A new novel by the author of Everything Is Illuminated introduces Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center bombing who searches the city for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind. Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent...

Sometimes, there is nowhere safe to hide. It was a typical evening at a mall outside Portland, Maine. Three teenage friends waited for the movie to start. A boy flirted with the girl selling sunglasses. Mothers and children shopped together, and the manager at the video-game store tending to customers. Then the shooters arrived. The chaos and carnage lasted only eight minutes before the killers were taken down. But for those who lived through it,...

When five women are found brutally killed in Sierra Leone, journalist Connie Burns suspects that a British mercenary is acting out his sadistic fantasies, but her efforts to expose him are complicated by her traumatic experiences as a hostage in Baghdad.

"One weekend, sisters Tanya and Nessa Bloom pause their respective adult lives and travel to the Boston suburbs to help their mother pack up and move out of their childhood home. For the first time since they were teenagers sharing a bunk bed over a decade ago, they find themselves in the place where long-kept secrets were born, where jealousy, comfort, anger, forgiveness, and repulsion coexist with the fiercest love and loyalty. What they don't expect...

A Manhattan psychiatrist, who thinks he's seen it all until he's assigned to analyze Prot, a psychiatric patient who claims to be from a distant planet called K-PAX. He is convinced that Prot is "a convincing delusional, " but his cynicism turns to open-minded fascination as Prot's case reveals a combination of otherworldly insight and all-too-human trauma, prompting an earthbound explanation for Prot's allegedly alien origins.

After the sudden death of her father leaves a teenage girl without a family, she becomes lost in her own anger and sadness. Her family doctor informs her that her father had a secret, that the mother she never knew was alive and well. When she travels to meet her, she befriends a horse trainer and discovers that in caring for the horse, she is able to overcome her hardships and emotional trauma. Through the victories and new friendships she forms,...

"In her rural Appalachian holler, ten-year-old Misty's closest friends are the crawdads. Misty can speak to them, to the birds, to the creek, to everything outside, and she understands how they think. She knows that if she could just speak to her parents in the same way, she could stop all the fighting. But it's too hard. When her only friend William takes their friendship too far, Misty doesn't know how to get help. This is the story of one tough-as-nails...

"This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing."--Publisher.

"A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that...

"Dear Miss Metropolitan tells the fragmented story of Fern, Gwinnie, and Jesenia, three girls abducted by a monster who calls himself Boss Man and held captive in a decaying house in Queens for a decade. Inspired by real events, the tale is inventively revealed by multiple narrators before, during and after their ordeal. Documents, newspapers, excerpts from books, photographs, interviews, and other forms of media piece together the larger story. By...