Jack

For Claire Roth, an established psychotherapist, her new patient - Jody Goodman, a young filmmaker - is a welcome diversion from her predictable life. Jody, successful, yet uncertain, is disarmed by Claire's interest and approval. Gradually, the lines between friendship and family, between love and compulsion, start to blur. In a Country of Mothers is a transfixing psychological thriller, that forces us to confront our own judgments about sanity, danger, and desire.

The End of Alice treads the thin line between the evil and the everyday and caused a major controversy when it was first published. The story centres on a disturbing correspondence between the narrator, a middle-aged killer serving his twenty-third year in prison; and his slang-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, a nineteen-year-old girl intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Slowly, through these letters, the narrator's dangerous character emerges.

Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide hole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house.

A razor-sharp story collection from a writer who is always "furiously good" (Zadie Smith, best-selling author of Swing Time). With her signature humor and compassion, A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection - exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren't quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be. In "A Prize for Every Player," a man is nominated to run for president by the customers of a big box store, while he and his family do their weekly shopping.

On the day that Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected and the story spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious.