Tom Perrotta

Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters
These three brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters.

Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Summer, also set in rural New England, is often considered a companion to Ethan Frome-Wharton herself called it “the hot Ethan”-in its portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening. Bunner Sisters takes place in the narrow, dusty streets of late nineteenth-century New York City, where the constrained but peaceful lives of two spinster shopkeepers are shattered when they meet a man who becomes the unworthy focus of all their pent-up hopes.

All three of these novellas feature realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured, and together they provide a superb introduction to the shorter fiction of one of our greatest writers.

Dennis Lehane: The Given Day
Danny Coughlin is Boston Police Department royalty and the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains. His beat is the predominately Italian neighbourhoods of the North End where political dissent is in the air - fresh and intoxicating. On the hunt for hard-line radicals as a favour to his father, Danny is drawn into the ideological fray and finds his loyalties compromised as the police department itself becomes swept up in potentially violent labour strife. Set at the end of the Great War, The Given Day is meticulously researched and expertly plotted, it will transport you to an unforgettable time and place.

Sheila Weller: Girls Like Us
Carly Simon, Carole King and Joni Mitchell remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Together they changed a decade and altered the lives of a generation. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, every girl who came of age in the late 1960s, when - to paraphrase one of their songs - the earth moved. Their stories trace the arc of the now-mythic era known a 'the Sixties'. "Girls Like Us" is an epic treatment of these three exceptional women who dared to break tradition and become what few had been before them - confessors in song, rock superstars, adventurers of heart and soul.