Long Haul

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A SUNDAY AT THE POOL IN KIGALI
By Gil Courtemanche
Love amid war is an ancient literary conceit, but Courtemanche gives it a twist. The journalist-turned-novelist, who reported on the Rwandan genocide during the '90s, sets his unlikely but touching tale against that bloody backdrop. "Passion feeds on abandon," he writes. So it is for his protagonists, who kindle an affair as the country, riven by AIDS and ethnic slaughter but neglected by the rest of the world, descends into chaos.

MY LIFE AS A FAKE
By Peter Carey
What happens when a poet decides to teach everyone else a lesson about reality and fakery? It's his life, not theirs, that is changed. Inspired by a legendary literary hoax in Australia, the Booker winner's new novel delves satisfyingly into a world of lies, literary demons and artistic pretense.

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN
By Tracy Chevalier
Is life ever as neat as it looks in art? Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring) ventures back into art history and returns with another spellbinding account of how a great work—the 15th century Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, now in the National Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris—came to be. Her characters take turns telling the (fictional) story of the weavings' genesis—and the tangled web of art and heart that results.