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 | The Exception
Christian Jungersen (Nan A. Talese, 9780385516297, $26.00)
A bestseller throughout Europe, The Exception is a gripping dissection of the nature of evil and of the paranoia and obsessions that drive ordinary people to commit unthinkable acts.
Four women work together for a small nonprofit in Copenhagen that disseminates information on genocide. When two of them receive death threats, they immediately believe that they are being stalked by Mirko Zigic, a Serbian torturer and war criminal, whom they have recently profiled in their articles.
As the tensions mount among the women, their suspicions turn away from Zigic and toward each other. The threats increase and soon the office becomes a battlefield in which each of the their actions is suspect. Their obsession turns into a witch hunt as they resort to bullying and victimization.
Yet these are people who daily analyze cases of appalling cruelty on a worldwide scale, and who are intimate with the psychology of evil. The cruelty which the women have described from a safe distance is now revealed in their own world. They discover that none of them is exactly the person she seems to be. And then they learn that Interpol has traced Mirko Zigic to Denmark.
The Exception is a unique and intelligent thriller, heralding Christian Jungersen as a gifted storyteller and keen observer of the human psyche.
STAFF COMMENT: This is a gripping psychological thriller examining the nature of evil and the fine line between villain and hero. The author switches back and forth between the viewpoints of four female colleagues working in a Copenhagen genocide research institute, shifting our sympathies and outrage along with the shifting alliances of the characters. This is an excellent and thought provoking read. – Julie Loving |
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| Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir
Shalom Auslander (Riverhead Books, 9781594489556, $24.95)
Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up and was estranged from his community, his religion and its traditions, he could not find his way to a life where he didn't struggle against God daily.
Foreskin's Lament reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander remembers his youthful attempt to win the "blessing bee" (the Orthodox version of a spelling bee), his exile to an Orthodox-style reform school in Israel after he's caught shoplifting Union Bay jeans from the mall, and his fourteen mile hike to watch the New York Rangers play in Madison Square Garden without violating the Sabbath. Throughout, Auslander struggles to understand God and His complicated, often contradictory laws. He tries to negotiate with God and His representatives – a day of sin-free living for a day of indulgence, a blessing for each profanity. But ultimately, Shalom settles for a peaceful cease-fire, a standoff with God, and accepts the very slim remaining hope that his newborn son might live free of guilt, doubt, and struggle.
Auslander's combination of unrelenting humor and anger – one that draws comparisons to memoirists David Sedaris and Dave Eggers – renders a rich and fascinating portrait of a man grappling with his faith, family, and community.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER TIM SKIPP |
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| Heart in the Right Place
Carolyn Jourdan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 9781565124875, $23.95)
Carolyn Jourdan had it all: the Mercedes Benz, the fancy soirees, the best clothes. She moved in the most exclusive circles in Washington, D.C., rubbed elbows with big politicians, and worked on Capitol Hill. As far as she was concerned, she was changing the world.
And then her mother had a heart attack. Carolyn came home to help her father with his rural medical practice in the Tennessee mountains. She'd fill in for a few days as the receptionist until her mother could return to work. Or so she thought. But days turned into weeks.
Her job now included following hazmat regulations for cleaning up bodily fluids; maintaining composure when confronted with a splinter the size of a steak knife; distinguishing between a "pain," a "strain," and a "sprain" on indecipherable Medicare forms; and tending to the loquacious Miss Hiawatha, whose daily doctor visits were never billed.
Eventually, Jourdan gave up her Mercedes and made do with a twenty-year-old postal jeep. She shed her suits for scrubs. And the funny thing was, she liked her new life. As she watched her father work tirelessly and uncomplainingly, she saw what making a difference really meant: being on call all hours of the day and night, tolerating the local drug addict's frequent phone calls, truly listening to Miss Hiawatha. It meant just showing up, every day, and taking care of every person in Strawberry Plains and beyond, whether he got paid to do it or not. And for his daughter, it meant learning that her real place to change the world was right here – in her hometown – by her father's side.
