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527 books match the query 'Novel' and 18 start with n

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Natural Consequences

Elia Barceló

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

The Xhroll, an alien humanoid race whose infertility is bringing them near extinction, come into contact with a crew of fertile human astronauts. Their encounter on a remote space station will have significant consequences for both species when a human male winds up impregnated.

Author Elia Barceló's setup is funny and feminist, and it raises questions of what it means to be "male" or "female"—prescient, considering this novel was first published twenty-five years ago. The anniversary is being celebrated now with the first English-language edition, translated by veteran sci-fi translators Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell, who also provide a critical introduction.

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Natural Wonders

A Novel

Angela Woodward, Foreword by Stacey Levine

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

Natural Wonders is a novel in the form of a series of lectures about the earth and its prehistory. In it, a grieving widow assembles an idiosyncratic history of the earth’s history based on her understanding and impressions of her deceased husband’s papers.

In Natural Wonders, Jenny is given the task of assembling a memorial edition of her recently deceased husband Jonathan’s lecture series about the physical history of the earth. With little knowledge of his work or of Jonathan himself, Jenny constructs from his fragmentary and disorganized notes her own version of our planet’s past.

Presented as a series of lectures, Jenny’s earth history is an amalgam of stories from science and about scientists—a Serbian mathematician and his theory of the ice ages, a Swiss doctor camped on a glacier, the mysterious materia pinguis thought to have drifted down from stars to form fossils. Into these stories she interweaves scenes from their marriage as well as material she finds on Jonathan’s shelves. In her history, an explanation of continental drift becomes enmeshed with a schoolboy’s erotic encounter with an older woman. Icebergs in an Andean lake launch a woman’s jealous affair with a third-rate actor, and H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau is dramatically recounted in new form.

Natural Wonders mixes mythology, popular fiction, and a misfired romance with the story of the earth hurtling around the sun. From intimately human to geologic to cosmic, it explores change, love, and loss.

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Navel of the Moon

A Novel

Mary Helen Lagasse

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Navel of the Moon is a coming-of-age tale centering on Vicenta “Vicky” Lumiere, a resident of the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. By closely observing her neighbors and friends, often with a critical eye and a naïve interpretation, Vicky learns that the world fails to fall into discrete categories of good and evil, and that any attempt to assert authority over chaos is ultimately impossible. The characters that structure Vicky's world are intriguing, beginning with her Mexican grandmother, Mimy, whose claim to be from the "navel of the moon" baffles Vicky. Over the course of one summer, the heroine's attempts to understand the illusive nature of friendship captures the sorrow, the happiness, and the ordinary of one's humanity.

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New Glory

A Novel

Günter de Bruyn

Northwestern University Press, 2009

At the time New Glory (Neue Herrlichkeit) was published in 1984, most dissident authors had fled the German Democratic Republic, then in its final years. Günter de Bruyn courageously remained to satirize the regime from behind the Iron Curtain. He is a popular writer and cultural commentator in unified Germany.

New Glory tells the story of Viktor Kösling, a privileged young man from the GDR about to embark on a diplomatic career. He retreats to "New Glory," a state-run resort in rural Brandenburg run by a corrupt director, to finish his dissertation on "The Foreign Policy of the Prussian Government During the French Revolution with Particular Emphasis on the Effects of Artisan and Peasant Unrest in the Provinces." While there he falls, against his parents’ wishes, for the lisping chambermaid, Thilde. The complex drama that follows, which pays tribute to Mann’s The Magic Mountain and its ironic view of human nature, exposes the moral weakness of Viktor’s character and the farcical distance between official East German ideals and the opportunistic functionaries who enabled the system.

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Nietzsche's Kisses

A Novel

Lance Olsen

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Nietzsche's Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his radibly anti-Semitic sister. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsche we know and the Nietzsche we don't. His titantic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche's Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche's final hours.

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Night Garden

A Novel

Carrie Mullins

Ohio University Press, 2016

A harrowing, redemptive coming-of-age journey from youthful innocence to the darkest levels of addiction and human experience.

When tragedy strikes her family, seventeen-year-old Marie Massey runs away from a safe, privileged life in her small college town and into the arms of a much older man in a neighboring Kentucky county. Though innocent at first, Marie’s budding relationship with the charismatic, thirty-year-old Bobo Owens and his family of bootleggers and drug dealers sets in motion a cataclysmic chain of events from which no one will emerge unscathed. In this stark reflection of the many challenges rural young people face in the heart of the opioid epidemic, debut novelist Carrie Mullins presents a haunting narrative about the ways addiction can destroy American communities.

Published in 2016 by Old Cove Press

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Night Roads

A Novel

Gaito Gazdanov

Northwestern University Press, 2009

Drawing together episodes of rich atmosphere, this novel is as deep and brooding as the Paris nights that serve as its backdrop. Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov arrived in Paris, as so many did, between the wars and would go on, with this fourth novel, to give readers a crisp rendering of a living city changing beneath its people’s feet. Night Roads is loosely based on the author’s experiences as a cab driver in those disorienting, often brutal years, and the narrator moves from episode to episode, holding court with many but sharing his mind with only a few. His companions are drawn straight out of the Parisian past: the legendary courtesan Jeanne Raldi, now in her later days, and an alcoholic philosopher who goes by the name of Plato. Along the way, the driver picks up other characters, such as the dull thinker who takes on the question of the meaning of life only to be driven insane. The dark humor of that young man’s failure against the narrator’s authentic, personal explorations of the same subject is captured in this first English translation. With his trademark émigré eye, Gazdanov pairs humor with cruelty, sharpening the bite of both.

