Anthony Marra and NoViolet Bulawayo discuss their provocative debuts, and the honorable responsibility of drawing fiction from history.

In an espionage master's latest, war is a booming private enterprise.

The Afghan odyssey of two Pakistani brothers finds fabled beauty amidst modern warfare.

The Da Vinci Code's author on defining hell, challenging his hero, and deciphering Dante in his latest historical thriller, Inferno.

The author of The Liars' Gospel on making unorthodox fiction out of the life of Jesus.

How selfish must an artist be?

A multiracial man returns to the African town of his birth, to confront a mystery of poetry and identity.

Charting a love affair between astronomers from worlds apart.

The rise of a painter amid the French Revolution and the Terror that followed.

The frustrated doctor at the center of Restoration travels to Versailles and beyond.

A supernatural thriller that defies genre conventions and the "guilty pleasure" principle.

History repeats itself -- with variations -- in an inventive epic from the creator of the Jackson Brodie novels.

A nineteenth-century Russian comic storyteller shines in a bold new English translation.

A view of the Colorado landscape and a family's new horizon.

A long-out-of-print gem of wry postmodernism returns.