Random House: New Stories
A great story—like the ones here—can open people’s eyes, stir imaginations, and instill empathy. How will these books change you? NEW FAVORITES
Watch Jenna Bush Hager pick her latest book club pick!
A twelve-year-old boy struggles with the worst kind of fame—as the sole survivor of a notorious plane crash—in this “stunning novel of courage and connection” (Helen Simonson, bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand).What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live? One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor. READ MORE »Order Dear Edward
A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago. “The residents and their buoyant dreams are documented, celebrated, honored. I bow to this writer in gratitude.”—Sandra CisnerosBefore being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for some, like Tracy—the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories—they are simply home. READ MORE »Preorder Stateway’s Garden 
A real-life vanishing act leaves one man looking for his missing friend in this Kafkaesque new novel from the author of The Room and The Invoice. The gentle, offbeat narrator of The Circus is perfectly content with his quiet life. By day he works in a bakery, and by night he obsessively organizes and reorganizes his record collection: it’s all just the way he likes it. But when his childhood friend Magnus comes calling out of the blue, the contours of our narrator’s familiar world begin to shift. On a visit to the circus together, Magnus volunteers to participate in the magician’s disappearing act, and—midway through the routine—he vanishes.READ MORE »Preorder The Circus READ AN EXCERPT 
From the New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, this epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home.“A paean to human love and endurance.”—Elle“Isabel Allende is a grand storyteller who writes with surpassing compassion and insight.”—Khaled Hosseini“This gorgeous novel, like all the best novels, transports the reader to another time and place, and also sheds light on the way we live now.”—J. Courtney Sullivan READ MORE »Preorder A Long Petal of the Sea “The young soldier was part of the “Baby Bottle Conscription,” the boys called up when there were no more men, young or old, to fight the war. Victor Dalmau received him with the other wounded taken from the supply truck and laid out like logs on mats placed over the cement and stone floor of the Estacion del Norte, where they had to wait for other vehicles to take them to the hospital centers. The boy lay motionless, with the calm look of someone who has seen the angels and now fears nothing. There was no telling how many days he had spent being shifted from one stretcher to another, one field hospital to another, one ambulance to another, before reaching Catalonia on this particular train. CONTINUE READING WOMEN’S FICTION 
