Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s drifting toward bankruptcy and is in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes.

Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a child who looks very much like Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin’s high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin—a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives—begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who have been on the run all these years from a drug dealer from whom Anna stole $121,000.

In her most ambitious novel yet, Emily Mandel combines her most fully realized characters with perhaps her most fully developed story that examines the difficulty of being the person you’d like to be, loss, the way a small and innocent action (e.g., taking a picture of a girl in a foreclosed house) can have disastrous consequences. The Lola Quartet is a work that pays homage to literary noir, is concerned with jazz, Django Reinhardt, economic collapse, love, Florida’s exotic wildlife problem, crushing tropical heat, the leavening of the contemporary world, compulsive gambling, and the unreliability of memory.

About Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. Her first novel, Last Night in Montreal was a June 2009 Indie Next pick and a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, recently released in paperback, won the Indie Bookseller’s Choice Award and was the number-one Indie Next Pick for May 2010. It was also long-listed for The Morning News’ 2011 Tournament of Books and the 2011 Spinetingler Awards.

She is currently a staff writer for The Millions, and she’s had both essays and short fiction recently anthologized.

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“The Lola Quartet,” by Emily St. John Mandel

The Washington Post Book Review – May 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

At the satisfying conclusion of Emily St. John Mandel’s “The Lola Quartet,” the exhausted protagonist, Gavin Sasaki, contemplates the suburbs at night as he drives north from Florida. He sees “a continuous centerless glimmering of lights, shadows of palm trees on parking lots, malls shining like beacons. . . . None of the cities had edges anymore, just a long slow reach across landscapes.”

The same is true for most of the characters in this elegant, hypnotic novel. Their edges are blurred, their identities hazy, their grip on truth as weak as their hold on each other. Take Gavin, a junior reporter for the New York Star. Depressed, disillusioned and fearing the next round of layoffs, Gavin begins to invent quotes to animate his stories. “If you tell a lie it’s easier to tell another,” he quickly realizes, and we have the queasy sense of truth slipping its moorings, of imminent disaster. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly consumes him. But when young Mercy’s disapproving father threatens Henry’s life, Henry runs as far as he can—to the other side of the world.

The time is 1950, and the Korean War hangs in the balance. Descended from a long line of soldiers, Henry enlists in the marines and arrives in Korea on the eve of the brutal seventeen-day battle of the Chosin Reservoir—the turning point of the war—completely unprepared for the forbidding Korean landscape and the unimaginable circumstances of a war well beyond the scope of anything his ancestors ever faced. But the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far.

Robert Olmstead’s riveting new novel is not only a passionate story of love and war, it is a timeless story of soldiers coming home to a country with little regard for, and even less knowledge of, what they’ve confronted. Through his hero, Olmstead reveals an unspoken truth about combat: that for many men, the experience of war is the most enlivening, electric, and extraordinary experience of their lives.

About Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead is the author of seven previous books. Coal Black Horse was the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the Ohioana Award, and was a #1 Book Sense pick and a Border’s Discover pick. Far Bright Star was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant, and is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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Editorial Review

Henry Childs grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, raised by his grandfather and his sweet-natured mother Clemmie. (The mystery of his never-mentioned father is a late-revelation shocker.) His forebears were soldiers and horsemen, but they’ve lost their land, and Clemmie must move with Henry to the city, Charleston. In 1950 Henry is a high-school junior with a passion for horses and baseball. He helps out at some stables where he meets Mercy. She comes from money and is university-bound, while Henry seems headed for a factory. The attraction between these virgins is mutual and overwhelming; from the outset their sex is a rapt communication. Henry is warned off by her father and brother. The lovers elope to New Orleans, where an apartment is waiting for them, courtesy of Mercy’s accommodating aunt. They make it their Eden. Father and brother come to expel them, abducting Mercy, giving Henry a final warning. Though underage, he enlists as a Marine and is sent to Korea. He does recon with Lew, a gruff World War II vet. Quite unsentimentally, a bond develops, a wise-guy routine. The cold is arctic. The Chinese come at night, waves of them. It’s kill or be killed; answer atrocity with atrocity. In New Orleans we ached because we feared what was happening had to end; in Korea we ache because we fear it never will. Olmstead’s extraordinary language gives us new eyes. – Kirkus Reviews

‘The Coldest Night,’ by Robert Olmstead, takes readers back to the Korean War

The Washington Post Book Review – May 21, 2012 (Excerpt)

How is it that Americans tuned into “M*A*S*H” for 11 years — savoring a mighty impressive 250-plus episodes — and yet the Korean War remains “The Forgotten War”? The answer may be that while “M*A*S*H” reminded us that war is hell, anything that comes with a laugh track is likely to dial down the violence, evisceration and sheer terror that accompany battle. Moreover, “M*A*S*H” was a general anti-war statement, not an attempt to illuminate the specific “police action” that was sandwiched between World War II and the Vietnam War.

