Literary Fiction

Pi Patel grows up in Pondicherry, India, the son of a zookeeper who tends a menagerie of animals that will later save his son’s life — and nearly end it. Pi is an endlessly curious boy who practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously, to the mild bafflement of everyone around him. When his family emigrates…

Summary Audrey Magee’s debut novel, published in 2014, opens with a transaction: two strangers, a German soldier named Peter Faber and a young Berliner named Katharina Spinell, agree to marry by proxy. They have never met. The marriage is a legal arrangement permitted under a wartime Nazi scheme that grants financial benefits to wives and…

Rosalie Knecht’s debut novel, Relief Map, published in 2016 by Tin House Books, drops a sixteen-year-old girl into the kind of crisis that forces growing up in real time. Set in the fictional rust-belt town of Lomath, Pennsylvania, the novel follows Livy Marko through a sweltering summer that begins with babysitting, creek-swimming, and hanging out…

Summary Pamela Erens’s third novel, published by Tin House Books in 2016, takes a single setting and holds it for the length of the book. Eleven Hours unfolds entirely in a hospital labor and delivery ward over the course of, as the title announces, eleven hours. The novel follows two women: Lore Atlas, who arrives…