FICTION
UNION ATLANTIC, by Adam Haslett
A property rights battle between young banker Doug Fanning and retired teacher Charlotte Graves is marked by Charlotte’s bank-president brother, Charlotte’s tenacious grip on sanity and a troubled high school senior. By the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-finalist author of You Are Not a Stranger Here.
THE POSTMISTRESS, by Sarah Blake
The stories of a small Cape Cod postmistress and an American radio reporter stationed in London collide on the eve of the United States’s entrance into World War II, a meeting that is shaped by a broken promise to deliver a letter.
Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight.
SECRETS OF EDEN, by Chris Bohjalian
Haunted by the final words of a newly baptized congregation member who was subsequently murdered by her husband, the Reverend Stephen Drew abandons his pulpit to spend time with an author who writes best-selling books about angels. By the best-selling author of Midwives. 150,000 first printing.
Secrets of Eden is both a haunting literary thriller and a deeply evocative testament to the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. Once again Chris Bohjalian has given us a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems. As one character remarks, “Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume all of our stories are suspect.
HOUSE RULES, by Jodi Picoult
Unable to express himself socially but possessing a savant-like knack for investigating crimes, a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome is wrongly accused of killing his tutor when the police mistake his autistic tics for guilty behavior. By the author of My Sister’s Keeper. 1.5 million first printi
WINTER GARDEN, by Kristin Hannah
Reunited when their beloved father falls ill, sisters Meredith and Nina find themselves under the shadow of their disapproving mother, whose painful history is hidden behind her rendition of a Russian fairy tale told to the sisters in childhood. 150,000 first printing.
Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn’t know her mother?
From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past.
MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND, by Helen Simonson
Forced to confront the realities of life in the 21st century when he falls in love with widowed Pakistani descendant Mrs. Ali, a retired Major Pettigrew finds the relationship challenged by local prejudices that view Mrs. Ali, a Cambridge native, as a perpetual foreigner. 75,000 first printing.
MAKING TOAST, by Roger Rosenblatt
The National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist author of Children of War describes how, after his adult daughter’s sudden death, he and his wife moved in with their son-in-law and three grandchildren, quickly becoming reaccustomed to the world of small children and helping the family grieve and get on with life. 50,000 first printing.An
BONE FIRE, by Mark Spragg
While Wyoming sheriff Crane Carlson struggles with a meth-influenced murder, his wife’s addictions and his own manifestation of a genetic disease, octogenarian Einar Gilkyson takes stock of his life and reluctantly accepts help from his college dropout granddaughter. By the award-winning author of An Unfinished Life.
CLAIMING GROUND, by Laura Bell
An elegant, deep-running chronicle of Bell’s 30 years living in the mountain West. It begins as an encomium of place the Lewis Ranch in northwestern Wyoming, up in the Bighorn Mountains, where the author took a job herding sheep, far indeed from her native Kentucky. She was fresh out of college, clueless but lucky to stumble into these parts, and she found herself a young woman among old male sheepherders “tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company.” When she could get it, that is, for the job was full of silence and space, tending to a knot of a thousand sheep, “a luminous, drifting mass that spills in rivulets through gulley and rises up hillsides, conforming intricately to the imperfect shape of earth.” If the “bare-bones immensity of Wyoming can make you feel like a sacrifice left on a slab for the gods to pick clean,” all the better when it revealed its beauties, which Bell tenders with restrained grace. A few years later she was herding cattle and falling in love and marrying the wrong man, though her love of land and kin, particularly her parents and stepdaughters drawn in intricate, emotionally charged portraits helps get her through. She closes with a crushing death in the family, recounted with scalding vulnerability and sadness: “When I think the ash of every sorrow has burned cold, I’m mistaken.” The episode speaks volumes about fragility, impermanence and transformation. Slowly she made her way back to solid ground, in the same landscape she started with, and it can only be hoped that the next 30 years find her in the same state of raptness, but with an earned measure of serenity. A work of descriptive virtuosity and a hard, honest pull through rough emotional terrain an exemplary memoir .Author tour to Boulder, Colo., Montana, New York, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Wyoming. Agent: Nancy Stauffer/Nancy Stauffer Associates Copyright Kirkus
THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION, by Dexter Palmer
With his only companions being his insane lover and her cryogenically frozen father, greeting card writer Harold Winslow must come to terms with the madness of a genius inventor and his quest to create a perpetual motion machine, in a story set in a fantastical future where nearly anything is possible. An enchanting first novel with elements of steampunk and alternate history, loosely constructed around the plot of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST. It’s a powerful story!