Over the past few years, however, it has seemed to me that Korea is finally being remembered for the three-year nightmare it was. Recently, I’ve read histories of the conflict by David Halberstam (“The Coldest Winter”) and Bruce Cumings (“The Korean War: A History”), as well as Jayne Anne Phillips’s novel “Lark & Termite” — a National Book Award finalist in 2009. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has just published “Home,” a novel about a Korean War veteran.

And this month Robert Olmstead turns his prose — gritty one moment, lyrical the next — on the conflict in his book, “The Coldest Night.” Fans of Olmstead’s Civil War novel, “Coal Black Horse,” of which I am one, will not be disappointed. “The Coldest Night” is riveting, thoughtful and — in the large section set in Korea — harrowing. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Anne Perry’s acclaimed Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels have made London’s exclusive world of wealth and power an addictive literary destination for readers everywhere. This new masterpiece, a haunting story of love and treason, invites us not only into the secret places of Britain’s power but also into the innermost sanctums of the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thomas Pitt, once a lowly policeman, is now the powerful head of Britain’s Special Branch, and some people fear that he may have been promoted beyond his abilities. He, too, feels painful moments of self-doubt, especially as rumors reach him of a plot to blow up connections on the Dover-London rail line—on which Austrian duke Alois Habsburg is soon to travel to visit his royal English kin.

Why would anyone destroy an entire train to kill one obscure Austrian royal, or are the rumors designed to distract Pitt from an even more devastating plot? He must resolve this riddle at once, before the damage is done.

Meanwhile, in a London sickroom, an old Italian woman—at the end of a romantic career as a revolutionary spy—is terrified that as she sinks into dementia, she may divulge secrets that can kill. And a beautiful young Croatian woman, married to a British power broker, hoards her own mysteries. Apparently all roads lead to the Continent, and Pitt suspects that between them these two fascinating women could tell him things he desperately needs to know. But as the hours tick by, it seems that the only woman Pitt can count on is his clever wife, Charlotte.

No one sustains mesmerizing suspense better than Anne Perry.  In Pitt’s trial by fire, his wrenching moral dilemma, and his electrifying moment of decision, the beloved bestselling author gives us a climax never to be forgotten.

About Anne Perry

Anne Perry is the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England:  the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, including Treason at Lisson Grove and Buckingham Palace Gardens, and the William Monk novels, includingAcceptable Loss and Execution Dock. She is also the author of a series of five World War I novels, as well as nine holiday novels, most recently A Christmas Homecoming, and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Ottoman Empire. Anne Perry lives in Scotland.

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Editorial Review

Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the wise and knowing aunt of Pitt’s wife Charlotte, is right to be concerned about her old friend Serafina Montserrat. It’s not just that Serafina’s life is drawing to a close; her illness makes her mind wander, and oftentimes she says things she shouldn’t—and, according to her niece, Nerissa Freemarsh, things that just aren’t true. But Serafina speaks very much to the point when she tells Vespasia that she’s afraid “they’ll kill me” because “I know too much.” Sure enough, the next time Vespasia comes to visit, Serafina has already died. Pitt, who’s already been put on high alert by the hints about very contemporary terrorist threats Serafina has intimated to Vespasia, ascertains that the cause of death was an overdose of laudanum quite impossible for Serafina to have administered to herself. Whodunit? And even more important, why? It doesn’t take long for Pitt (Long Spoon Lane, 2005, etc.) to focus his concern on Duke Alois Habsburg, a decidedly minor noble whose upcoming visit to his cousins in England seems increasingly likely to end with his assassination. But which of the slippery bureaucrats Pitt must deal with in his new capacity as head of Special Branch is the traitor behind the plot? And how can Pitt, who continues to be superstitiously reverent toward his alleged social superiors, smoke out the traitor and deal with him? – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: ‘Dorchester Terrace,’ by Anne Perry

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Downton Abbey” addicts take heart! Season three of that luscious Edwardian bonbon may still be months away from delivery, but mystery dowager Anne Perry stands at the ready with her latest gaslit costume drama, “Dorchester Terrace.”

