Kirjahaku

The parents and children in these stories are driven to speak by the hungers of love and the fear of time. Tender, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, Busch captures our need to connect, the failures that make us human, and the triumphs that make us splendid. In "Heads" a mother is haunted by her own past when her daughter is accused of a murder. In "Malvasia" a daughter gives her bereaved father the gift to go on living. A father suffers over his inability to save his grown son from heartbreak in "Passengers." "The Joy of Cooking" is a tour de force about a failed marriage. Called a "first-rate American storyteller," and a "master craftsman" by the New York Times Book Review, Busch delivers a moving portrait of the American family.

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

Combining the pace of a detective story with the bold prose of a master storyteller, North is both an adventure and a pilgrimage. Alone and haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, Jack—who prowled the backwaters of Girls—returns to upstate New York from the Carolina coast, where he has been working as a security guard. A New York lawyer hires him to find her missing nephew, last seen in the area of Jack's northern hometown. His search gradually uncovers a dark underside of rural life and a cast of dangerous characters. Jack is besieged by memories as he uncovers a brutal crime and finds himself in a turbulent relationship with a treacherous woman. In trying to save another's life, Jack must relive his own; memory, obsession, and reality fuse; and Jack discovers the truth of Faulkner's observation that "the past is not really past; it's not even over."

Here is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown-up love story. Harry and Catherine have been falling in and out of love for many years. She is divorced, determinedly raising two sons, and running a small gallery in upstate New York. He is an ex-newspaperman, a wistful drifter, now assistant to a New York senator. After a long separation, Harry is assigned to find out whether a new shopping mall in Catherine's neighborhood will desecrate an historic black cemetery. Catherine is living with another man, a contractor for the mall who finds both his financial interests and his relationship with Catherine threatened by Harry. With penetrating acuity and generosity of spirit, one of our finest writers brings us what David Bradley calls "a book people will love and be proud of loving." "Unsuppressed emotion, painful honesty . . . all of it in the most lively and supple language anyone is writing today."—Rosellen Brown