Tiffanie's Suggestions

The Fox Was Ever the Hunter: A Novel

by Herta Müller

256 pages

Paperback available in May - Fiction

An early masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize, hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism. 

Romania, the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher, Paul is a musician, and Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover, but one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the whole group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police. Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it's hard to tell victim from perpetrator. In The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, Herta Muller once again uses language that displays the ''concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose'' -- as the Swedish Academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize -- to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism.

The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

368 pages

Paperback - Fiction

When Alizée Benoit, an American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her artistic patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. And, some seventy years later, not her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, who while working at Christie’s auction house uncovers enigmatic paintings hidden behind works by those now-famous Abstract Expressionist artists. Do they hold answers to the questions surrounding her missing aunt?

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist 

by Sunil Yapa

320 pages

paperback available in October - Fiction

Grief-stricken after his mother's death and three years of wandering the world, Victor is longing for a family and a sense of purpose. He believes he's found both when he returns home to Seattle only to be swept up in a massive protest. With young, biracial Victor on one side of the barricades and his estranged father--the white chief of police--on the opposite, the day descends into chaos, capturing in its confusion the activists, police, bystanders, and citizens from all around the world who'd arrived that day brimming with hope. By the day's end, they have all committed acts they never thought possible. 

As heartbreaking as it is pulse-pounding, Yapa's virtuosic debut asks profound questions about the power of empathy in our hyper-connected modern world, and the limits of compassion, all while exploring how far we must go for family, for justice, and for love.