Lauren Bufferd
Content by Lauren Bufferd
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What keeps Twice Born from sinking into a desperate sadness is Mazzantini’s skilled depictions of love, both maternal and romantic, and her honest look at the collateral damage of a war-torn city.
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Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City.
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Dear Husband, I lost our children today. The newly widowed Rehana addresses these startling words to her husband's grave in A Golden Age, the accomplished first novel by Tahmima Anam.
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Novelist Taiye Selasi coined the word Afropolitanism eight years ago to refer to educated, multilingual, multiethnic Africans living around the globe.
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Vida is the debut collection of nine linked stories by Patricia Engel. But don’t let the slimness of this volume fool you.
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When Embers was published in English in 2001, it ignited the career of a Hungarian author little known outside his native country.
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Carol Edgarian’s second novel explores how many trials a marriage can stand. Lena and Charlie are struggling emotionally and financially.
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In his new novel, Trapeze, Simon Mawer explores the secret world of British Special Operations Executives (SOE), the agency that recruited citizens to work behind enemy lines durin
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Nadifa Mohamed grew up listening to her father’s stories of growing up in East Africa in the 1940s, but it was not until she was older that she realized how truly remarkable his life was.
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Toronto’s leading radio host Kevin Brace greets the newspaper deliveryman at the front door of his luxury condo, covered in blood, a confession on his lips. His beautiful common-law wif
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Toronto’s leading radio host Kevin Brace greets the newspaper deliveryman at the front door of his luxury condo, covered in blood, a confession on his lips. His beautiful common-law wif
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In We Need New Names, 10-year-old Darling and her gang of friends roam their shantytown in Zimbabwe with the mischievous spirit of children at play.
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The heroine of The Echo Chamber, Evie Steppman, has hearing so developed, she can even listen to the past.
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Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to the spellbinding Wolf Hall, is one of
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It is 1980 in Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear, and the Outer Hebrides, a remote island chain off the northern coast of Scotland, has some unexpected visitors.
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Linked short stories offer a singular form of narration. Ideally each story can stand alone, but when read together, they overlap and intersect, continually offering new perspectives.
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Michael Frayn is perhaps best known as an award-winning playwright, especially for his theatrical farce, Noises-Off. But he is also an accomplished novelist.
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Novelist Pearl Abraham was brought up in a Hasidic family and raised in New York and Jerusalem.
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Golden Richards is in a bad way. He has four wives but is flirting with another woman.
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A Man in Uniform is set in the Paris of the 1890s, a world familiar to many of us from Impressionist paintings of street scenes and bohemian cafes.
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After years of looking for a place to belong, Daniel Rooke’s keen intellect and interest in astronomy won him a place on the 1788 First Fleet voyage to the British colony of New South Wales,
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Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, Twelve Rooms of the Nile.
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Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid made his literary debut with the critically acclaimed Moth Smoke in 2000, and cemented his reputation with the 2007 international bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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Sebastian Faulks is best known for rich historical novels like Charlotte Gray and Birdsong.
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Danielle Evans’ book of eight stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, is long anticipated.
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The Distant Hours is a multigenerational puzzle complete with a decaying castle, hidden manuscripts and not one but two families with secrets.
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Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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Family life can be like a journey—an expedition filled with delights and sorrow, a mixture of monotony and surprises, with a few unexpected side trips.
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Like his fictional alter ego, journalist Gus Bailey, Dominick Dunne was the man who knew all the secrets and wasn't afraid to share them.
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In Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li explores the big themes—individuality, honor, family ties and love—and sets them against a richly detailed tapestry of Chinese life.
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The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead, by Pennsylvania novelist Paul Elwork, was inspired by the Fox sisters, three 19th-century siblings who claimed they could communicate with the dead.
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Herbs and potions, love charms and secrets, the complex intimacies between mothers and daughters: It’s clear from the outset of The Dovekeepers that we are firmly in Alice Ho
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Start with a opinionated narrator with a spicy tale to tell; stir in a seasoned mix of bitter in-laws and a troubled family business; sprinkle with heady descriptions of melted butter, rich chocola
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Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories.
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Hilary Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall, a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to King Henry VIII and a significant
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It’s only January, but if you plan on reading just one great novel in 2010, this might be it.
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Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel, See Now Then, begins in a small house in New England inhabited by the Sweets—mother, father and two children—and at first appears as
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Some novels are written for adults.
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Canadian novelist Miriam Toews returns to the subject of Mennonite teenage girls in Irma Voth.
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Andrea Levy’s Small Island is a hard act to follow.
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The Disappeared, Canadian Kim Echlin’s poignant love story set against Cambodia’s troubled history, has two epigraphs: the first, a verse celebrating the destruction of all cultu
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Allegra Goodman is often described as a 21st-century Jane Austen. Like Austen, she writes subtle and engaging social comedies that focus on love, betrayal and familial loyalty.
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An engrossing double love story set in the not-so-swinging ’60s and a contemporary London news office, The Last Letter from Your Lover offers a captivating tale of missed con
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When Montse and Santiago meet in Barcelona in 1975, they have little idea their relationship will take them to another continent altogether.
