“Summons up a small American town at precisely the right moment in our history . . . a bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.”—George Saunders
A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times—fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan.
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
Mark Firth is a contractor...

"Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the hypermasculine crustacean king who intimidates the other male lobsters, beds all the lady lobsters, and "wins" at life. At least not according to the ego-bursting feedback he's given in his freshman seminar. But Paul finds a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls, and maybe -- oh god, please -- he's beginning to catch the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Gutierrez. Cruising through high school as a sauced-out,...

Emma Bovary, the bored wife of a French provincial doctor, scans her solitude with desperate eyes, like a shipwrecked sailor searching for a white sail on the distant horizon. And when Emma's ship finally comes in, it carries with it vast and tragic consequences upon which her own life and the lives of those around her are wrecked.