One of the most widely praised and rapturously entertaining first novels in recent years begins with a little girl falling down an abandoned mineshaft in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her name is Ursula Wong, she’s part Chinese, part Finnish, only two years old, and soon the dangerous effort to rescue her has an entire country glued to the TV. As it follows that effort, “Ursula, Under” re-creates the chain of ancestors, across two thousand years, whose lives culminate in the fragile miracle of a little girl underground: a Chinese alchemist in the third century bc, the orphaned playmate to a seventeenth- century Swedish queen, Ursula’s great-great-grandfather who was the casualty of a mining accident that eerily foreshadows Ursula’s dilemma, and many more. A work of symphonic richness and profound empathy, “Ursula, Under” dramatically demonstrates that no one is truly alone.
Lionel Shriver
Marina Lewycka
Maile Meloy
Sheri Holman
Jane Gardam
Joolz Denby
Patricia Ferguson
Tricia Wastvedt
Joyce Carol Oates
Maile Meloy
Michelle Lovric
Nell Leyshon
Marina Lewycka
Sheri Holman
Ingrid Hill
Miranda Hearn
Sue Gee
Jane Gardam
Melanie Finn
Christine Dwyer Hickey
Anita Desai
Joolz Denby
Kira Cochrane
Clare Clark
Kate Atkinson
Lionel Shriver
Barbara Kingsolver
Ruth Ozeki
Susanna Clarke
Maggie O'Farrell
Tayari Jones
Kamila Shamsie
Naomi Alderman
Lisa McInerney
Ali Smith
Eimear McBride
A.M. Homes
Madeline Miller
Téa Obreht
Barbara Kingsolver
Marilynne Robinson
Rose Tremain
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Lionel Shriver
Andrea Levy
Valerie Martin
Ann Patchett
Kate Grenville
Linda Grant
Suzanne Berne
Carol Shields
Anne Michaels
Helen Dunmore
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