ANGELOLOGY, by Danielle Trussoni
Critically acclaimed memoirist Trussoni (Falling Through The Earth, 2006) breaks into the fiction market in a big way with an epic fantasy that combines a rich mythology with some Da Vinci Code–style treasure-hunting. The contest between good and evil is waged not in the heavens but here on Earth, between warring factions of biblical scholars and heavenly hosts. The unusual central character is Sister Evangeline, a 23-year-old nun at St. Rose Convent outside New York City. In the course of her work, she stumbles across a mislaid correspondence between philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller and the convent’s founding abbess concerning an astonishing 1943 discovery in the mountains of Greece. Simultaneously, the book introduces Percival Grigori, a critically ill, once-winged member of one of the most powerful families in an ancient race of beings born of a union between fallen angels and human beings: the Nephilim. These parasitic creatures, the “giants” referred to in the sixth chapter of Genesis, have engaged in spiritual warfare for generations with the Society of Angelologists, a group that included Evangeline’s parents. “It has been one continuous struggle from the very beginning,” says one of Evangeline’s comrades-in-arms. “St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the dark angels fell within twenty seconds of creation—their evil nature cracked the perfection of the universe almost instantly, leaving a terrible fissure between good and evil.” As Evangeline and Grigori are drawn into conflict over control of a powerful artifact, the lyre of the mythical Orpheus, Trussoni constructs a marathon narrative arc, ending the volume with a satisfying, if startling, transformation. A film adaptation and a sequel are already waiting in the wings. An ambitious adventure story with enough literary heft and religious fervor to satisfy anyone able to embrace its imaginative conceits and Byzantine plot. Copyright Kirkus
THE MAN FROM BEIJING, by Henning Mankell
In the aftermath of the 2006 massacre of 19 people in a Swedish village, Judge Birgitta Roslin, a granddaughter of two of the victims, discovers the 19th-century diary of a gang leader that reveals the case’s eerie connections to the abuse of Chinese slave workers. By the award-winning author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries.
NONFICTION
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, by Rebecca Skloot
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community’s exploitation of a dying woman and her family’s struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world’s most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one’s sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot’s graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre civil-rights racism. The author’s style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.Skloot’s meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.
ANIMAL FACTORY: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, by David Kirby
By the New York Times bestselling author of Evidence of Harm: a dramatic exposé of factory farms and the dangerous public health crisis created by some of the most powerfulEric Schlosser’s classic Fast Food Nation revealed how our meat is bred, raised, and brought to market. Now, in Animal Factory, bestselling journalist David Kirby takes the next step, exposing the devastating health and environmental impact of large-scale factory farms.
In this thoroughly researched book, Kirby follows three American families and communities—one in North Carolina, one in Illinois, and one in Washington state—whose lives are utterly changed by immense neighboring animal farms. Weaving complex science, politics, business, and the lives of everyday people, Kirby accompanies a fisherman who fights to preserve his family’s life and home; watches as a Midwestern community pushes back against a local farmer with grand ambitions; and interviews an unlikely activist, who takes on a powerful alliance of corporate and political entities when her home is covered with toxic soot and her water supply is compromised by runoff from lagoons of animal waste.
Written with power, insight, and narrative momentum, Animal Factory documents a crisis that has reached a critical juncture in the history of human health and our larger global environment.
AMERICANS IN PARIS: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation, by Charles Glass
In Americans in Paris, tales of adventure, intrigue, passion, deceit, and survival unfold season by season, from the spring of 1940 to liberation in the summer of 1944, as renowned journalist Charles Glass tells the story of a remarkable cast of expatriates and their struggles in Nazi Paris. Before the Second World War began, approximately thirty thousand Americans lived in Paris, and when war broke out in 1939 almost five thousand remained. As citizens of a neutral nation, the Americans in Paris believed they had little to fear. They were wrong. Glass’s discovery of letters, diaries, war documents, and police files reveals as never before how Americans were trapped in a web of intrigue, collaboration, and courage.
CITIZENS OF LONDON: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour, by Lynne Olson
How the initially fragile Anglo-American alliance was forged in the perilous days of World War II.In early 1941, Britain was perilously close to being forced to surrender to Germany. Submarines were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of merchant shipping each month, creating dangerous shortages of food and materiel necessary to fight the war, yet Franklin Roosevelt held back from authorizing U.S. military convoys to accompany ships. Former Baltimore Sun White House correspondent Olson (Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England, 2007, etc.) re-creates the dramatic interplay of personalities and world politics, from the relationship between Winston Churchill (who understood that America was Britain’s lifeline) and FDR (who feared precipitating war with Germany and was suspicious of British imperialist motives), to the successful efforts of a small group of Americans living in London who played a vital behind-the-scenes role in bringing the two leaders together and forming an important alliance. These included Ambassador John Gilbert Winant, a former Republican governor who was nonetheless an ardent New Dealer; Edward R. Murrow, whose live broadcasts brought the reality of German terror bombings home to Americans; Averill Harriman, FDR’s special emissary who served as lend-lease coordinator and coached the prime minister on how to deal with the president; and Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor. Though many mingled with Britain’s “rich and powerful,” Murrow relished reporting about the “front-line” troops in the “Battle of London,” the “firemen, wardens, doctors, nurses, clergymen, telephone repairmen, and other workers who nightly risked their lives to aid the wounded, retrieve the dead, and bring their battered city back to life.” After Pearl Harbor, strains in the alliance emerged regarding the conduct of the war, with Dwight Eisenhower playing a crucial on-the-scene role in integrating the U.S.-British military command.A nuanced history that captures the intensity of life in a period when victory was not a foregone conclusion.