Speaking of costumes, Perry’s fashion-forward heroines give the Crawley ladies a run for their entailed money: For a soiree at Buckingham Palace, one well-heeled dame dons a billowing pink ball gown with daringly deep decolletage; another soberly struts a deep indigo wool day dress suitable for visiting shut-ins; a third decks herself out in exquisite jet jewelry to mutely signify mourning.

“Upstairs Downstairs”-type class tensions waft through Perry’s swank London townhouses as thickly as they do the passageways of Downton. (Indeed, the solution to one of the murders in this novel emerges after Perry’s detective hero, Thomas Pitt — himself the son of a gamekeeper — has a confidential chin-wag over a pot of tea with the housekeeper in a prominent household.) And, most ominously, the approaching storm of World War I twists nerves taut in both the British soap opera and Perry’s stately page-turner.

“Dorchester Terrace” is the 25th suspense novel featuring Perry’s married sleuths, Charlotte and Thomas Pitt. Through adventure after adventure, Thomas has diligently risen through the police ranks to finally ascend, here, to the apex: the august position of head of the Special Branch. Unfortunately, he barely has time to bask in that honor before the sky falls down. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department is offered a bit of luxury by friends and supporters within the Party – a week’s vacation at a luxurious resort near Lake Tai, a week where he can relax, and recover, undisturbed by outside demands or disruptions. Unfortunately, the once beautiful Lake Tai, renowned for its clear waters, is now covered by fetid algae, its waters polluted by toxic runoff from local manufacturing plants. Then the director of one of the manufacturing plants responsible for the pollution is murdered and the leader of the local ecological group is the primary suspect of the local police. Now Inspector Chen must tread carefully if he is to uncover the truth behind the brutal murder and find a measure of justice for both the victim and the accused.

About Qiu Xiaolong

QIU XIAOLONG is a poet and author of several previous novels featuring Inspector Chen as well as Years of Red Dust, a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2010.  Born and raised in Shanghai, Qiu lives with his family in St. Louis, Missouri.

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Editorial Review

Chen Cao, veteran of the Shanghai Police Bureau and renowned writer, is unexpectedly called away from a conference outlining “new responsibilities for Communist Party officials” to visit Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, noted for its lush natural surroundings. In order to avoid being bothered by his protégé Sergeant Huang Kang and other detectives seeking help, he keeps his respite at the coveted getaway a secret. Ironically, Wuxi has devolved into a shabby resort, its legendary Tai Lake now brackish with pollution, the result of industrial development in the region. Chen finds a kindred intellectual soul in Shanshan, a young woman who proves to also be a font of information about local business in general and the chief polluter in particular: Liu Deming, representative of the People’s Congress of Zhejiang Province and owner of The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company. After Liu is found murdered, the investigative tables are turned when Huang catches the case, forcing Chen to play Watson to his unsteady Holmes. Huang’s slowness is a constant test of Chen’s patience, but he develops an effective strategy of convincing Huang that the suggestions he plants are Huang’s own. A wronged wife and unhappy employees top the list of suspects, with Shanshan a ubiquitous presence. – Kirkus Reviews

Qiu Xiaolong’s ‘Don’t Cry, Tai Lake’ has a political edge, but endearing innocence

The Washington Post Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Qiu Xiaolong, the author of this odd, charming and quite political detective novel, was a teenager in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, the only way he could read Sherlock Holmes stories was to hide his book beneath the red-plastic cover of “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.”

After the madness passed and reading was more permissible, Qiu entered college and studied Chinese and English literature. He particularly loved the poetry of  T.S. Eliot . In 1988, a fellowship took him to St. Louis — Eliot’s birthplace — where Qiu and his family still live and where he has since written seven novels about the poetry-loving Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police.

Chen’s crime-fighting successes have brought him fame as an eccentric but brilliant detective. His eccentricities include the fact that, even in the middle of an investigation, he might pause to dash off a poem. He’s an honest cop who roots out corruption, which can put him at odds with Communist Party officials. Fortunately, he has the protection of his mentor, Comrade Secretary Zhao, one of the most powerful men in Beijing.