STAFF COMMENTS: When her mother’s sudden illness necessitates a return to East Tennessee to help her dad with his rural medical practice, Carolyn Jourdan – an attorney and senatorial aide – finds that she needs to trade all the sophisticated trappings of the Washington Beltway for a new lifestyle filled with blue dungarees and bandages. The resulting memoir is well seasoned with salt-of-the-earth characters and new insights both touching and profound. With touches of ER, Mayberry, and the writings of James Herriot, this sweet and restorative volume is just what the doctor ordered! – Joe Drabyak |
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| Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan (Viking Press, 9780670018277, $19.95)
Stewart O’Nan has been called “the bard of the working class” and has now crafted a frank and funny yet emotionally resonant tale set within a vivid workaday world seldom seen in contemporary fiction.
Perched in the far corner of a run-down New England mall, The Red Lobster hasn’t been making its numbers and headquarters has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a tricky last shift. With only four shopping days left until Christmas, Manny must convince his near-mutinous staff to hunker down and serve the final onslaught of hungry retirees, lunatics, and holiday office parties. All the while, he’s wondering how to handle the waitress he’s still in love with, his pregnant girlfriend at home, and the perfect present he still needs to buy.
Last Night at the Lobster is a poignant yet redemptive look at what a man does when he discovers that his best might not be good enough.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER MICHAEL FORTNEY |
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| Run
Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 9780061340635, $25.95)
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children – all his children – safe.
Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met. As in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.
STAFF COMMENT: A freak accident opens this tender and generous exploration of the meaning of family. Lovely and quite moving! – Julia Loving
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| The Worst Thing I've Done
Ursula Hegi (Touchstone Books, 9781416543756, $25.00)
“Ask me, Annie. Ask me what's the worst thing I've done. Ask, goddammit. Because then you'll know I'll never go beyond last night.”
Tonight, Annie is driving alone from North Sea to Montauk and back again, as she has every night since her husband, Mason, challenged what she believed about herself and about their marriage. Eating junk food and listening to talk radio, Annie tries to shut out her rage, her pain, but Mason's voice persists within her, as urgent as the voices of the anonymous callers who confess their misery to the radio psychologists.
Once again, Ursula Hegi writes along that border where bliss and sorrow meet. Sensuous, funny, and mysterious, her new novel takes us into an exuberant and troubled friendship. Since early childhood, Annie, Jake, and Mason have had a special bond. When Annie's parents die on the same night that she and Mason are married, the three friends decide to raise Annie's newborn sister, Opal, together.
Annie struggles to be both a sister and a mother to Opal, a wife to Mason, and a friend to Jake. Not surprisingly, their relationships, already entangled, grow dangerous, too close, on the line. One fateful night the three friends miss the moment when they could still turn back, and they goad each other to step across the line, with shocking, unforeseen consequences.
Set on the East End of Long Island, The Worst Thing I've Done is an incandescent story of love, friendship, and marriage; of joy and betrayal; of an artist's struggle to reconnect with her work; and of how we can choose our mothers, our families. Beautifully written and brilliantly vivid, it explores the resilience in the protagonists' lives, and their courage to move forward despite an uncertain future.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
Gail Tsukiyama (St. Martin's Press, 9780312274825, $24.95)
“Just remember,” Yoshio said quietly to his grandsons. “Every day of your lives, you must always be sure what you’re fighting for.”
It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their loving grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hard-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater.
Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an informal apprenticeship with the most famous mask-maker in Japan and Hiroshi receives a coveted invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families’ quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold – and then find their way in a new Japan.
