WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Reads like a brilliant miniseries ... has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved.' Observer Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his taller, smarter, and more successful younger brother George acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in New York City. But Harry also knows his brother has a murderous temper. When George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Suddenly Harry finds himself playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down a rabbit hole of online sex, and dealing with aging parents who move through life like travellers on a fantastic voyage. And he is forced to confront the ways in which our histories can either compel us to repeat our mistakes - or become the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is a darkly funny tale exploring how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. 'An unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing' Salman Rushdie

THE END OF ALICE treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday, following the correspondence of two paedophiles. One, the narrator, is a child-killer, serving his twenty-third year in prison. The other, his seemingly sweet admirer, is a nineteen-year-old woman, intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Teetering on the knife's edge between the American Dream and the American Nightmare, THE END OF ALICE unpicks the darkness of inconceivable desire, and the destruction and horror left in its wake.

From the 2013 Orange Prize-winning author of "May We Be Forgiven."..

Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal -- and revel in -- their obsessive desires, Homes creates in "The End of Alice" a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.

Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood.Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.

Short listed for the Richard & Judy Book Club 2007.An uplifting story set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. 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 sinkhole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, This Book Will Save Your Life reveals what can happen if you are willing to open up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A.M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.

'Breathtakingly accurate satire and laser-cut portraits of American life from a seriously heavyweight author whose snapshots remain etched on the retinas' Evening Standard '...a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life' Jeanette Winterson '...one of our most important and original writers of fiction' Jay McInerney 'Ms. Homes just gets better and better' Gary Shteyngart 'a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe' Meg Wolitzer ''Homes is a devastating satirist..' Lionel Shriver 'at her merciless satirical best' Tessa Hadley 'These defiantly comic stories are like postcards from contemporary America' Summer Books round up, Mail on Sunday The winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction returns with signature humour and psychological accuracy, to tell thirteen stories exposing the heart of an uneasy 21st-century America. In tales of a family obsessed with the surfaces of their lives, or the story of a shopper who suddenly finds himself nominated to run for President, she explores 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. Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is another visionary, fearless and outrageously funny work from a master storyteller.

"The Lottery," one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in "The" "New Yorker." "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery: " with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jack son's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

For Claire Roth, an established psychotherapist with an adoring husband and children, her new patient - Jody Goodman, a witty and attractive young filmmaker - is a welcome diversion from her predictable life. Jody, successful, yet uncertain, is disarmed by Claire's interest and approval. Gradually, the boundaries between friendship and family, between love and compulsion, start to blur - especially when one of them starts to believe fanatically that some things simply cannot be coincidences, and that what they share, in fact, is the deepest bond of all. In a Country of Mothers is a transfixing psychological thriller, and with it A.M. Homes forces us to confront our own judgements about sanity, danger and desire.

Jack is a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal - even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack's father takes him out rowing on a lake and tells his son that he's gay, nothing will ever be normal again. Out of Jack's struggle to redefine 'family', comes a work of enormous humour, charm and resonance, the most convincing, funny and insightful novel about adolescence since The Catcher in the Rye.

Paul and Elaine have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly, inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with 'making things good again', they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careers well and truly out of control. As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the technicolour hues of the American good life become nearly hallucinogenic: from a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford Wife neighbour, to a house-cleaning team in space suits, to a hostage situation at the school. Homes lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life and creates characters outrageously flawed, deeply human and entirely believable.

On the day that A. M. 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, heartbreaking and absurd. Along the way, Homes describes the clash between her childhood fantasies of her birth parents and the disappointing reality. She writes about the experience of experiencing biological resemblance for the first time (in 'My Father's Ass') and the addictiveness of the genealogical research she embarks on. She reflects on the significance of DNA testing and having two mothers and two fathers and unearths profound truths about her family and herself. Finally, she writes movingly about her own baby daughter and the way she has recently helped to mend Homes' fractured life.

Things You Should Know is a collection of dazzling stories by one of the most talented and daring young American writers, whose distinctive narratives demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. A woman pursues an unconventional strategy for getting pregnant; a former First Lady shows despair and courage in dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's; a teacher's list of 'things you already should know but maybe are a little dumb, so you don't' becomes an obsession for someone who wasn't at school the day it was given out; and adult tragedy intrudes into a childhood friendship. The stories are full of magic and strangeness and humour, but also demonstrate an uncanny emotional accuracy and compassion.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION. A.M Homes returns with signature humour and psychological accuracy, to tell thirteen stories exposing the heart of an uneasy 21st-century America. In tales of a family obsessed with the surfaces of their lives, or the story of a shopper who suddenly finds himself nominated to run for President, she explores 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. Her first book since the Women's Prize-winning May We Be Forgiven, Days of Awe is another visionary, fearless and outrageously funny work from a master storyteller.

The dazzling new state-of-the-nation novel from one of America's most significant contemporary writers and winner of the Women's Prize for May We Be Forgiven, which explores the makings of our political times. --- 'A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifyingly close to the unfunny truth' - Salman Rushdie The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 Presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family and must take responsibility for his past actions. For his wife and daughter are having their own awakenings: self-denying Charlotte enters rehab, and eighteen year old Megan, who has voted for the first time, explores a political future that deviates from her father's ideology, while delving into deeply buried family secrets. Dark, funny and prescient, The Unfolding explores the implosion of the dream and how we arrived in today's divided world. 'From her first book onward, A. M. Holmes has been challenging us to look at fiction, the world, and one another as we haven't done-because we haven't had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us' - Michael Chabon

Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction-A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life by a writer who is always "compelling, devastating, and furiously good" (Zadie Smith) Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.

The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 Presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family and must take responsibility for his past actions. For his wife and daughter are having their own awakenings: self-denying Charlotte enters rehab, and eighteen year old Megan, who has voted for the first time, explores a political future that deviates from her father's ideology, while delving into deeply buried family secrets. Dark, funny and prescient, The Unfolding explores the implosion of the dream and how we arrived in today's divided world.

This anthology is an exclusive look at the country's most promising new writers. These 10 stories of extraordinary literary merit represent a showcase of talented writing through original pieces of fiction and narrative nonfiction, chosen for publication by "New York Times"-bestselling author, AM Homes. This anthology speaks to a readership with an appreciation of short literary fiction and compelling narrative nonfiction. Selected stories include works by Nelson Algren Finalist, Andrew Payton, and Burning River Chapbook Contest winner, Dustin M. Hoffman, as well as numerous Pushcart Prize nominees.

Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. "This Book Will Save Your Life" is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.

As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic. Laying bare th foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control. From a strange and hilarious encounter with a Stepford Wife neighbor to an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, to a sexy cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, to a housecleaning team in space suits, a mistress calling on a cell phone, and a hostage situationat a school, A.M. Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that thery are entriely believable.

No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient--unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs.
Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody's parentage--Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody's age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more--or with more terrifying consequences.

The stories in The Safety of Objects are both bizarre and believable, very funny but also frightening and sad. A girl's blonde Barbie doll seduces her teenage brother in an intense episode of erotic obsession; a couple go off the rails and smoke crack while their children are staying with their grandmother; and a lawyer seeks revenge on his boss by urinating into his potted plant every evening.