“Don’t Cry, Tai Lake” begins when Zhao declines a vacation at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, a luxury resort for senior party officials, and sends Chen in his place. The resort is not far from Shanghai and overlooks the huge, once gorgeous Tai Lake. Now the lake is ringed by factories and severely polluted by toxic wastes. That fact, denied by the party faithful and regretted by Chen and a few environmentalists, is the crux of the novel — and Tai Lake is the author’s symbol of the widespread pollution throughout China. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Lewis Chopik has just graduated from Columbia University. Having been dumped by his girlfriend and in flight from the pressures exerted by his ambitious professor father, Lewis returns to Wichita in search of respite at the home of his New-Ager mother, Abby. But when Abby picks Lewis up from the airport, she reveals that she’s starting a storm-chasing business and indulging a polyamorous lifestyle. Another unexpected arrival is Seth, Lewis’s bi-polar younger brother, who shows off a new tattoo on his chest: In Loving Memory of Seth Chopik.

About Thad Ziolkowski

Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, and a memoir, On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure and Index. He directs the Writing Program at Pratt Institute. Wichita is his first novel.

Editorial Review

Lewis Chopik has come home to Wichita to lick his wounds. The young graduate (Columbia, summa cum laude) should be buoyant, but he’s been dumped by his girlfriend, who’s traded up to snag a Rhodes Scholar. And he’s being badgered by his father Virgil, a Columbia professor and part of a formidable clan of academics, to pursue his studies, an unwelcome prospect. All his divorced mother Abby wants is for him to be happy. However, any hope of peace and quiet back home dissolves when his 20-year-old brother Seth appears. He’s been on a downward spiral since age 14, when a morning-glory trip convinced him death was an attractive destination. Since then he’s been tentatively diagnosed as bipolar; briefly married to a stripper in San Francisco; and almost killed by fellow street punks. He fits right in at Abby’s. His indulgent mom has always provided “havens for oddballs,” while busying herself with New -Age projects and a succession of “lifetime companions.” Her latest companion is unhappily sharing her with Bishop, a genial university chemistry teacher who’s cooking up “designer psychedelics” in Abby’s basement; he’s also helping her set up her latest project: storm-chasing with a New -Age twist. There’s never a dull moment in a novel which fires us up with snappy and often very funny dialogue; Seth, deranged but smart (those Chopik genes), takes down anyone in earshot with gleeful malice. The central relationship is that between the two brothers; Lewis loves Seth dearly but is powerless to slow his descent. They will be ejected from a bowling alley and a biker bar; after Seth’s frightening rant in a graveyard, Lewis realizes he must be committed. Then the whole gang takes off after a tornado—for Seth, the perfect solution. – Kirkus Reviews

Prairie Dust - ‘Wichita,’ a Novel by Thad Ziolkowski

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Near the end of “Wichita,” Thad ­Ziolkowski’s first novel, the protagonist recalls a line from Rilke: “You are not surprised at the force of the storm — you have seen it growing.” It’s a passing reference; the character, Lewis, neither dwells on the line nor mentions the poem it comes from, “Onto a Vast Plain.” But Ziolkowski is an accomplished poet, and it’s not hard to see Rilke’s great poem about grief as the secret heart beating through this charming, smart and ­devastating book.

The novel begins with Lewis’s return to his mother’s home in Wichita, Kan., from New York, where he has just graduated from Columbia. His pompous professor father, Virgil, expects him to attend graduate school, though Lewis is unsure of his next step. His girlfriend has left him, and his divorced, eccentric mother, Abby — who invests in one “multilevel marketing” scheme after another — has “half-­facetiously” suggested he return to “the healing powers of the Great Plains,” where she has begun a storm-chasing business.

Lewis is not the only one returning home. His younger brother, Seth, is supposed to be away at an “art school/spa for the wealthy,” working as a groundskeeper and modeling for drawing classes. But when Lewis and Abby pull into the driveway, Seth is there, “waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road.” On Seth’s collarbone is “a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk.” His presence is electric. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.

Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.

