Heller McAlpin

The author restores balance in the homophones with her latest novel; both stories are thought-provoking, although somewhat less beguiling than her usual fare.

In Five Weeks in the Country, author Francine Prose imagines a distressing, ill-timed visit to Charles Dickens' home in 1857 — offering a memorable twist on the classic English country house drama.

Departure(s) explores several of Barnes' lifelong obsessions — mortality, memory, and time. It's slim but weighty, digressive yet incisive. Barnes, who just turned 80, says it will be his last.

America's literary highways may be plenty crowded with middle-aged runaways fleeing lives that increasingly feel like a bad fit. But Ben Markovits adds a moving tale to the collection.

The punk rock star has produced several books that braid thoughts on her newest endeavors with memories and photographs of her lost lovers and friends. Bread of Angels is her most autobiographical.

In this follow-up to her hit novel, Catherine Newman reprises her beloved Rocky, a sharp-witted, neurotically doting mother.

The Secret Life of a Cemetery is a paean to the renowned Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. There, 10,000 visitors a day seek the graves of some 4,500 notable figures.

Didion's book is an intimate chronicle of the author's struggle to help her daughter, even if it meant digging into her own long-unexamined neuroses.

In her latest work, Cusk probes questions about the connections between freedom, gender, domesticity, art, and suffering.

Jill Ciment wrote about a relationship she had with a teacher when she was very young – that turned into a marriage – in Half a Life. Now, eight years after his death at 93, she reconsiders their relationship in light of the #MToo movement.