Fiction | featured news

Tom Wolfe’s novel “Back to Blood” imagines a city where “everybody hates everybody.”

It's the last book in the series that inspired 'True Blood' ... Dead Ever After, the 13th and final novel in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, will be published May 7, and USA TODAY has this first look at the cover, which shows Sookie walking off into the sunset.

Three novelists who've gained literary respect as well as commercial success — Junot Diaz, (This is How You Lose Her), Louise Erdrich (The Round House) and Dave Eggers (A Hologram for the King) — are among the finalists for the National Book Award for fiction announced Wednesday.

Surely, somewhere, at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, lies a dusty, never-before noticed spell book. In that book, J.K. Rowling, the celebrated creator of Harry Potter, could find the formula that would transform her into a critically acclaimed writer of adult fiction. But Rowling isn't relying on magic as the release date for her adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, draws near. She believes her reputation for creating great characters and compelling stories will trump any spell that Harry or his mentor, the all-powerful Professor Dumbledore, could ever conjure.

Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade says he felt numb as a child when he watched his mother inject herself with heroin. "My mom didn't know I had seen her shoot up," he said. Jolinda Wade managed to overcome her addiction. But her son's new book, "A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball," offers his perspective on her drug use for the first time.

‘Those We Love Most” is Lee Woodruff’s first novel, following her essay collection, “Perfectly Imperfect,” and a work of nonfiction called “In an Instant.” That powerful book, co-written with her husband, ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff, chronicled their family’s life in the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury Bob suffered while embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq. Her new novel explores some of the same themes: A sudden tragedy strikes one person, leading many others along a complex emotional path that winds in and around an entire family.

Mitch Albom's third inspirational novel, The Time Keeper, lands on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list at No. 10, short of his first two fictional works. Both For One More Day (2006) and The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) were No. 1 on the list.

It’s got to be something in the fjord water. Or maybe lingonberries are an unacknowledged superfood. How else to explain all the superlative Swedish crime writers who have swarmed into the mystery arena since the mid-1960s?

This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre. “Home” encapsulates all the themes that have fueled her fiction, from the early novels “Sula” and “The Bluest Eye,” through her dazzling masterwork, “Beloved,” and more recent, less persuasive books like “Love” and “Paradise”: the hold that time past exerts over time present, the hazards of love (and its link to leaving and loss), the possibility of redemption and transcendence.

Adam Johnson’s novel recounts the adventures of Jun Do, a North Korean soldier, kidnapper and surveillance officer who becomes complicit in the state’s crimes and then falls in love with an actress.