About Paul Theroux

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include A Dead Hand and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

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Editorial Review

As a young man, Ellis Hock loved teaching in Malawi for the Peace Corps, happiest years of his life. (Theroux did a hitch there; see his early novel Jungle Lovers.) Then he had to return to suburban Boston to run the men’s-clothing store he’d inherited. Thirty-five years later, the store and his marriage having failed, he returns to Malawi for a nostalgia-induced vacation. He’s warned on arrival that people are hungry and only want money, but he heads into the bush with a bagful of it, another mzungu (white man) who knows best. Malabo, the remote riverbank village where he’s remembered as the mzungu who helped build the school and clinic, gives him a warm welcome, but Hock’s disillusion sets in fast. The school is a ruin; the visiting doctor is a quack; AIDS is rampant; requests for money are constant. The villagers keep him under surveillance at the direction of the headman Manyenga, who is all smiles and lies. One bright spot is his reunion with Gala, the woman he loved, and the presence of her 16-year-old granddaughter Zizi, who waits on Hock and is fiercely loyal to him. The snakes, too, are a blessing. They terrify the villagers, but Hock handles them fearlessly, using them as protection once he realizes he is being held captive. He makes three escape attempts. The second takes him downriver into Mozambique. There Hock runs into a community of starving but deadly children and a food drop, horribly bungled by white Westerners; these scenes are devastating. All his escapes are foiled by the formidable Manyenga. The suspense is enriched by Theroux’s loving attention to local customs and his subversive insights. As Hock weakens in body and spirit, Zizi just grows stronger. Could she be his savior?  - Kirkus Reviews

Retracing His Steps - ‘The Lower River,’ a Novel by Paul Theroux

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The central character in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, “The Lower River,” is an American named Ellis Hock who decides to return to Africa after an absence of almost 40 years. Life in his own country has become tiresome and frustrating, but there’s a village in Malawi where, during his Peace Corps days, Hock had once been happy and useful. He wants to be useful again. So he prepares to say goodbye to his failing men’s wear store in Medford, Mass., along with his embittered ex-wife and his grasping, heartless daughter.

Before Hock has even left the United States, he hears about a woman in a nearby town who takes her rock python to bed with her. This python has been behaving oddly, flattening itself beside its owner, stretching the length of her sleeping body. Hock knows what’s going on: the snake is getting ready to eat her. What he doesn’t know is that this is a portent of what will happen to him: he’s about to be consumed by the people in the village he once loved. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.

As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

About Peter Carey

PETER CAREY is the author of eleven previous novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

The latest from the renowned and prolific Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America, 2010, etc.) is too fanciful to pass as realism yet too inscrutable for parable or fable. Though all of it (or at least half of it) concerns a grieving woman’s attempt to re-engage with life after the death of her married lover, the prevailing spirit is comedic, even whimsical, rather than tragic. And the prevailing metaphor is that of clockwork, the mechanical precision of the museum where she serves as a curator, with “a considerable horological department, a world-famous collection of clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up engines,” a place where “for years I thought clockmaking must still any turmoil in one’s breast. I was so confident of my opinion, so completely wrong.” To keep protagonist and occasional narrator Catherine from going haywire, her supervisor assigns her an archival task: to study the diaries of a man who had commissioned a mechanical duck for his ailing son more than a century earlier. Some chapters are all Catherine, some are from the diaries of Henry and his adventures with the mechanical duck, and some mix the two, though the reader must make leaps of conjecture to connect the writing of Henry and the response from Catherine. Then the plot thickens, as it appears that the circumstances surrounding her affair were more complicated than Catherine had realized, and she comes to suspect that the pages she reads were written specifically for her: “He anticipated someone would watch him through the wormhole, that was clear. He wrote for that person.” While reading about the attempts to construct a mechanical duck that would appear animated, practically alive, Catherine feels herself turning into a machine: “Ingest, I thought, digest, excrete, repeat.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘The Chemistry Of Tears’ And The Art Of Healing

NPR Book Review – May 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

Peter Carey’s dazzling new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, encompasses heartbreak, the comfort of absorbing work, the transformative power of beauty and the soul of an old machine. If you’ve never read the Australian-born, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang — or, most recently, Parrot and Olivier in America — his 12th novel is a terrific introduction to his work. Once again, Carey demonstrates an artful ability to capture a two-way interplay between past and present that is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful.

