STAR ISLAND, by Carl Hiaasen
The career of singer Cheryl Bunterman (aka Cherry Pye), who debuted with Jailbait Records at age 15, is foundering due to her lack of talent and indiscriminate appetite for drugs, booze, and sex in this outrageous, offbeat novel from Hiaasen (Nature Girl). Clueless celebrities and criminal paparazzi provide the perfect match and the perfect metaphor for contemporary public culture. And you never know which sentences are going to end with a back flip.
FOUR FISH, by Paul Greenberg
A seafood journalist who has written for National Geographic traces the history of bass, cod, salmon and tuna fishing while assessing the critical state of today’s commercial fishing industry, citing the roles of over- fishing and fish farming while recommending specific protections.
“If you’ve ever ordered salmon, if you’ve ever slurped a bowl of chowder, if you’ve ever sat down for sushi, Paul Greenberg’s friendly and thoughtful book will lure you in, surprise you, probably shock you, and certainly make you think. Revelatory and colorful, Four Fish provides a ringside seat for one of the biggest culinary events of the day: the unfolding human drama of constructing a science-fiction future for our seafood that might actually work, while also reviving the natural majesty and abundance of the seas. Read this book—you will stand before the fish case at your local market or monger, and order you next restaurant dinner from the ocean, with vastly more knowledge and wisdom than you possessed before.”—Trevor Corson, bestselling author of the Secret Life of Lobsters and the Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice
THE SISTERS FROM HARDSCRABBLE BAY, by Beverly Jensen
A sequence of tales chronicling the early 20th-century lives of New Brunswick sisters Idella and Avis Hillock includes “Gone,” an account of their mother’s heartbreaking childbirth crisis and the Pushcart Prize- nominated “Wake,” in which they attend their wild father’s funeral. (This is our store’s summer pick!!! Rich characters…multiple settings…though a collection of short stories, you will think you are reading a novel.)
New York Times quote: “Jensen died of cancer in 2003, before any of her stories made it into print. In fact, it’s not clear she intended for them to be published, which may explain their remarkable intimacy and unflinching honesty.”
RED HOOK ROAD, by Ayelet Waldman
Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.
A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin. As she
writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it’s often the little things that make life so precious.
REMEDIES, by Kate Ledger (paperback)
“An immediately gripping, expertly woven tale of pain and healing. Ledger is a brilliant writer.” -Elin Hilderbrand
Sinon and Emily Bear look like a couple who have it all. Simon is a respected doctor; Emily shines as a public relations expert who spins away her corporate clients’ mistakes. Yet as their 13-year-old daughter’s troubled summer reveals, all is not perfect inside this home.
Simon has stumbled upon an obscure drug that may revolutionize the treatment of pain. In his excitement, he barely notices that Emily is seeking relief from the family’s tragic past. And neither fully realizes how much danger their daughter is in. Soon, everything they have will be on the brink of collapse, and there will be no masking the symptoms or hiding the truth any more.
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, by Kate Racculia
A sudden death, a never-mailed postcard, and a longburied secret set the stage for a luminous and heartbreakingly real novel about lost souls finding one another
The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared outcasts who have formed a perfectly insular family unit: the two of them and the four eclectic boarders living in their house. But their small, quiet life is upended when Arthur Rook shows up in the middle of a nervous breakdown, devastated by the death of his wife, carrying a pink shoe box containing all his wife’s mementos and keepsakes, and holding a postcard from sixteen years ago, addressed to Mona but never sent. Slowly the contents of the box begin to fit together to tell a story—one of a powerful friendship, a lost love, and a secret that, if revealed, could change everything that Mona, Oneida, and Arthur know to be true. Or maybe the stories the box tells and the truths it brings to life will teach everyone about love—how deeply it runs, how strong it makes us, and how even when all seems lost, how tightly it brings us together. With emotional accuracy and great energy, This Must Be the Place introduces memorable, charming characters that refuse to be forgotten.
THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA, by Adrienne McDonnell
Building a successful career by helping couples to conceive, an early 20th- century obstetrician makes a risky decision after meeting a talented opera singer whose infertility issues prompt her to leave her husband and pursue a career abroad. A first novel.
A breathtaking novel of romantic obsession, longing and one woman’s choice between motherhood and her operatic calling.
THE GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST, A NOVEL, by Noam Shpancer
“Noam Shpancer portrays the oft-hidden world of psychotherapy with unparalleled authenticity, compassion, and wit… An astonishing debut.”—Jonathan Kellerman
Noam Shpancer’s stunning debut novel opens as a psychologist reluctantly takes on a new client—an exotic dancer whose severe anxiety is keeping her from the stage. The psychologist, a solitary professional who also teaches a lively night class, helps the client confront her fears. But as treatment unfolds, her struggles and secrets begin to radiate onto his life, upsetting the precarious balance in his unresolved relationship with Nina, a married former colleague with whom he has a child—a child he has never met. As the shell of his detachment begins to crack, he suddenly finds himself too deeply involved, the boundary lines between professional and personal, between help and harm, blurring dangerously. With its wonderfully distinctive narrative voice, rich with humor and humanity, The Good Psychologist leads the reader on a journey into the heart of the therapy process and beyond, examining some of the fundamental questions of the soul: to move or be still; to defy or obey; to let go or hold on.
