By Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 416pgs
Release Date: October 11, 2011

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jeffrey Eugenides will publish his first new novel in almost a decade with the release of The Marriage Plot. Set at Brown University in the early 1980′s, the story focuses on an emerging love triangle between three soon to be graduating seniors. At the center of the triangle is Madeleine Hanna, an English major enamored of the romantic ideals of Austen and Joyce, who meets the brilliant, but emotionally troubled, Leonard Bankhead in a Semiotics seminar. On the sidelines is Mitchell Grammaticus, a smart and practical religious-studies student who carries a torch for Madeleine. After Graduation Leonard and Madeleine move in together and eventually marry, though Leonard’s emotional state continues to deteriorate. Mitchell embarks on a trip through India to find his true path, but cannot stop pining for Madeleine. He is inextricably drawn back to the U.S., but his return home complicates Madeleine’s marriage. Will this novel end happily ever after? Read more…

By Brady Udall
W. W. Norton & Company | 602pgs
Release Date: May 3, 2010

Golden Richards struggles with indecision and loneliness while surrounded by his four wives and 28 children in The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall’s second novel. The Mormon patriarch is under tremendous strain as he divides his time between his family’s three separate households in remote Utah and tries to keep his failing construction business afloat, all while grieving over the death of his young daughter. In an effort to support his family, he goes against his religious beliefs and takes a contacting job building a brothel in Nevada, though he glosses over the truth with his family and tells them it is a retirement home. Richards may have a “God-given patriarchal authority”, yet he constantly struggles to keep up with the demands of his wives, and further complicates his life when he develops romantic feelings for a woman he meets at the construction site. Udall’s story of a man in crisis and a family in chaos encompasses the tragic and comedic elements of real life, with an ultimate message of love and redemption.
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By Ian McEwan
Nan A. Talese | 304pgs
Release Date: March 30, 2010

Nobel prize–winning physicist, Michael Beard is skating by on his celebrity and little else, as Ian McEwan’s Solar opens. His exorbitant public speaking fees and regular paychecks from his post at Britian’s National Centre for Renewable Energy, give him plenty of time and resources to over-indulge in food, drink and women. In Part One of the book, Beard’s voracious appetites and infidelities have ruined his personal relationships, and caused his professional life to stagnate. In Part Two, the physicist attempts to jump start his career by passing off a dead colleague’s research as his own, and gains sponsorship to study climate change in New Mexico. Because Beard comes by his fresh start in the U.S. dishonestly, he decides to work on mending his deceitful ways. Part Three has him striving to save the environment from Global Warming and himself from a life of debauchery.
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By Rosina Lippi
G.P Putnam’s Sons ©2008 | Hardback 351pgs

Two guarded souls come together in the beginning pages of The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square. When John Dodge first meets Julia Darrow, he is immediately intrigued by her choice of wardrobe. Julia, owner of Lambert Square’s upscale bedding boutique, Cocoon, requires all employees (herself included) to wear pajamas to work. Dodge soon learns that these pajama-wearing ladies are just a few of the Southern eccentrics that people the shopping area of Lambert Square, and the town of Lamb’s Corner in general.

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