The day after BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, Catherine Gehrig, a tall, elegant, 40-something London museum conservator specializing in horology — clocks and windup automatons — learns of the sudden death of her beloved, miserably married lover. Because their blissful 13-year affair was a secret, there is no one she can turn to in her grief. Her boss, a friend of her darling Matthew who condoned their relationship, sets her up with a new project in the museum’s isolated annex, away from prying eyes. He hopes the complex reassembly of a magnificent, mid-19th century automaton of a silver swan will distract and buoy her. He also provides a phenomenally able if unbalanced young assistant, whose spying presence Catherine resents from the get-go. Catherine and the pretty girl lock into exquisitely rendered terse, tense battles over the import and control of their project. [Read the full article...]

The Mechanics of Loving and Grieving

The New York Times Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

Peter Carey has said that he worked backward to create his latest novel, “The Chemistry of Tears.” He assembled an inventory of seemingly unrelated elements that intrigued him, then found ways of stitching them together. On top of it all, he added an eerie sensuality: “I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labor at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells.” That heady blend of sex and death is almost enough to keep the seams from showing.

Mr. Carey’s wild hybrid novels are always intriguing, sometimes transporting, never ordinary. But concocting a narrative out of found objects can be forced and awkward. In the case of “The Chemistry of Tears,” the mixture winds up more mystifying than magical, and all too easy to resist.

Among this book’s ingredients: Engines. Automatons. The BP oil spill. Fairy tales. Charles Babbage, the 19th- century inventor and mathematician who conducted groundbreaking experiments with computing machines. Horology. Cuckoo clocks. A city with a layout shaped like a wheel. And a little German boy who was a child when much of this two-tiered book takes place, but whose name, Benz, still resonates in the auto industry today. [Read the full article...]

Peter Carey’s “The Chemistry of Tears”

The Washington Post Book Review – May 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

Peter Carey’s new novel is about robots. I think. And grief. Yes, I’m positive it’s got something to do with grief. And art restoration, computers and global warming. And possibly space aliens, but don’t quote me on that. The Australian two-time Booker winner, who lives in New York, is one of my all-time favorite novelists. For more than 30 years, he’s published dazzlingly smart stories about con artists and fanatics with deceptions nested inside confusion tied up with madness. But his latest novel pulls those strings of madness a little too tight to unpack. It took me back to A.S. Byatt’s “The Biographer’s Tale,” which tried to re-create for us the bafflement of confronting jumbled notes, and succeeded.

“The Chemistry of Tears” starts in 2010, but, like the best of Carey’s fiction, it slips into the 19th century. Catherine Gehrig is a conservator at an “almost-secret” museum in London who’s just learned that her lover of 13 years — a married colleague — has died of a heart attack. As her cloistered grief threatens to overwhelm her, her boss offers an unusual salve: a box of rusted parts from some kind of automaton circa 1854. In need of painstaking restoration, it’s a complex project that might distract Catherine from mourning and garner some flashy publicity for the museum when she’s done. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Sweeping from the Central European countryside just before World War II to Paris to contemporary Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I Am Forbidden brings to life four generations of one Satmar family.

Opening in 1939 Transylvania, five-year-old Josef witnesses the murder of his family by the Romanian Iron Guard and is rescued by a Gentile maid to be raised as her own son. Five years later, Josef rescues a young girl, Mila, after her parents are killed while running to meet the Rebbe they hoped would save them. Josef helps Mila reach Zalman Stern, a leader in the Satmar community, in whose home Mila is raised as a sister to Zalman’s daughter, Atara. As the two girls mature, Mila’s faith intensifies, while her beloved sister Atara discovers a world of books and learning that she cannot ignore. With the rise of communism in central Europe, the family moves to Paris, to the Marais, where Zalman tries to raise his children apart from the city in which they live.

When the two  girls come of age, Mila marries within the faith, while Atara continues to question fundamentalist doctrine. The different choices the two sisters makes force them apart until a dangerous secret threatens to banish them from the only community they’ve ever known.

A beautifully crafted, emotionally gripping story of what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law, and centuries of tradition collide, I Am Forbidden announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new voice and opens a startling window on a world long closed to most of us, until now.

About Anouk Markovits

ANOUK MARKOVITS was raised in France in a Satmar home, breaking from the fold when she was nineteen to avoid an arranged marriage. She went on to receive a Bachelor of Science from Columbia University, a Master of Architecture from Harvard, and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell. Her first novel, Pur Coton, written in French, was published by Gallimard. I Am Forbidden is her English-language debut. She lives in New York with her husband.