In an exquisitely moving story that spans almost thirty years, Gail Tsukiyama draws us irresistibly into the world of the brothers and the women who love them. It is a world of tradition and change, of heartbreaking loss and surprising hope, and of the impact of events beyond their control on ordinary, decent men and women. Above all, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms is a masterpiece about love and family from a glorious storyteller at the height of her powers.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead Books, 9781594489501, $25.95)
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them – in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul – they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX |
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| Swim To Me
Betsy Carter (Algonquin Books, 9781565124929, $23.95)
It's a fresh start for Delores Walker when she boards a Greyhound bus bound for Florida. Leaving the Bronx far behind, she's headed for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, frayed roadside attraction in danger of becoming obsolete with the opening of Walt Disney's latest creation, only miles up the road. Always more suited for a life underwater, Delores joins a group of other aquatic hopefuls in this City of Live Mermaids, where she discovers a world of sequined tails and amphibious theme shows that even Disney couldn't dream up. It's in this fantastic place of make-believe and reinvention that Delores Walker becomes Delores Taurus, Florida's most unlikely celebrity.
Bringing together an eccentric assortment of outcasts, poseurs, and underdogs, this wise and poignant novel conjures up a time in America when anything was possible, especially in the Sunshine State. A story of family, chasing dreams and finding your way, Swim To Me will have you believing the impossible – even in mermaids from the Bronx.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA
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| Julius Winsome
Gerard Donovan (Overlook Press, 9781585679416, $13.95)
Living alone with his dog in the remote cabin in the woods, Julius Winsome is not unlike the barren winter lands that he inhabits: remote, vacant, inscrutable. But when his dog Hobbes is killed by hunters, their carelessness – or is it cruelty? – sets Julius’s precarious mindset on end.
STAFF COMMENTS: This beautifully composed volume relates a tale of revenge told through the poetic sensibilities of someone like Robert Frost. Julius Winsome will be one of the most unusual thrillers that you will ever read. – Joe Drabyak |
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| The Worthy: A Ghost's Story
Will Clarke (Simon & Schuster, 9780743273169, $14.00)
Conrad had it pretty good in life – a Porsche, pretty girls, and a trust fund full of oil money. But now, thanks to a brutal hazing incident at Louisiana State University's Gamma Chi fraternity, Conrad is dead – a nineteen-year-old spirit suddenly without an earthly body.
Make no mistake, the newly deceased Conrad is one angry ghost, and the object of his wrath is chapter president Ryan Hutchins, a "big, bright, rising star" who, in Conrad's view, is really "the darkest black hole you'll ever meet – and I'm not just saying that because he killed me." Conrad's ghostly ability to see all but be seen by no one (except Miss Etta, Gamma Chi's elderly cook, who is gifted with paranormal powers) confirms his suspicion that Ryan's dark hand has a wide reach, from beating his girlfriend, Maggie Meadows, to terrorizing Sarah Jane Bradford, a religious student who senses that Ryan must be stopped.
STAFF COMMENTS: In this twisted tale, the ghost of a murdered fraternity pledge returns to the LSU campus to even the score with the Gamma Chi brother who killed him. Part Stephen King and part Christopher Moore, this wry and oddly spirited novel is filled with funny and profound musings on life (and the afterlife) that are damned near poetic! Think The Lovely Bones with a laugh track.—Joe Drabyak
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| Mary
Janis Cooke Newman (Harvest, 9780156033473, $15.00)
Mary is an engrossing novel about Mary Todd Lincoln – one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women.
Writing from Bellevue asylum – where the shrieks of the other inmates keep her awake at night – a famous widow can finally share the story of her life in her own words. From her tempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through the opium–clouded years after her husband’s death, we are let into the inner, intimate world of this brave and fascinating woman.
Intelligent and unconventional – and some thought, mad – she held spiritualist séances in the White House, ran her family into debt with compulsive shopping, negotiated with conniving politicians, and raised her young sons in the nation’s capital during the bloodiest war this country has ever known. She was also a political strategist, a comfort to wounded soldiers, a supporter of emancipation, the first to be called First Lady, and a wife and mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband.
Interwoven with her memories of the past, she describes life in the asylum, where the treatment for lunacy is bland food, cold baths, and near-lethal doses of chloral hydrate. It is here where we meet her friends, the anorectic Minnie Judd, who is starving herself to win the affection of her beautiful husband; and Myra Bradwell, the suffragist lawyer who helps Mary win her freedom.