IN THE HEART OF THE CANYON, by Elisabeth Hyde (paperback)
From the author of The Abortionist’s Daughter, a gripping new novel about a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon that changes the lives of everyone on board.
Meet Peter, twenty-seven, single, and looking for a quick hookup; Evelyn, a fifty-year-old Harvard professor; and Ruth and Lloyd, river veterans in their seventies. There’s Mitchell, an overeager history buff with no qualms about upstaging the guides with his knowledge. There’s Jill from Salt Lake City, wanting desperately to spark some sense of adventure in her staid Mormon family; and seventeen-year-old Amy, so woefully overweight that she can barely fit into a pup tent, let alone into a life jacket.
Guiding them all is JT Maroney, who loves the river with all his heart and who, having made 124 previous trips down the Colorado, thinks he has seen everything. But on their first night, a stray dog wanders into their campsite, upsetting the tentative equilibrium of this makeshift family. Over the next thirteen days, as various decisions are second-guessed and sometimes regretted, both passengers and guides find that sometimes the most daunting adventures on a Colorado River trip have nothing to do with white-water rapids, and everything to do with reconfiguring the rocky canyons of the heart.
WHERE MEN WIN GLORY, by Jon Krakauer (paperback)
Traces the controversial story of NFL player and army soldier Pat Tillman, describing the military’s efforts to hide the truth about his death by friendly fire, in an account that draws on Tillman’s journals and letters as well as interviews with family members and fellow soldiers. Reprint. A best-selling book.
TELLING TIMES, by Nadine Gordimer
Few writers have been so much at the center of historical events as Nadine Gordimer. Telling Times, the first comprehensive collection of her nonfiction, bears insightful witness to the forces that have shaped the last half century. It includes reports from Soweto during the 1976 uprising, Zimbabwe at the dawn of independence, and Africa at the start of the AIDS pandemic, as well as illuminating portraits of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and many others. Committed first and foremost to art, Gordimer appraises the legacies of hallowed writers like Tolstoy, Proust, and Conrad, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Achebe, Said, and Soyinka. No other writer has so consistently evoked the feel of Africa– its landscapes, cities, and people–through a remarkable range of travel writing from Tanzania, Egypt, and along the Congo River. Telling Times is an extraordinary summation from a writer whose enduring courage and commitment to human freedom have made her a moral compass of her time.
MEMORY WALL, by Anthony Doerr
In multiple O. Henry Prize–winner Doerr’s latest (after Four Seasons in Rome), the presence and persistence of memory thematically binds stories set apart by vast distances of time and space. The title story finds a South African woman at the end of her life, taking part in a procedure that records her memories on cassettes; meanwhile, a pair of thieves rifles through the recordings, hoping to discover a secret her husband took to his grave. Bookending the collection is “Afterword,” about a woman in her final days whose seizures take her back to her youth in a Nazi-era Hamburg orphanage. In between are a couple of domestic stories, one about a village’s impending erasure by flood, and another about a teenage orphan adapting to life with her grandfather. Doerr has an incredible sense of language and a skill for crafting beautiful phrases and apt metaphors, but he doesn’t always connect with his characters, a shortcoming most obvious in the first-person pieces. For the bulk of the collection, though, Doerr’s prose brings home the weight of his troubling thesis, that “every hour… an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves.” PW Review
ICE COLD, by Tess Gerritsen
In Tess Gerritsen’s latest chiller, Ice Cold, pathologist Maura Isles is out of her Beantown element, half a country away in rural Wyoming. Attending a medical conference, she hooks up with an old college classmate and, on a whim, embarks on an impromptu trip into the mountains with a group of his friends. Their GPS prompts them to take a wrong turn, and they wind up getting stuck on a snowy road, basically miles from nowhere, as night is closing in. In the valley below, they spot a small gathering of houses, and make their way toward it. There, in a scene reminiscent of a Stephen King novel, they find the village has been hastily abandoned: cars still parked in the garages, half-eaten meals on the kitchen tables, but not a soul in sight. And there is no help on the horizon, to say the least. Stir in a bizarre polygamous religious cult, an unhealthy amount of toxic waste, a bent cop or two, a feral wolf-boy and a violently libertarian rancher, and you have a convolutedly compelling storyline, a seamless melding of an Old West tale and a thoroughly modern thriller.
SIZZLING SIXTEEN, by Janet Evanovich
Does the legacy of her Uncle Pip’s lucky bottle really bring Stephanie Plum good fortune? You be the judge. Worth celebrating, not for the tangled story, but for gems like Lula’s four ways of managing stress: “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts.” Kirkus Review
COMING SOON…IN PAPERBACK!
(call and reserve your copy now!)
HALF BROKE HORSES, by Jeannette Walls (September 9)
JULIET NAKED, by Nick Hornby (September 7)
TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES, by Sue Monk Kidd, and Ann Kidd Taylor (September 7)
WOLF HALL, by Hilary Mantel (August 31)
STONES INTO SCHOOLS, by Greg Mortenson (October 26)
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett (January 4, 2011)