Editorial Review

French-raised Markovits’ English-language debut opens in Manhattan in 2005 with the meeting of two women: Atara, who, like the author, fled her Hasidic family to avoid an arranged marriage; and Judith, the granddaughter of Atara’s adopted sister, burdened by a cataclysmic secret. Then the clock turns back to Transylvania in 1939, where Josef witnesses the murder of his family and is taken in by a Catholic farmer, and Mila is saved by Josef when her parents are murdered too. Rabbi Stern later rescues Josef and sends him to the U.S. while taking Mila into his own family. Stern’s daughter Atara starts to question her father’s beliefs and expectations, including limited education for women, and also researches a dark episode of Holocaust history involving Mila’s parents and a revered Hasidic rabbi whose escape from Europe may have come at a very high price. When Mila and Josef marry, Atara abandons her family and disappears. The years pass but Mila doesn’t conceive. Finally, when she does, desperate choices have been made by both husband and wife. Decades later, matters come full circle as Judith and Atara choose what matters most. – Kirkus Reviews

Sisters Joined by Tumult, Grown Apart in Time

The New York Times Book Review – May 15, 2012 (Excerpt)

Anouk Markovits was raised a Hasidic Jew in France, but at 19 she fled her community to avoid an arranged marriage. She went on to get a master’s degree in architecture and a Ph.D. in romance studies. “I Am Forbidden,” her first novel in English, centers on two Hasidic sisters: one who leaves, and one who stays, shunning modernity. Given the author’s background, you might assume that this is a story about how one of them is wrecked by her choice.

But the wonder of this elegant, enthralling novel is the beauty Ms. Markovits unearths in the Hasidic community she takes us into. She remains largely nonjudgmental about the most difficult-to-grasp practices of the Satmar sect, while showing how even the most fervent believers struggle with the letter-of-the-law faith.

The involved plot, sweeping across four generations, opens in Transylvania, along the Hungarian-Romanian border, just before World War II. A 5-year-old boy named Josef plays with his little sister, Pearela. He’s just crawled under a table after her and whacked his head when he hears heavy boots clomp into the house. He sees his sister stabbed with a pitchfork. He hears his mother’s screams in the yard, and then it is quiet. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Absently, I threw some fluffy white kernels on the floor for Dante, who snapped them up with his tongue as though he were starving to death, and then looked expectantly up at me for more. He had wolfed down his share of spaghetti earlier, and didn’t complain that the sauce had come out of a jar something he would never have served were he human, as he’s part Italian. I was convinced that he’d had plenty to eat — for a dog. I quickly reminded myself he’d gone through a lot in the past forty-eight hours, and I didn’t blame him for being overly hungry.

Earlier, when I’d arrived, Jena and Tera both had thrown their arms around Dante as soon as they saw him. From all the excitement generated by “the dog,” I was certain that it would be difficult to get them to bed. But they had gone obediently up to bed about an hour after dinner, and I’d read from one of their story books while Dante lay on the floor beside us with his head between his paws. It wasn’t long before the girls had dozed off.

Dante made one of his soft “woof” sounds, startling me, when I quit throwing him popcorn.

“It’s gone,” I said. “See? You ate more than me.” I tipped the empty bowl toward him, and he stuck his head into it, and licked it. I yanked it away from him and set it on the table. He stuck his head in and licked the bowl again.

“No!” I jumped up and grabbed the bowl before he knocked it off the table, and took it into the kitchen, placing it in the sink. Dante followed me the whole way, tail wagging, then followed me back out. He jumped up on the couch with me and knocked me back. I half-giggled and half-grumbled at him for it. He was in a playful mood, and I had to tussle with him some before he settled down. He was a heavy dog, probably a sturdy, solid eighty pounds of muscle. I tried to push him off, but he would have none of it, so I lay there with a large, black dog sprawled half-way on top of me, wondering how this would look if Randy and Constance came through the door just then. At least he hadn’t tried to hump me. He was still a gentleman, even in dog-form.

Then he became uncharacteristically still. I studied him. He looked as if he were going to be sick.

“Oh, God. Don’t be sick all over me,” I said, desperately trying to push him off.

With a loud whimper, his body made a sudden jerk.

“Dante, what’s wrong?” I tried to keep my voice down. The open oak stairs weren’t far from where I sat, and the girls might hear us. I didn’t want them to come down wondering what was happening, and then see something they shouldn’t.