CHASING THE WHITE DOG: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, by Mac Watman
Chronicles the origins of moonshine while revealing its hold in the modern world, providing coverage of everything from the late-18th-century whiskey tax and Prohibition to the present day’s illegal microdistillery trade and the recent operation to make moonshining a federal crime.
LUNCH IN PARIS, A Love Story with Recipes, by Elizabeth Bard
Documents how the author fell in love and discovered the excellence of French cuisine during a life-changing lunch, recounting her decision to leave her fast-paced New York life to build a life abroad marked by bustling marketplaces, bad-tempered butchers and decadent chocolate shops.
WILLIE MAYS, The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch
In a biography authorized by the baseball great himself, the best-selling author of Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter offers a gripping account of Willie Mays’s life, drawn from interviews with the icon, as well as friends, family members and teammates.
Mystery/Suspense
BLACKOUT, by Connie Willis
Three history researchers, all time travelers from the future, find themselves trapped in England during World War II when they discover that the portals to their own times have disappeared. Setting her first novel since 1991’s Passage in the same near-future as The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, the award-winning author brings an intimacy to her narrative that increases the tension of her characters. VERDICT Willis is a consummate storyteller whose immersive style hooks readers from the start; her latest work, which is being published in two parts (the second volume is scheduled for November), should appeal to a wide readership and be a particular draw for her devoted followers. LJ Reviews
THE DEVIL’S STAR, by Jo Nesbo
As a serial killer terrorizes Oslo, Inspector Harry Hole (Nemesis, 2009, etc.) is battling even more fearsome demons.When copywriter Camilla Loen is shot to death, her index finger removed and a star-shaped red diamond tucked beneath her eyelid, Chief Inspector Bjarne Møller has the bright idea of pairing his heir-apparent, Inspector Tom Waaler, with barely functional alcoholic Harry, who’s spent most of the previous month on unofficial leave drowning his grief over his late colleague, Officer Ellen Gjeltsen. But Harry doesn’t just dislike and distrust Waaler; he’s convinced that Waaler is Prince, the mob’s inside man who murdered Ellen. So the salt-and-pepper rapport between Harry and Waaler is more like arsenic-and-cyanide. Even pulling Harry off the case so that he can investigate the disappearance of producer Wilhelm Barli’s wife turns sour because a parcel containing her severed middle finger swiftly makes it clear that singer/actress Lisbeth Barli has become another victim of the Courier Killer. The exhaustingly wide-ranging case poses three crucial questions. What pattern underlies the Courier Killer’s choice of victims and modus operandi? When the police arrest an innocent suspect, can Harry protect him long enough to get the goods on the real killer? And how can he possibly neutralize the hydra-headed Waaler, who grows more dangerous the more he’s thwarted?Not all the answers are equally interesting, but even readers new to this white-hot series will be impressed by Nesbø’s generous plotting and his insight into dark places in the human soul.
FALSE MERMAID, by Erin Hart
Convinced that her brother-in-law was responsible for her sister’s murder, Nora returns to Minnesota when her brother-in-law prepares to marry again; while her sometime partner, Cormac, confronts the return of his estranged father. By the Agatha Award-nominated author of Haunted Ground.
A chilling new suspense novel from Erin Hart that brilliantly combines forensics, archaeology, and history with Irish myth and mystery.
NO MERCY, by Lori Armstrong
A war-hardened daughter returns home to find small-town South Dakota life as perilous as her tour of Iraq.The Army grants medical leave to sharpshooter Mercy Gunderson, but she just misses her father’s passing. And that’s not the only chip on this tough gal’s shoulder. Her flaky sister Hope is on the latest in a string of good-for-nothing boyfriends, her surly nephew is determined to get into trouble and people keep going and getting themselves killed on her land. When cocky acting sheriff Dawson, the successor to Mercy’s father, refuses to get involved, she has no other choice than to lead her own informal investigation. The more she finds out, the more trouble she gets into, as she uncovers a group of Native-American teens from the local reservation whose silence seems to be her biggest clue. She knows she must be on the right path when people start turning up dead, but her search heats up as it becomes increasingly clear that she’s next on the list. Things get more personal as Mercy has to face her past in order to get the help she needs. The more determined she is that she won’t let herself and her family down, the more deeply she gets invested in her hometown.Something for everyone in this tale of two cultures in collision. The mystery is mostly solid, the climax suitably complex, and there’s enough blood and guts for those so inclined.
SILENCER, by James W. Hall
Verdict Thorn is among the most likable heroes in crime fiction. There is a fair amount of action that fans expect, but the story really revolves around Hall’s outstanding characterization of Thorn, Rusty, and Sugarman. Sure to please fans of the series, this is another winner.
