Books for Adults
Fiction
Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea
An inside view of the hidden world of upper-class Saudi women. Four young women try to find love and fulfillment, while navigating Islamic traditions.
Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow
Doctorow’s latest is inspired by the famed and reclusive Collyer brothers of New York City. Homer Collyer and his brother, while entombed in their once-grand mansion, remember their exciting former lives in postwar New York City.
The Believers by Zoe Heller
Civil rights attorney Joel Litvinoff suffers a stroke. His family struggles to accept both his illness and each other, as they try to decide what they still believe in.
Happy Family: A Novel by Wendy Lee
A Chinese immigrant becomes the nanny of a Chinese girl adopted by an American family. She tries to protect the girl from the strains in her parents’ marriage.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Chase’s fiancee is tragically trapped on a space station. While sending her love letters, he explores the underside of Manhattan society.
How It Ended: New and Collected Stories by Jay McInerney
A collection of McInerney’s short stories written over the past 26 years. Subjects range from New York City nightlife to life in tribal Afghanistan.
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Dutch banker Han’s wife and son return to London after 9/11. He adjusts to a new single life amid the artists and eccentricities of New York City’s Chelsea Hotel.
Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Captain Hayward, Pendergast, and D’Agosta infiltrate a deadly cult to find the assailant of a Manhattan journalist and his wife.
What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel by Irina Reyn
In this contemporary version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, set in Queens, Anna K. has an affair with an outsider in her close-knit Russian community. At the same time, her cousin is passionately courted by a Bukharian-Jewish pharmacist.
The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan
Chinese American private investigator Lydia Chin must find the famed jewel the Shanghai Moon, which previously belonged to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust in Shanghai.
The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine
The lives and loves of Manhattan dog-owners who meet and become part of each other’s lives because of their pets.
Prospect Park West: A Novel by Amy Sohn
Four upper-class Park Slope women cope with the frustrations and boredom of their lives in Brooklyn’s most desired neighborhood.
Midnight: A Gangster Love Story by Sister Souljah
In this prequel to The Coldest Winter Ever, teenage Sudanese immigrant Midnight comes of age on the streets.
Brookyn: A Novel by Colm Tóibín
Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey leaves post-World War II Ireland for a bookkeeping job in Brooklyn and a charming Italian boyfriend. However, her new life is threatened by news from her homeland.
Cutting for Stone: A Novel by Abraham Verghese
Twin half-British, half-Indian brothers are raised as orphans in Ethiopia before the revolution in that country. They are bound together by a shared interest in medicine and forever divided by their love for the same woman.
Nonfiction
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint
Jane Jacobs’s refusal to let Robert Moses build an expressway through Washington Square Park led to the birth of community activism, and reshaped the ways in which people in New York City respond to urban renewal projects
Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York by William Grimes
The former New York Times restaurant critic explores the history of restaurants in New York City, focusing on how, where, and what people eat. Grimes also reflects on restaurants as larger political and social forces.
NYPD Confidential by Leonard Levitt
Levitt’s weekly column, “NYPD Confidential,” exposes the underside of the city’s police department. His book explores conflicts between the mayor and police commissioner over control of the department, as well as rampant corruption in the NYPD.
Next Stop: Growing Up Wild-style in the Bronx Ivan Sanchez
Sanchez tells the compelling story of growing up amidst the slumlords, drug dealers, gang members, and burgeoning hip-hop superstars in the late 1980s-era Bronx.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s by Edmund White
White moved to the city from the Midwest, worked at Time-Life Books, and tried to get published while exploring New York’s literary nightlife and gay culture.
