Jennifer Egan

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is 'one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis.' Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or 'externalizing' memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, 'Own...

In San Francisco, a conventional woman who has always been fascinated by her hippie sister, retraces the sister's European trip which ended in her death. In the process of learning more about her, the idol loses some of the glitter.

"The long-awaited, daring, and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn...

The slow but inevitable moral degeneration of a weak woman. Describes the patient rendering of the squalor and narrowness of provincial life and of its effect on the woman's mind.