HISTORY
MATTERHORN, by Karl Marlantes
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
THE PACIFIC, by Hugh Ambrose
A companion to the HBO miniseries focuses on the real-life stories of five U.S. armed servicemen who fought the key battles against Japan during World War II, from Bataan and Midway to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
UNBOUND, by Dean King
In October 1934, the Chinese Communist Army found itself facing annihilation, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Nationalist soldiers. Rather than surrender, 86,000 Communists embarked on an epic flight to safety. Only thirty were women. Their trek would eventually cover 4,000 miles over 370 days. Under enemy fire they crossed highland swamps, climbed
Tibetan peaks, scrambled over chain bridges, and trudged through the sands of the western deserts. Fewer than 10,000 of them would survive, but remarkably all of the women would live to tell the tale.
Unbound is an amazing story of love, friendship, and survival written by a new master of adventure narrative.
FICTION
THE OTHER FAMILY, by Joanne Trollope (Paperback)
After Richie Rossiter, a pianist and songwriter, dies suddenly, his companion, Chrissie, with whom he had three daughters, and the wife he left behind, with whom he had a son, are left to deal with each other and the unexpected terms of his will.
From the superb storyteller and quintessential women’s fiction author, a new story about two families who must confront each other over an inheritance.
A SPANISH LOVER, by Joanna Trollope (Paperback)
Stepping away from her usual provinces and into more cosmopolitan territory, Trollope (The Choir; The Rector’s Wife) delivers an insightful and thoroughly engrossing story of 39-year-old twin sisters whose lives and fortunes change dramatically over the course of a year. Lizzy has four kids, a rambling house in a charming English town, a wonderful husband and
a flourishing gallery/antique shop business. Frances, her twin, tends to her small travel firm, is single and has always been Lizzie’s quiet supporter and soul mate. On a business trip through southern Spain, the reticent Frances falls for an urbane, married Spaniard and is suddenly too involved in her own blossoming affairs (business and love) to play cheerleader for her sister. While Frances’s life is lifting off, Lizzie and her husband run into devastating financial problems. Lizzie loses her beloved home, takes a dull office job to help make ends meet and is
consumed with jealousy at her sister’s new life. As Frances comes into her own, her life serves as a touchstone for the other characters, who begin to measure their gumption and personal happiness against hers. Caught up in all of this are the twins’ parents, Barbara and William, as well as a woman who, through her longstanding affair with William, has become a kind of aunt and confessor to the twins. With sparkling dialogue, Trollope brings all of her characters, adults and children, to full life while managing to bestow unforgettable glimpses of Spain in all its melancholy and magnificence. She makes her readers want to drop everything in order to keep on reading. BOMC selection; paperback rights to Berkley; author tour. (Feb.) FYI: A Spanish Lover was a #1 bestseller in England in both hardcover and paperback.
SOLAR, by Ian McEwan
In McEwan’s latest, a Nobel prize-winning physicist gets slashed by the media after he says that most physicists are men because of differences between male and female brains. Just as McEwan himself got slashed by the media when he said last summer that Islamism was out to create a society he found morally offensive. Bound to be controversial.
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.
MEN AND DOGS, by Katie Crouch
After the loss of her business and her husband sets her adrift, Hannah Legare is compelled to try to solve the mystery behind her father’s disappearance when she was 11, an endeavor that hinges on her ability to unlock secrets long held by her brother and ex-boyfriend. By the best-selling author of Girls in Trucks.
IMPERFECT BIRDS, by Anne Lamott
Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She’s intelligent-she aced AP physics; athletic-a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family’s move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn’t been as bumpy as
Elizabeth feared.
But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth’s hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them-and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.
This is Anne Lamott’s most honest and heartrending novel yet, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.
THE ALOHA QUILT, by Jennifer Chiaverini
In this latest entry to the bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series, quilting queen Bonnie Markham explores Hawaii and learns about the islands’ quilting traditions while setting up a tropical quilt camp. Weary from a difficult divorce battle, Bonnie leaves beloved Elm Creek Manor and takes up her friend’s invitation to start the camp; once in Hawaii, she gets to work on
hiring staff and making her version of a Hawaiian quilt. When her mean-spirited ex-husband-to-be demands half her share in Elm Creek as part of the settlement, Bonnie takes drastic measures to protect the estate and her friends. Still, the big changes are hard to take, and Bonnie’s not sure she can follow through. With homey details and a strong sense of the
connections that bind women, friends, and families, Chiaverini (Circle of Quilters) lovingly crafts her tale about a woman stitching together a new life and a new project. Series fans will enjoy this latest entry, and those new to the quilting bee should have no problem finding their groove.
SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT, by Beth Hoffman
Relegated to the care of an eccentric great-aunt after her mentally unbalanced mother’s accidental death, 12-year-old CeeCee is quickly surrounded by the strong women and cultural elements of her new Savannah community. A first novel.
Steel Magnolias meets The Help in this Southern debut novel sparkling with humor, heart, and feminine wisdom
MEMOIR
CLAIMING GROUND, by Laura Bell
After college, a Kentucky girl spends a summer in Wyoming to find herself and regroup. Thirty years later, she’s still there. In this memoir, Bell vividly depicts her life out West, starting with her first job herding sheep—an occupation usually done by men. She goes on to write about her life as a ranch hand, masseuse, housewife, stepmother, and forest ranger,
mixing work experiences with touching and poignant accounts of family and friends. She also describes the Wyoming landscape in brilliant detail, revealing her love for the place. In reliving some of the sadder moments of her life, Bell uses a simple writing style that strengthens this memoir while giving it a raw poignancy to which anyone can relate. VERDICT An
award-winning author for her short pieces, Bell here turns in satisfying reading for ranching enthusiasts, memoir fanatics, and anyone who likes to get lost in stories about rural life and nature’s beauty.
COOKING
IN THE GREEN KITCHEN, by Alice Waters
Waters, restaurateur and chef extraordinaire, showcases basic cooking techniques every cook can and should master along with recipes using each method in this slim and attractive book. Derived from a Slow Food Nation event she helped organize, where notable chefs and foodies provided demonstrations on foundational procedures, Waters highlights a set of techniques that are universal to all cuisines. She covers the most basic of the basics, from stocking the pantry and washing lettuce to boiling pasta and wilting greens. In typical Waters fashion, recipes showcase just a few simple ingredients, allowing the natural flavors of the food to shine. Since dishes were chosen to highlight process, the result is a somewhat eclectic grouping of recipes, including pesto; spaghettini with garlic, parsley, and olive oil; dirty rice; Irish soda bread; and apple galette. She also covers peeling tomatoes, skinning peppers, roasting vegetables, and roasting and carving chicken. Throughout are color photographs of demonstrators from the event including Lidia Bastianich, Traci Des Jardins, Dan Barber, and David Chang, among others. Ideal for the cooking novice, this gem of a book captures the expertise of world-class chefs in an accessible, straightforward manner.
MYSTERY OF THE MONTH!!!
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.
BOOK CLUB HITS! (Paperback)
LITTLE BEE, by Chris Cleave
Cleave’s much-praised second novel has an unforgettable central character—a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan named Little Bee. After escaping from a mass slaughter in her village, Little Bee encounters a married couple on the beach, a crossing of paths that changes the lives of everyone involved. The couple, Andrew and Sarah, are journalists from England who are trying to
rekindle their marriage with a holiday. What transpires between them and Little Bee on the beach is one of the novel’s many horrifying yet oddly transportive events. When Little Bee enters England covertly, she ends up in an immigration center but soon runs away, pinning her hopes on tracking down Andrew and Sarah. And find them she does, in the suburbs of London,
where a new chapter in Little Bee’s life soon unfolds—one that draws upon the horrible events back home even as it offers strange possibilities for the future. Courageous, resourceful and smart, Little Bee makes for a first-class narrator. Her impressions of European culture bring humor to a novel of many moods. Cleave, who writes for the Guardian, clearly has a broad
understanding of international politics and a deep sympathy for immigrants and exiles, both of which he brings to bear on this compelling narrative. His skills as a novelist have earned him comparisons to master storytellers such as Ian McEwan and John Banville, and Little Bee makes it easy to see why.
THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS, by Erica Bauermeister
Gathering at Lillian’s Restaurant for a weekly cooking class, a young mother struggles with the growing demands of her family, an Italian kitchen designer works to adapt to life in America and a widower mourns the loss of his wife to breast cancer. Reprint. A best-selling novel.
A “heartbreakingly delicious” national bestseller about a chef, her students, and the evocative lessons that food teaches about life.
