"Locked up or free, women were never safe anywhere. Always the first affected by decisions made without their consent." I rarely jump on hyped books, but this one got me. Powerful stuff about women's autonomy and society's way of silencing them.

"He was struck by how wildly lives diverge, how powerless each of us is against circumstance. And where is God in all this?" Newark, summer 1944. War rages but young athletic Bucky Cantor can't serve. Instead he faces a different enemy.

"We discover together, with equal joy and wonder, the fresh blanket of snow. Now daylight rises from the earth itself. The weak sky-light bounces generously off infinite crystals. The snow that fell during the night..." An extraordinary Arctic journey.

"Looking back, all I see is the chaos of history repeating endlessly, replaying itself, reinterpreting itself, the world and its degenerate heart pulsing beneath us, failing again and again, while continuing its course around..." Devastating and necessary.

"Love is impossible in a country where men and women can't mix freely, meet, and talk together. You know why? Because the moment a woman shows interest, men jump on her like starving beasts..." Obsession catalogued. Istanbul rendered. Love dissected.

"I both love and fear the idea that a shadow line exists. An invisible frontier crossed mid-life, beyond which you stop becoming and simply are." Can freedom and happiness coexist? You could spend your whole life asking.

"Natural greed, which is the foundation of human freedom, will always triumph over the whims of tyrants." Summer demands a massive novel that transports you across time and space. This one delivers. Epic in every sense.

"To be American is to be empty, and a true American is genuinely empty. So all things considered, Josie was a true great American." Josie is running. With her two kids—reasonable Paul, eight, and mischievous Ana—she heads for Alaska.

"He knows that sometimes just naming a thing is enough to give it substance and invite it plainly into the real world." Nice to stumble on something completely different from the usual publishing mill. This one stands apart.

"Marriage is something far too serious to entrust to young people." It starts in 1958 with an unlikely trip to the USSR sponsored by both the Communist Party and Paris-Match to witness Soviet paradise. Edgar is a young photojournalist...