A dramatic tale filled with passion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity and redemption, Mary is the unforgettable story of Mary Todd Lincoln.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER BONNIE RAUGHT |
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| Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America
Andrew Ferguson (Atlantic Monthly Press, 9780871139672, $24.00)
Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president and perhaps the most influential American who ever lived. But what is his place in our country today? In this brilliant and captivating new book, Andrew Ferguson goes searching for Lincoln in homes, museums, national parks, roadside motels, and elsewhere from Rhode Island to Beverly Hills. What he finds is a man whose spirit, mythology, and philosophy continue to shape our national identity in ways both serious and surprising.
Ferguson knows a thing or two about the Lincoln mystique. As a child growing up in Illinois, he hung photos of Abe from his bedroom wall, memorized the Gettysburg Address, and read himself to sleep at night with the Second Inaugural. But, decades later, just when Ferguson had almost lost track of Lincoln completely, his buffdom was reignited.
In Land of Lincoln, Ferguson packs his bags and embarks on a journey to the heart of contemporary Lincoln Nation, where he encounters a world as funny as it is poignant, and a population as devoted as it is colorful. In a small town in Indiana, Ferguson drops in on the national conference of Lincoln presenters, 175 grown men who make their living (sort of) by impersonating their hero. He crisscrosses the country to meet the premier Lincoln memorabilia collectors, whose prized items include Lincoln’s chamber pot, locks of his hair, and pages from a boyhood schoolbook. In a motel outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he attends a leadership conference that teaches businesspeople how to run their companies more effectively by appropriating Lincoln’s “management style.” And in one of the book’s most amusing sections, Ferguson takes his wife and children on a trip across the long-defunct Lincoln Heritage Trail, a driving tour of landmarks from Lincoln’s life that wound through three states in the 1960s. At one point, Ferguson even manages to hold a very special piece of American history in his hands (we wouldn’t want to spoil the fun).
Told with an irresistible blend of humor and pathos, and propelled by a boyish enthusiasm as vast as it is infectious, Land of Lincoln is an entertaining, unexpected, and big-hearted celebration of our sixteenth president’s enduring influence on our country – and the people who help keep his spirit alive.
STAFF COMMENTS: As the author gleefully notes in the preface of this volume more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln that any other American – nearly fourteen thousand in all. With grace, insight, and great good humor Ferguson travels the blue highways in an attempt to discover the stories behind our fascination with the 16th president. During the course of the journey readers come to know a Lincoln that was an icon, an enigma, an intimate, and an enemy. And it is a journey well worth taking – honest! -- Joe Drabyak and Craig Miller |
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| Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations
Simon Rich (Random House, 1400065887, $12.95)
In Ant Farm, former Harvard Lampoon president Simon Rich finds humor in some very surprising places. Armed with a sharp eye for the absurd and an overwhelming sense of doom, Rich explores the ridiculousness of our everyday lives. The world, he concludes, is a hopelessly terrifying place – with endless comic potential.
If your girlfriend gives you some “love coupons” and then breaks up with you, are the coupons still valid?
What kind of performance pressure does an endangered male panda feel when his captors bring the last remaining female panda to his cage?
If murderers can get into heaven by accepting Jesus, just how awkward is it when they run into their victims?
Join Simon Rich as he explores the extraordinary and hilarious desperation that resides in ordinary life, from cradle to grave.
STAFF COMMENTS: Every now and then you just need to read something that will make you giggle, chuckle and snort. This silly but sophisticated collection of extremely short stories and comic essays is chockfull of chortles! – Joe Drabyak |
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| Fieldwork
Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 0374299161, $24.00)
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand’s English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead – a suicide – in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.
Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya’s crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology – and into the family history of Martiya’s victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa’s obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world.
Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and page-turningly plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo –scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.
