Hamid's flawed but beautifully written new novel follows the trajectory of a self-made man in an unnamed country.

Enduring the everyday is relatively straightforward -- just keep breathing and putting one foot in front of the other -- but how to transcend the everyday, in this world neither you nor I have made?

Greyson Todd is a man on a wire. He has excelled as a studio executive in Hollywood, and has everything that one’s supposed to want: a kind and supportive spouse, a lovely child. Money, beautiful house, glamourous career. But he’s been hiding a bipolar disorder for two decades, and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe.

Hamid's first novel, recently re-released, was published not long after Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapons, and the arms race between Pakistan and India form the jittery backdrop to a harrowing story of a man's descent.

Once again Cronin has superbly handled the difficult task of writing a character-driven adventure story. The vampires remain terrifying, but they’re arguably less terrifying than the humans who have decided to collaborate with them in order to survive.

Gill’s stories are fascinating, but she is possessed of that rarest of attributes among memoirists: an understanding of her own story as only a part of a broader picture, a willingness to broaden the focus beyond the particulars of her personal experience.

Is he alive, or is he dead? There are moments in this very funny, very ghoulish novella when he seems definitely one or the other; other moments when he might somehow be both. He's roughly the fictional equivalent of Schrödinger's cat.

Jeet Thayil's debut novel is an unsettling portrait of a seething city, a beautifully-written meditation on addiction, sex, friendship, dreams, and murder.

Simon Brenner is an ex-detective, a man in middle age who has decided after trying out more than fifty professions that he was born to be a chauffeur. Although actually, "chauffeur" doesn’t seem exactly the right word for his current employment: he’s almost, when you come right down to it, a sort of Autobahn-based nanny.