Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2021 - One Word Titles (Fiction)
- Mahogany S.
- Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Collection
Books with One Word Titles span genres. Here are some General Fiction titles that are only one word.
Learn more about the Broader Bookshelf challenge and see more lists here.
Cygnet
A Novel
Published in 2019
The Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back months ago, and now their seventeen-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island. Swan isn't just any island; it is home to an eccentric old age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland for a haven which is rapidly sinking into the ocean. The Kid's arrival threatens to burst the idyllic bubble that the elderly residents have so carefully constructed - an unwelcome reminder of the life they left behind, and one they want rid of. Cygnet is the story of a young woman battling against the thrashing waves of loneliness and depression, and how she learns to find hope, laughter and her own voice in a world that's crumbling around her.
Grievous
Published in 2019
St. Stephen's Academy, Yorkshire, 1931. A world unto itself, populated by boys reveling in life's first big mistakes and men still learning how to live with the consequences of their own. They live a cloistered life, exotic to modern eyes, founded upon privilege, ruled by byzantine and often unspoken laws, haunted by injuries both casual and calculated. Yet within those austere corridors can be found windows of enchantment, unruly love, and a wild sort of freedom, all vanished, it seems, from our world. Told from a variety of viewpoints --including that of unhappy Housemaster John Grieves-- Grievous takes us deep inside the crucible of St. Stephen's while retaining a clear-eyed, contemporary sensibility, drawing out the urges and even mercies hidden beneath the school's strict, unsparing surface. The Academy may live by its own codes, but as with the world around it-- a world the characters must ultimately face-- it already contains everything necessary to shape its people or tear them apart.
Murmur
Published in 2019
"In Murmur, a hallucinatory masterwork, Will Eaves invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for "gross indecency with another male" and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing's suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness" -- Provided by publisher.
Sarah
A Novel
Published in 2016
JT LeRoy has created a haunting memorable world, strangely reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. "Sarah" is the story of the prodigal son recast in the carnivalesque world of the highway truck stop and its environs--a poignant, lyrical debut by a young author.
Rag
Stories
Published in 2019
In Meijer's collection of short stories, the desperate human desire for connection slips into a realm that focuses on the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people's yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. -- adapted from back cover
Lolita
Published in 1989
A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him
Swamplandia!
Published in 2011
Twelve year old Ava must travel into the Underworld part of the swamp in order to save her family's dynasty of Bigtree alligator wresting. This novel takes us to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator wrestling theme park, formerly no. 1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety eight gators as well as her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, the author has written a novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking.