Recommendations based on "4 3 2 1: A Novel"

An intensely powerful new novel from the best-selling author of The Bastard of Istanbul and Honour'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...'For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . .

Published to worldwide critical acclaim, with more than one million copies already in print, this is the lush, wondrous story of an unrequited love that survives half a century and more than 600 distractions.

In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities, when our lives are linked so closely to others'? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel in eleven years - a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., "Here I Am" is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home, and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, "Here I Am" is Foer's most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer's stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.

In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective, penetrating the cunning labyrinth of the abbey and deciphering coded manuscripts for clues. Reprint.

As teenagers, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love in a Nigeria under military dictatorship. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America, where Obinze hopes to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face? This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60% of the author's work and as low as 30% with characters and plotlines removed.

The New York Times BestsellerNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistLambda Literary Award winnerFrom Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger.New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition. Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist--the de facto leader--and a biologist, who is our narrator. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens, to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding--but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

"With weathered photograph in hand, a young man visits the Ukraine to find the woman who might. or might not, have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by Alex, his youthful and seriously inadequate Ukrainian translator, an old man haunted by his memories of the war, and a mongrel bitch named Sammy Davis Jr Jr, he is led on a quixotic search across a devastated landscape and back into an unexpected past. As their adventure unfolds, the young man imagines--and reanimates--the Ukraine, weaving a tapestry of symmetries that unites generations across time. Lit by passion, fear, sex, guilt, memory, and hope, the characters of Everything Is Illuminated mine the black holes of history (while stopping off for the occasional non-vegetarian meal), in an arresting blend of high comedy and deep tragedy. As their journey moves backwards in time, the fantastical history moves forwards, until reality collides with fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power. Ultimately this is a novel about searching: for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future. Exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving, Everything Is Illuminated is an astonishing debut."--Page 2 of cover.

Set in the insular upper-class society of New York City in the 187o's, this book tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer who plans to marry the beautiful debutante May Welland. On the eve of their engagement, he meets May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has fled Europe and an unhappy marriage. Ellen's charm and worldliness stir in Archer a longing for life beyond his restrictive upper-class ecistence. He cannot think of leaving May, yet he continues to pursue Ellen.