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In her fourth novel, an acclaimed Canadian writer transforms a stranger-than-fiction experience into a memorable coming-of-age tale.
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Sadie Jones returns to the past in her new novel Small Wars, a psychologically probing story about a British military family posted to Cyprus in the 1950s.
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It's been nine years since Jayne Anne Phillips' last book and almost 30 since the acclaimed author burst on the scene with her dazzling short-story collection Black Tickets.
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In the 1930s, Franklin County, Virginia, held a dubious distinction: nearly 100 percent of the population was illegally trading in liquor.
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The map of modern American fiction is scattered with urban spaces, from cafés and diners to beauty parlors and laundries.
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April 17, 1861, was the date on which the state of Virginia seceded from the Union.
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Deborah Lawrenson pays homage to Daphne du Maurier’s 20th-century Gothic novel Rebecca in The Lantern, which interweaves two stories, past and present, both set in a
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Marina Lewycka's second novel Strawberry Fields is a darkly comic trip through rural England told by migrant workers on a strawberry farm.
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In The Assassin's Song, M.G. Vassanji has created a stunning portrait of a man struggling with the burdens and the joys of filial and religious obligation.
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Mohsin Hamid’s ambitious novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, puts a new spin on the self-help book, a genre known for its glib pronouncements and superficial impera
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Australian writer Tim Winton is an acclaimed author of poetry, short stories, novels and children's books.
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The night her sister was born, Janie was warned by her grandmother to take good care of the new baby, since in their family, a sister disappears in every generation.
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There is an air of faded gentility hovering around Sterne, the old manor house at the heart of Sadie Jones’ third novel, The Uninvited Guests.
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The Quality of Mercy is Unsworth’s long-awaited sequel to his 1992 Booker prizewinner Sacred Hunger, a game-changer of a historical novel which concluded with severa
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Debut novelist Catherine Chung talks about her moving first novel Forgotten Country—our Top Pick in Fiction for March.
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Novelists and historians are often tempted to play the ‘what-if’ game, but few of these attempts result in anything as inspired as Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo&rsq
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At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America.
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At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America.
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With two prize-winning novels behind her, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become a formidable voice in contemporary West African literature.
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Americans have become acquainted with best-selling French author and director Philippe Claudel through his award-winning film I’ve Loved You So Long in which Kristin Scott Thomas plays
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Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Strout is known for the remarkable empathy she shows her characters and for her tough yet truthful depiction of intimate relationships.
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Those of us who are of a certain age sometimes find ourselves wondering, “Am I still the person I once was?” Nothing can bring this question to mind more quickly than seeing a friend fr
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In her seventh novel, Lucky Break, Esther Freud draws on her own experience as a drama student and actress (and the wife of actor David Morrissey) to explore what it takes to pursu
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, begins in a train station in Princeton, New Jersey, where Ifemelu is on her way to Trenton to get her hair braided.
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In her second novel, The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna looks at the aftermath of a civil war in an African country very much like Sierra Leone.
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When Adam Haslett was writing the novel that became Union Atlantic, he couldn’t have known that a book about a rogue banker, the Federal Reserve and conflicts between old and new monie
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When does an idea become a conviction, love become an obsession, interest become a passion? When do we shift from engagement to foolish fixation?
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The Man in the Wooden Hat, a compelling new novel from acclaimed British novelist Jane Gardam, marks the return of Sir Edward Feathers, the central character in Gardam’s prize-winning
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As a novelist, the gifted Valerie Martin rarely repeats herself.
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Before she became a heroine of the Crimean War, and before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert each traveled to Egypt—and, reportedly, g
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For the last five decades, Anita Desai has kept her focus on Indian characters coping with modern life at home and around the world.
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In After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, debut novelist Evie Wyld chronicles the stories of three generations of an Australian family whose lives are shaped by conflict and trauma.
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What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism?
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Since her first novel in 1994, Emma Donoghue has taken her readers through centuries and back and forth across the Atlantic, from a tender coming-of-age (and coming-out) story in 1970s Ireland (
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<b>Tropical paradise holds a star's secrets</b> In the mid-1940s, a storm-wrecked boat carrying the film star Errol Flynn washed up on a small island off the Jamaican shore.
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Writer Aminatta Forna spent her childhood in the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone, the daughter of an African father and Scottish mother.
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It is difficult to write about Patrick Flanery’s riveting debut Absolution without giving away too much of the plot.
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In his new novel, TransAtlantic, Colum McCann proves once again why he is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.
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Do we look up at an airplane now the same way we did before September 11, 2001?
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A decaying English country house holds menace and mystery in The Uninvited Guests, the remarkable third novel from Sadie Jones.
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The Night Swimmer is about a young American couple who move to Ireland and open a pub in a small coastal village outside of Cork.
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It is the summer of 1963, and 12-year-old Florine Gilham lives with her parents on The Point, a small fishing village in Maine.
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Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British - ruled India and China was in full swing.
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Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British-ruled India and China was in full swing.
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It’s been seven years since Zadie Smith’s last novel, On Beauty, and it’s fair
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