STAFF COMMENTS: This is a spellbinding story of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and an obsessed young reporter. I was mesmerized by this surprising and exotic tale so adventurously told. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Motel Life
Willy Vlautin (Harper Perennial, 0061171115, $13.95)
With "echoes of Of Mice and Men"(The Bookseller, UK), The Motel Life explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers – on the run after a hit-and-run accident – who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.
STAFF COMMENTS: Vlautin has garnered international acclaim as a member of the alt band Richmond Fontaine. In this bittersweet debut he brings his keen observational eye and the lyricism of his considerable songwriting talent to bear on the story of two young brothers on the lam after a fatal hit-and-run accident. There is both the high lonesome feel of a country ballad and the muted stillness of an Edward Hopper painting in the writing. This is a tale filled with those people and places found around the margins – the denizens of bus terminals, late-night diners, shot-and-beer bars, and two-dollar-all-you-can-eat casino buffets. And as scruffy as it may seem there is something utterly beautiful in the detail. There may be a touch of peeling paint, pitted chrome, and busted upholstery but this book, like a ’63 Caddy, still runs like a champ. – Joe Drabyak
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| Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me
Phillip Hoose (Walker, 0802715370, $19.95)
In the winter of 1956, nine-year-old Phil Hoose moved with his family to Speedway, Indiana, home of the Indianapolis 500. By his own admission “weak and mouthy,” he was the proverbial new kid on the block. Baseball was one ticket to acceptance, but Phil had never played before, and his awkward attempts only made life harder. Until, one day, his parents dropped a bombshell: his cousin, Don Larsen, was a pitcher on the New York Yankees.
Suddenly baseball became his passion; as his cousin helped the Yanks win the pennant, Phil immersed himself in the game, on and off the field. And then, on October 8, 1956, Larsen stunned the world by pitching a perfect game in the World Series – arguably the most unexpected moment in sports history. It also transformed Phil’s life.
In pitch-perfect prose, and with a gift for conveying the fears and dreams of a young boy’s life, Phil Hoose recalls this magical year, when the game of baseball helped him take root in a tough new town. Whether encountering the school bully or a kindly principal, bargaining with his parents, trying to stand in against a fastball, or triumphantly meeting the Yankees in a Chicago hotel, Hoose makes you smile, wince, and applaud. Perfect, Once Removed is a wondrous ode to the glory of baseball and to growing up.
STAFF COMMENTS: If Jean Shepherd had ever written a book about baseball this would be it. This is an absolutely charming memoir that swings for the fences and connects in a big way. Perfect, Once Removed is one of my favorite books of 2006. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Falling Through the Earth
Danielle Trussoni (Picador, 0312426569, $14.00)
From her father, Danielle Trussoni learned rock and roll, how to avoid the cops, and never to shy away from a fight. Growing up, she was fascinated by stories of his adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, where he risked his life crawling headfirst into holes to search for American POWs held underground. Ultimately, Danielle came to believe that when the man she adored drank too much, beat up strangers, or mistreated her mother, it was because the horror of those tunnels still lived inside him. Eventually her mom gave up and left, taking all the kids except one: Danielle. When everyone else walked away and washed their hands of Dan Trussoni, Danielle would not. Now she tells their story.
As Danielle trails her father through nights at Roscoe’s Vogue Bar, scores of wild girlfriends, and years of bad dreams, a vivid and poignant portrait of a father-daughter relationship unlike any other emerges. Although the Trussonis are fiercely committed to each other, theirs is a love story filled with anger, stubbornness, outrageous behavior, and battle scars that never completely heal.
Beautifully told in a voice that is defiant, funny, and yet sometimes heartbreaking, Falling Through the Earth immediately joins the ranks of those classic memoirs whose characters imprint themselves indelibly into readers’ lives.
