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...

Brooklyn native and young widow Erica Donato wants to focus on her PhD research. But when her teenage daughter Chris finds a skeleton behind a wall in their crumbling Park Slope, Brooklyn, home, she and her daughter are both touched and disturbed by the mysterious tragedy. Are the remains more recent than they at first appear? Chris' dangerous curiosity and Erica's work at a local history museum lead her right back to her neighborhood in its edgy,...

Ha Jin's seismically powerful new novel is at once an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist Chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. When the venerable professor Yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. Since the dutiful Jian plans to marry his mentor's beautiful, icy daughter, the job requires delicacy. Just...

"Valdin is still in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who used to drive around Auckland in a ute but now drives around Buenos Aires in one. Greta is in love with her fellow English tutor Holly, who doesn't know how to pronounce Greta's surname, Vladislavljevic, properly. From their Auckland apartment, brother and sister must navigate the intricate paths of modern romance as well as weather the small storms of their eccentric Māori-Russian-Catalonian...

A grad student meets his intellectual match and seals his dark fate when he responds to a newspaper ad seeking a conversationalist.

An English grad student struggling with her dissertation about the intellectual history of inspiration desperately searches for a perfect case study to anchor her thesis, only to find it in the unlikeliest of places.

Bottoming out after a dramatic breakup, doctoral student Lucy accepts her sister's invitation to dog-sit at her home on Venice Beach for the summer, where she meets an eerily attractive swimmer whose Sirenic identity transforms her understanding of what real love looks like.

"From the moment she discovered her sister's secret relationship with charismatic professor Jay Crane, Jessie Mooney has been convinced that he's to blame for the events leading to her death. Haunted by their last email exchange -- You know what you did -- she enrolls in graduate school and competes her way into Crane's famous "Law and Literature" class, setting into motion a plan to get close to him so she can expose who he really is. Jessie will...