Andrew Sean Greer - The confessions of Max Tivoli

Out of the womb in 1871, Max Tivoli looked to all the world like a tiny 70-year-old man. But inside the aged body was an infant. Victim of a rare disease, Max grows physically younger as his mind matures. In Andrew Sean Greer's finely crafted novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Max narrates his life story from the vantage point of his late fifties, though his body is that of a 12-year-old boy. He has known since a young age that he is destined to die at 70, and he wears a golden "1941" as a constant reminder of the year he will finally perish in an infant form. His mother, a Carolina belle concerned over her son's troubling appearance, curses Max with "The Rule": "Be what they think you are". Max fails to keep this Rule only a handful of times in his life, but it is the burden of living by it that wounds him and slowly alienates him from the people he loves.
Over Max's narration of the preceding decades of his life, he offers outsider's snapshots of San Francisco and all of America across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout, Greer uses the literary device of reverse aging to interrogate the evolution of social conventions, the finitude of a human life and the decay of memory. Max wants love. But his curse destines him to deception. He loses his wife, Alice, changes his name and remains hidden from his own son to keep his true identity secret. Only his lifelong friend, Hughie, stands by Max and can see the person inside the anachronistic body. Like the best science fiction and myth, the novel uses its central conceit to reveal human prejudice and explode all assumptions of normalcy to profound effect.
Love is a destructive force in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. But Greer recognises that in the failure of love is also hope. He artfully captures Max's fragile world with a delicacy that never crosses into sentimentality but also avoids the monumental scale of tragedy. As Max says near the end of the novel, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love." A journey with Max, while brave and beautiful, is hardly a waste.

Alice Sebold - The lovely bones

On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue". The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun...

Christian Kracht - Imperium

In »Imperium« erzählt Christian Kracht eine Aussteigergeschichte in den deutschen Kolonien der Südsee, indem er virtuos und gut gelaunt mit den Formen des historischen Abenteuerromans eines Melville, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson oder Jack London spielt. Die Welt wollte er retten, eine neue Religion stiften, gar ein eigenes Reich gründen - eine Utopie verwirklichen, die nicht nur ihn selbst, sondern die Menschheit erlöst, fernab der zerstörerischen europäischen Zivilisation, die gerade aufbricht in die Moderne und in die Katastrophen des Ersten und Zweiten Weltkriegs. Doch in der Abgeschiedenheit der Südsee, in einer Kolonie des wilhelminischen Deutschland, gerät ein von einem vegetarischen Spleen besessener Sonnenanbeter in eine Spirale des Wahnsinns, die die Abgründe des 20. Jahrhunderts ahnungsvoll vorwegnimmt.

Martin Suter - Allmen und der rosa Diamant

Es wird ernst: der erste große Fall für "Allmen International Inquiries". Es gilt, einen seltenen Diamanten aufzuspüren, viele Millionen wert. Ein Fall, in dem nichts ist, wie es scheint. Noch dazu ein Fall von globalem Interesse. Das Duo muss unter Beweis stellen, wie sehr es die Kunst des Hoch- und Tiefstapelns beherrscht unter Profi-Bedingungen.

Martin Suter - Allmen und die Libellen

Allmen, eleganter Lebemann und Feingeist, ist über die Jahre finanziell in die Bredouille geraten. Fünf zauberhafte Jugendstil-Schalen bringen ihn und sein Faktotum Carlos auf eine Geschäftsidee: eine Firma für die Wiederbeschaffung von schönen Dingen. Die Geburt eines ungewöhnlichen Ermittlerduos und der Start einer wunderbaren Krimiserie.Allmen, eleganter Gentleman, Lebemann, Kunstsammler und charmanter Hochstapler, hat über die Jahre das Millionenerbe seines Vaters durchgebracht. Das hochherrschaftliche Anwesen musste er verkaufen, er hat sich mit seinem lebenserfahrenen Faktotum Carlos aus Guatemala ins bescheidene Gärtnerhaus zurückgezogen. So schlecht er mit Geld umgehen kann, so virtuos beherrscht er den Umgang mit Schulden und Gläubigern. Insbesondere die diskrete Geschäftsbeziehung zu einem Antiquitätenhändler hilft ihm immer wieder aus der Bredouille. Anfangs war Allmen bei ihm guter Kunde, mittlerweile ist er guter Lieferant, erst mit Stücken aus der eigenen Sammlung, dann mit Objekten, über deren Herkunft ein Gentleman besser schweigt. Bis ihn nach einem alkoholseligen Opernabend Jojo, eine heißhungrige junge Frau, in die See-Villa ihres Vaters abschleppt und er dort eine Sammlung von fünf bezaubernden Jugendstil-Schalen entdeckt, jede ein kleines Vermögen wert. Und jede mit einem Geheimnis behaftet. Eine Herausforderung, an der er wachsen - oder die ihn das Leben kosten kann.

Simon Beckett - Whispers of the dead

Forensic supremo David Hunter is chafing from the after-effects of the gruesome events of his last assignment and has made an ameliorative journey to the research faculty at which he polished his skills: the institution known as the Body Farm in Tennessee. Hunter receives a request from the man who polished his forensic skills to take a trip to a crime scene – a cabin in the woods, miles from anywhere. The grisly scenario that awaits him there is all too redolent of the horrors he has encountered in the past. Shortly after, a second corpse is discovered, and David Hunter is once again treading familiar territory involving lethal mind games with an ingenious and relentless psychopath.

Michael Connelly - The Concrete Blonde

When LAPD detective Harry Bosch shot and killed Norman Church, the 'Dollmaker', the police were convinced it marked the end of the search for one of the city's most bizarre serial killers. But four years later, Norman Church's widow is taking Bosch to court, accusing him of killing the wrong man. To make matters worse, Bosch has just received a note, eerily reminiscent of the ones the Dollmaker used to taunt him with, giving him a location where a body can be found. Is the Dollmaker still alive? Or is this the work of a vicious copycat killer, determined to repeat the Dollmaker's grisly feats and destroy Bosch's career in the process?