STAFF COMMENTS: Over 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Other soldiers came to discover that they had sustained a kind of mortal wound to their souls. Trussoni’s powerful and haunting remembrance of her father recounts how the shrapnel of war came to destroy a marriage, a family, and the spirit of a man. This is a poignant and unforgetable read. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Grayson
Lynne Cox (Knopf, 0307264548, $22.95)
Grayson is Lynne Cox’s first book since Swimming to Antarctica In it she tells the story of a miraculous ocean encounter that happened to her when she was seventeen and in training for a big swim (she had already swum the English Channel, twice, and the Catalina Channel).
It was the dark of early morning; Lynne was in 55-degree water as smooth as black ice, two hundred yards offshore, outside the wave break. She was swimming her last half-mile back to the pier before heading home for breakfast when she became aware that something was swimming with her. The ocean was charged with energy as if a squall was moving in; thousands of baby anchovy darted through the water like lit sparklers, trying to evade something larger. Whatever it was, it felt large enough to be a white shark coursing beneath her body.
It wasn’t a shark. It became clear that it was a baby gray whale – following alongside Lynne for a mile or so. Lynne had been swimming for more than an hour; she needed to get out of the water to rest, but she realized that if she did, the young calf would follow her onto shore and die from collapsed lungs.
The baby whale – eighteen feet long! – was migrating on a three-month trek to its feeding grounds in the Bering Sea, an eight-thousand-mile journey. It would have to be carried on its mother’s back for much of that distance, and was dependent on its mother’s milk for food – baby whales drink up to fifty gallons of milk a day. If Lynne didn’t find the mother whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and starve to death.
Something so enormous—the mother whale was fifty feet long – suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific Ocean. How could Lynne possibly find her?
This is the story – part mystery, part magical tale – of what happened.
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| You Don't Love Me Yet
Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, 038551218X, $24.95)
From the incomparable Jonathan Lethem, a raucous romantic farce that explores the paradoxes of love and art.
Lucinda Hoekke spends eight hours a day at the Complaint Line, listening to anonymous callers air their random grievances. Most of the time, the work is excruciatingly tedious. But one frequent caller, who insists on speaking only to Lucinda, captivates her with his off-color ruminations and opaque self-reflections. In blatant defiance of the rules, Lucinda and the Complainer arrange a face-to-face meeting – and fall desperately in love.
Consumed by passion, Lucinda manages only to tear herself away from the Complainer to practice with the alternative band in which she plays bass. The lead singer of the band is Matthew, a confused young man who works at the zoo and has kidnapped a kangaroo to save it from ennui. Denise, the drummer, works at No Shame, a masturbation boutique. The band’s talented lyricist, Bedwin, conflicted about the group’s as-yet-nonexistent fame, is suffering from writer’s block. Hoping to recharge the band’s creative energy, Lucinda “suggests” some of the Complainer’s philosophical musings to Bedwin. When Bedwin transforms them into brilliant songs, the band gets its big break, including an invitation to appear on L.A.’s premiere alternative radio show. The only problem is the Complainer. He insists on joining the band, with disastrous consequences for all.
Brimming with satire and sex, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a funny and affectionate send-up of the alternative band scene, the city of Los Angeles, and the entire genre of romantic comedy, but remains unmistakably the work of the inimitable Jonathan Lethem.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER MICHAEL FORTNEY
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| The Visible World
Mark Slouka (Houghton Mifflin, 0618756434, $24.00)
The unnamed narrator of The Visible World, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. Nowhere is this more true than in regard to his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman moving ever closer to genuine despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the Czech Resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lays behind Ivana’s unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic moments of the war: the actual assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official. And, in the almost unimaginably romantic story he tells, he creates the ending of their story and the beginning of his own. From an author whose gifts recall Milan Kundera and W. G. Sebald, The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely powerful novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.