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Night Sisters

A Novel

Sara Rath

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Nell Grendon never thought about communing with the dead when she was growing up in Little Wolf, Wisconsin; she was more concerned with slumber parties, boys, and the Lord’s Prayer Ring she won (dishonestly) in a Methodist Bible Bee. But when a chance visit to the eccentric but charming Wocanaga Spiritualist Camp brings the adult Nell face-to-face with the elderly medium Grace Waverly, she cannot resist the temptation to learn more about spirit mediumship.

Nell intends to fake her intuitive talents, but soon she spontaneously channels Angella Wing, an actress from the 1920s once known as the “Woman of a Thousand Voices.” Nell attempts to conceal her occult interests from skeptical friends, including George, a handsome jazz musician who rents an apartment in her historic home, and Polly, a childhood friend with buried anguish of her own. But soon Angella’s mischievous presence begins to make Nell’s life more and more difficult, eventually attracting shadows of Nell’s past. As she tries to free herself from Angella’s influence, Nell is forced into an investigation of a mysterious death at the very heart of her childhood—and the revelation of surprisingly dark secrets.

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No More Patients

A Novel

Sandra Cavallo Miller

University of Nevada Press, 2026

Dr. Norah Waters is approaching sixty-five and eager to retire, but complications keep disrupting her plans. New physicians in her practice aren’t acclimating well. Patients are going off the rails. Unwelcome exes and toxic former students reappear. And her ninety-one-year-old mother, Vivian Waters, has grown emotionally needy.

Once a free spirit, Vivian celebrated at Woodstock in her thirties and Burning Man in her eighties. Now she spends her time feuding with Marianne Dunwitty, her new rival from the Scrabble Klub. To help resolve her identity crisis, Vivian begins recording reflections on her life, revealing a deep despair that drives her to take on the Klub members, scorn the new cloud-watching man next door, and snoop into a suspected neighborhood homicide.

Norah and Vivian must find ways to deal with their out-of-balance lives, and—most importantly—each other. Picking up where Out of Patients left off, No More Patients is a heartfelt, humorous sequel that stands on its own, about the struggles of healing both patients and relationships alike.

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No More Patients

A Novel

Sandra Cavallo Miller

University of Nevada Press, 2026

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Noah

A Novel of the Boom Times

Hugo Loetscher

Seagull Books, 2012

As the current global recession stubbornly persists and financial experts around the world struggle to prevent further financial collapse, everyone has a theory about how to save the economy. But perhaps no idea that has been proffered is as radical or as unique as what Hugo Loetscher imagines in his novel Noah. In this book, first published in German in 1967, the eponymous Old Testament hero fuels his local economy with a prescient plan to build the Ark. Though no one around him seriously believes in the coming flood, everyone is more than willing to do business with him: “The people of Mesopotamia had never had it so good. There had been an economic miracle.” It is boom time in Mesopotamia, and the economy is flourishing; but as with many financial bubbles, scandal and demise are not far out of sight. An ancient legend retold in light of capitalist reality, Noah is a witty, delightful and thought-provoking parable of our times.

Hugo Loetscher (1929–2009), widely known as the most cosmopolitan of Swiss writers due to his travels and journalistic work in Latin America and Asia, has until now been known mainly by readers in his home country, where he has been the recipient of its most prestigious literary prize. This attentive and engaging translation makes available to a new audience an incredibly timely and entertaining work.

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Nobody Does the Right Thing

A Novel

Amitava Kumar

Duke University Press, 2010

A young poet is killed by her lover, a politician, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Soon afterward, across India in Bombay, an idealistic journalist is hired by a movie director to write a Bollywood screenplay about the murdered poet. Research for the script takes the writer, Binod, back to Bihar, where he and his cousin Rabinder were raised. While the high-minded Binod struggles to turn the poet’s murder into a steamy tale about small towns, desire, and intrigue, Rabinder sits in a Bihari jail cell, having been arrested for distributing pornography through a cybercafé. Rabinder dreams of a career in Bollywood filmmaking, and, unlike his cousin, he is not burdened by ethical scruples. Nobody Does the Right Thing is the story of these two cousins and the ways that their lives unexpectedly intertwine. Set in the rural villages of Bihar and the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi, the novel is packed with telling details and anecdotes about life in contemporary India. At the same time, it is a fictional investigation into how narratives circulate and vie for supremacy through gossip, cinema, popular fiction, sensational journalism, and the global media.

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Nobody's Here

A Novel

Sarah Blackman

University of Alabama Press, 2026

An end-of-life sex worker accused of murdering the man she loved—and a town forced to reckon with what makes a life meaningful

Set amid the lush landscapes and winding waterways of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Nobody’s Here is a haunting and compassionate novel about love, loss, and the value of a life. Flossie Taw works as an end-of-life sex worker, providing live-in care and companionship to men in their final days. Her latest client, Leonidas “Leo” Bane, has kept her by his side longer than anyone before him. Against her own rules, Flossie falls in love.

When Leo is found dead from what may or may not have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Flossie becomes the subject of suspicion in her small Maryland town. As she struggles with an unfamiliar grief, she becomes the subject of intense local speculation as neighbors, friends, police officers, the county coroner, and countless others weigh in on her character, her profession, and her possible role in Leo’s death.

Told through a rich chorus of voices alongside Flossie’s own, Nobody’s Here explores how ordinary people wrestle with life’s biggest questions while navigating the demands of everyday life. As the residents of Canterbury, Maryland, debate Flossie’s culpability, they are also forced to consider what makes a life meaningful and what we owe one another at the end of it. Nobody’s Here asks readers to look beyond appearances and decide for themselves whether Flossie Taw is responsible for Leo’s death, or whether she was responsible for giving his life meaning.

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