night a famous actor dies performing King Lear in Toronto, a deadly flu pandemic begins. Twenty years later, a traveling theater troupe performs Shakespeare for scattered survivors - and one of them carries a mysterious comic book given to her by the actor the night he died.

A stunning portrait of a geisha's life in pre-war and wartime Japan. Through the eyes of Sayuri, we witness the beauty, artistry, and complex world of geisha culture.

A coming-of-age story set in the Midwest after 9/11. Tassie Keltjin takes a job as a nanny and finds herself drawn into a complex family dynamic that challenges her understanding of race, identity, and belonging.

Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 debut: a love story between Henry DeTamble - a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder she calls Chrono-Displacement that pulls him involuntarily through his own timeline and other people's, naked and out of clothes he cannot take with him - and Clare Abshire, the artist he meets in person at twenty-eight at the Newberry Library, who has known him since she was six because he has been visiting her in the meadow behind her family's South Haven house from a future version of himself for fourteen years already by the time she finally meets him in his own present.