STAFF COMMENTS: Like any avid reader I have created, from a lifetime of volumes, an internal list of my very favorites. Rarely will a new book find its way into my top ten. THE VISIBLE WORLD, however, has leapfrogged all others into my top three. At its heart, this is a powerful, deeply romantic story of a man – child of Czech immigrants – trying to identify the missing pieces in the emotional lives of his parents. It is storytelling without equal and flawless in its execution. There are countless booksellers who aspire to be great writers. Because of this novel, I no longer count myself among their ranks. If someone were to ask why, I would simply hand them a copy of this volume. I could never hope to write anything as brilliant and breathtakingly beautiful as THE VISIBLE WORLD. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Finn
Jon Clinch (Random House, 1400065917, $23.95)
In this masterful debut by a major new voice in fiction, Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own.
Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body – flayed and stripped of all identifying marks – drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.
Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finn’s terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly, sycophantic brother, Will; blind Bliss, a secretive moonshiner; the strong and quick-witted Mary, a stolen slave who becomes Finn’s mistress; and of course young Huck himself. In daring to re-create Huck for a new generation, Clinch gives us a living boy in all his human complexity – not an icon, not a myth, but a real child facing vast possibilities in a world alternately dangerous and bright.
Finn is a novel about race; about paternity in its many guises; about the shame of a nation recapitulated by the shame of one absolutely unforgettable family. Above all, Finn reaches back into the darkest waters of America’s past to fashion something compelling, fearless, and new.
STAFF COMMENTS: By revisiting a single, haunting, enigmatic scene in Twain’s American classic, Clinch ventures into the heart of one of the most brutal figures in American literature – Huckleberry Finn’s father. This is a literary debut that flows like the Mississippi River – powerful, rich, and loamy – with surprising eddies into the mind and imagination. This wondrous volume is a fitting companion to the original work and a natural for book club discussions. – Joe Drabyak
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| The Spellman Files
Lisa Lutz (Simon and Schuster, 1416532390, $25.00)
Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors – but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman.
Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, aka Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who's become addicted to "recreational surveillance"); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed "Lost Weekends"). But when Izzy's parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy's new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there's a hitch: she must take one last job before they'll let her go – a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life.
The Spellman Files is the first novel in a winning and hilarious new series featuring the Spellman family in all its lovable chaos.
STAFF COMMENTS: If you dipped into the DNA of Amy and David Sedaris, added a dollop of Lucille Ball’s genetic material and retained cartoonist Charles Addams to supervise the blending, the resulting creation would very much resemble this funny debut. Lisa Lutz has given us a rollicking tale concerning a sweet but dysfunctional family of private detectives who use their considerable spy craft to keep tabs on each other. There’s a lot of parental meddling, mayhem and mirth in this spirited mystery. – Joe Drabyak |
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| The Teahouse Fire
Ellis Avery (Riverhead Books, 9781594482731, $15.00)
When nine-year-old Aurelia Bernard takes shelter in Kyoto's beautiful and mysterious Baishian teahouse after a fire one night in 1866, she is unaware of the building's purpose. She has just fled the only family she's ever known: after her French immigrant mother died of cholera in New York, her abusive missionary uncle brought her along on his assignment to Christianize Japan. She finds in Baishian a place that will open up entirely new worlds to her – and bring her a new family.
It is there that she discovers the woman who will come to define the next several decades of her life, Shin Yukako, daughter of Kyoto's most important tea master and one of the first women to openly practice the sacred ceremony known as the Way of Tea. For hundreds of years, Japan's warriors and well-off men would gather in tatami-floored structures – teahouses – to participate in an event that was equal parts ritual dance and sacramental meal. Women were rarely welcome, and often expressly forbidden. But in the late nineteenth century, Japan opened its doors to the West for the first time, and the seeds of drastic changes that would shake all of Japanese society, even this most civilized of arts, were planted.
Taking her for the abandoned daughter of a prostitute rather than a foreigner, the Shin family renames Aurelia "Urako" and adopts her as Yukako's attendant and surrogate younger sister. Yukako provides Aurelia with generosity, wisdom, and protection as she navigates a culture that is not accepting of outsiders. From her privileged position at Yukako's side, Aurelia aids in Yukako's crusade to preserve the tea ceremony as it starts to fall out of favor under pressure of intense Westernization. And Aurelia herself is embraced and rejected as modernizing Japan embraces and rejects an era of radical change.
