In The Unlikely Event - second hand

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes.

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

The highly praised author of Hideous Kinky, returns with a searing and sensuous tale young love set amid the heat and beauty of a Tuscan summer The Independent calls Esther Freud “the best writer on childhood we have.” In Love Falls this brilliant novelist proves her power once again with an utterly charming and irresistible tale of adolescent love and self-discovery set in a foreign land. When 17-year-old Lara accepts her father’s invitation to accompany him to Tuscany for the summer, she’s excited and trepidatious. But, her fears prove groundless, for the villa’s closest neighbors are the contagiously adventurous Willoughbys, the teenaged brood of a wealthy British lord. Caught up in their torrential good humor—and snared particularly by Kip Willoughby’s dark, flirtatious eyes—Lara sets off on a summer adventure full of danger, first love, and untold consequences that will change her life.