Welcome to the University of Iowa Libraries’ virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.
The Faces: A Novel
From Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, comes The Faces, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience.
Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children’s book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again.
Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder—is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848772600002771
A Strange Woman: A Novel
The pioneering debut novel by one of Turkey’s most radical authors, originally published in the 1970s, tells the story of an aspiring intellectual in a complex, modernizing country.
Erbil’s groundbreaking coming-of-age novel, nominated for the Nobel upon original release, follows a young woman and aspiring poet in Turkey. Nermin frequents Istanbul’s coffeehouses and underground readings, but is torn between the creative, anarchist youth culture of Turkey’s capital and her parents, members of the old cultural guard who are wary of Nermin’s turn toward secularism.
In four parts, A Strange Woman narrates the past and present of a complicated Turkish family through the eyes of each of its members. This rebellious, avant-garde novel tackles sexuality, psychology, and history through the lens of a modernizing 20th-century Turkey. Deep Vellum brings this long-awaited translation of the debut novel by a trailblazing feminist voice to US readers.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848503830002771
The Heap: A Novel
Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land.
Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.
The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.
What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847651610002771
In His Own Image: A Novel
From Goncourt Prize–winning author Jérôme Ferrari, a bewitching story of passion, death, and love, and a powerful reflection on the relationship between art and reality
Born in a small town in Corsican countryside, Antonia grows up in a place of deeply-rooted traditions and strong family ties. When she’s fourteen, her uncle, a priest, gives her a camera—igniting a passion that will prompt her to become a photojournalist.
Over two decades later, Antonia is walking around the port of Calvi when she runs into Dragan, a soldier whom she had met when she was reporting on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The two spend the night in deep conversation, reminiscing about their experience of the conflict. Shortly after saying goodbye, as she drives home Antonia loses control of her car, plunges off a cliff and is killed instantly. Tasked with officiating his niece’s funeral, Antonia’s uncle reflects on her life and legacy, and on the profound questions they beg about ambition and doubt, passion and guilt, representation and reality.
Wide in scope but rich in detail, restrained yet deeply moving, In His Own Image masterly weaves together the story of an individual life with universal themes that resonate across time and space.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844943600002771
The Plague: A Novel
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation, and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror.
An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France’s suffering under the Nazi occupation, as well as a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence. In this fresh yet careful translation, award-winning translator Laura Marris breathes new life into Albert Camus’s ever-resonant tale. Restoring the restrained lyricism of the original French text, and liberating it from the archaisms and assumptions of the previous English translation, Marris grants English readers the closest access we have ever had to the meaning and searing beauty of The Plague.
This updated edition promises to add relevance and urgency to a classic novel of twentieth-century literature.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840318110002771
Quiet Places: Collected Essays
A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in English
Quiet Places brings together Peter Handke’s forays into the border regions of life and story, upending the distinction between literature and the literary essay. Proceeding from the specificity of place (the mountains of Carinthia and Spain, the hinterlands of Paris) to specific objects (the jukebox, the boletus mushroom) to the irreducible particularity of our moods and mental impressions, these works—each a novella in its own right—offer rare insight into the affinities that can develop between a storyteller and the unlikeliest of subjects. Here, Handke posits a reevaluation of the possibilities and proper concerns of literature in a style unmistakably his own.
This collection unites the three essays from The Jukebox with two new works: “Essay on a Mushroom Maniac,” the story of a friend’s descent to and ascent from the depths of obsession, and “Essay on Quiet Places,” a memoiristic tour d’horizon of bathrooms and their place in Handke’s life and work. Featuring masterful translations by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim, this collection encapsulates the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848092940002771
Harrow: A Novel
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead,the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
“She practices … camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
Khristen is a teenager who,her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.”
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”?
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844003720002771
A Passage North: A Novel
A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.
Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/18gddib/TN_cdi_crossref_primary_10_1353_wlt_2022_0069
Sorrowland: A Novel
Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!
A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.
Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.
But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847636100002771
Not Everybody Lives The Same Way: A Novel
Paul Hansen is in prison. He’s been in this prison on the outskirts of Montreal for a couple of years now, sharing a cell with a murderous Hells Angel who often reminds Paul that he could kill him at any moment. What did Paul do to end up here? And why does he jeopardize his life and release by refusing to show remorse?
Before prison, there were his parents. There were his friends at the Excelsior, the luxury apartment complex where Paul worked as caretaker as well as restorer of souls and comforter of the afflicted. And there was his partner, Winona, an intrepid seaplane pilot, and their beloved dog, Nouk. Many of those closest to him are gone now, but Paul still talks to them; they appear in his dreams and as ghosts in his cell.
From France in the sixties to the asbestos mines of Québec, from the sand dunes of the peninsula where the Baltic connects to the North Sea to the wild lakes and mountains of Canada, Jean-Paul Dubois’s extraordinary novel and winner of the Prix Goncourt Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, follows this man, Paul Hansen, as he reviews his life. A life of equilibrium, it has given Paul both tragedy and gifts––that is, until the moment when fate presents him with someone capable of breaking his balance. Not Everybody Lives the Same Way is a powerfully original and unusual novel. Masterfully translated by David Homel and brilliantly animated by Jean-Paul Dubois’s keen feeling for humanity and intense revolt against all forms of injustice, it asks the question: What does it takes to live a dignified life?
https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847173120002771