An utterly absorbing story told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, 9780143038580, $16.00)
What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance. The cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet has thrown us back on a bewildering landscape where we once again have to worry about which of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. At the same time we're realizing that our food choices also have profound implications for the health of our environment. The Omnivore's Dilemma is bestselling author Michael Pollan's brilliant and eye-opening exploration of these little-known but vitally important dimensions of eating in America.
Pollan has divided The Omnivore's Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or "organic" food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on. He concludes each section by sitting down to a meal—at McDonald's, at home with his family sharing a dinner from Whole Foods, and in a revolutionary "beyond organic" farm in Virginia. For each meal he traces the provenance of everything consumed, revealing the hidden components we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods reflects our environmental and biological inheritance.
We are indeed what we eat-and what we eat remakes the world. A society of voracious and increasingly confused omnivores, we are just beginning to recognize the profound consequences of the simplest everyday food choices, both for ourselves and for the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a long-overdue book and one that will become known for bringing a completely fresh perspective to a question as ordinary and yet momentous as What shall we have for dinner?
RECOMMMENED BY STAFF MEMBER CHRIS BELL |
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| Suite Française
Irène Némirovsky (Vintage, 1400096278, $14.95)
By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française – the first two parts of a planned five-part novel – she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France – where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis – she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece.
The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival – some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives – but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers – from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants – cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation – at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic – of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX |
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| Once Upon a Day
Lisa Tucker (Atria, 9780743492782, $14.00)
From Lisa Tucker, the critically acclaimed author of The Song Reader, comes a wise, humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about the risks and rewards of loving when a single day can change our lives.
Nineteen years ago, a famous man disappeared from Los Angeles, taking his two children, Dorothea and Jimmy, to a rocky, desolate corner of New Mexico where he raised them in complete isolation in a utopian "Sanctuary." The children grew up with books and encyclopedias, records and a grand piano, but no television, computer, radio, or even a newspaper. Now Dorothea, at twenty-three, is leaving this place in search of her missing brother – and venturing into the wide world for the first time.
Dorothea's search will turn into an odyssey of discovery, leading to the truth of her family's past and the terrifying day that changed her father forever. But Dorothea's journey will also introduce her to an unusual cast of characters, including a homeless girl from Missouri who becomes a jazz singer and a social worker whose mistake in judgment changes her best friend's life. And she will meet Stephen, a doctor turned cabdriver who, after suffering his own losses, has lost his ability to believe in a meaningful world. Together, they have a chance to make a discovery of a different kind: that though a heart can be broken by the tragic events of a day, a day can also bring a new chance at love and a deeper understanding of life's infinite possibilities.
Beautifully written, with a spellbinding story, Once Upon a Day is "a lyrically poignant reminder of the necessity of hope" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| The Ruins
Scott Smith (Knopf, 9780307278289, $7.99)
Eerie, terrifying, unputdownable—Scott Smith’s first novel since his best-selling A Simple Plan (“Simply the best suspense novel of this year—hell, of the 1990s”—Stephen King). The Ruins follows two American couples, just out of college, enjoying a pleasant, lazy beach holiday together in Mexico as, on an impulse, they go off with newfound friends in search of one of their group—the young German, who, in pursuit of a girl, has headed for the remote Mayan ruins, site of a fabled archeological dig, only to come face to face with an insidious evil that threatens their lives.
STAFF COMMENTS: In Cancun, Mexico, for a peaceful vacation, a group of tourists sets off in search of one of their group who disappeared during an excursion to some nearby Mayan ruins, only to come face to face with an insidious evil that threatens their very lives. This is an eerie and terrifying work from the author of A SIMPLE PLAN. This volume is a bit like boarding a holiday excursion bus only to realize that your traveling companions are Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and John Wyndham. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1565125606, $13.95)
Water for Elephants is an atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons.
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX |
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