Titles starting with M from Snooty Literary Society

"M" is for the Malek brothers. The four men are poised to inherit the fortune amassed by their parents...but one brother has been missing for 18 years. That's where Kinsey Millhone steps in. The family hires her to locate the missing brother, and in the process, Millhone enters a forbidding web of family secrets and resentments. She begins to suspect that the desire for the brother's return is not driven by love, but by malice.

In Jane Smiley's satirical novel, Moo University, a vast Midwestern aggie school, is populated with schemers, dullards, losers, fornicators, frauds, and the few sensible souls who see through them all--including some very appealing animals. The book is not only a traditional academic comedy, with its bureaucracy, student-teacher interactions, and petty politics (Smiley claims it's based on Iowa State, where she was a teacher for many years), but a sly critique of higher education in America.

This chronicle of an ordinary middle-class family from the Depression to the Vietnam War--in which a beloved son is lost--is told from the points of view of a shifting collection of family members. When it was published in 1984, Phillips's novel was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.