Dante made another heart-wrenching sound, and then something happened. Right in front of me—and on top of me—he shifted. The bones in his body moved with an awful bone crunching sound that made me grit my teeth. I felt his body elongate, then his head reshaped itself, and I actually saw his dog form change, the entire molecular restructuring happening right before my eyes. The next thing I knew I was drenched in something warm and liquid-y. I didn’t understand it. My brain thought blood, but I looked and saw that it was clear, warm, gelatinous liquid.Ewww, yuck!

The jaguar’s eyes glinted, they were a beautiful green with dilated pupils. With his large paws on my chest — much larger than the dog’s — he stared down at me and made a loud purring. I saw his long tail whip around behind him. A moment later, he made another more vicious sound, and I saw a flash of huge, dagger-like teeth. Oh, crap. I hoped he wasn’t hungry. My heart thudded inside my chest. I held my breath as he dipped his head toward me.

Stiffening, I snapped my eyes closed and felt a big, raspy tongue lick up my neck and over my face, again and again. Then, he licked lower, to my chest and arms. I looked to find that he was actually cleaning the viscous liquid off me. Relief flooded me.

“Good kitty,” I said, my voice shaking. I hoped he didn’t sense that he’d scared the pee out of me. They say animals know when you’re frightened of them. I didn’t want the jaguar to become too interested in me.

Very, very slowly, I brought my hand up to his head. He didn’t seem to mind that I touched him as I smoothed my hand over his beautiful, soft fur. This was the first time I’d ever seen him up close and personal as his chosen animal. His coat wasn’t totally black. I could see some iridescent purple coloring as spots, over his body. The bright green eyes contrasted like jewels against black velvet. He was a gorgeous animal. I thought that if I were a lady jaguar I’d be into him. I admonished myself for the devilish ideas that evolved from that one little innocent thought. I never knew what exactly we’d done that first night I had shifted into my Were-animal, and he’d turned into a wolf. For all I knew, we had a fantastic time, werewolf-style.

His tongue slid over my face, not as wetly as a dog’s tongue, it felt like a soft version of a rasp. In fact, I thought he’d taken some skin with it from the way it had felt. Nothing like getting exfoliated by a jaguar.

“Damn it, Dante, get off me. You’re heavy!” He was. I thought he must weigh in at two hundred pounds of cat easily. If he were a wild cat, he’d have chowed down on me right there in my brother’s living room.

Then, something happened, and I saw the cat throw its head back and let out a loud, primal screech. Stunned, I pressed myself back, beyond imagining what more terrifying might occur at this point.

Again, I felt his body shift. The icky bone crunching, sliding sounds associated with his shifting filled my ears. Once again, the warm liquid coated me. While my feminine side was worried about cleaning up the yuck, my more logical side wondered what animal he had shifted into, and worried it would eat me because it would undoubtedly be hungry after shifting so many times in such a short time.

I heard a gasping above me, felt strands of silk touching my skin at my neck and face. I realized I had shut my eyes and now opened them to look up into Dante’s face. The silk had been his beautiful long black hair, only, it was wet with the slime.

I pulled in a sharp sound of marvel. “Oh, my God! You’re back!” I shrieked, grasping his face in my hands. I wanted to pull him into a fierce hug, but first things first.

I was suddenly aware that I had a naked man on top of me — his eyes tightly closed and his face pulled into a grimace as though still feeling the effects of shifting — but a naked man. No matter what, an animal on top of me would have been a whole lot easier to explain away — naked man, not so easy. I feared that one, or both girls could be spying on us right at that moment, and I strained my neck to scan the stairs. I didn’t see any little pair of hands on the open railings, no little faces peering out at us. I eased out a sigh of relief — we were okay, for now.

Dante lifted himself up on elbows and knees, and looked down at himself as though checking to make sure all his equipment was intact. It was, I assure you, and he was awfully glad to be with me, and that one detail was not lost on me, believe me.

“Oh, hell,” he groaned as his body sagged back down, and his head rested on my shoulder. I was awash with the shifting goo again.

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

In the third novel from the bestselling female writer in Sweden—and for the first time in English—the mysterious drowning of a little girl threatens to tear apart the town of Fjallbacka.

The remote resort town of Fjallbacka has seen its share of tragedy, though perhaps none worse than that of the little girl found in a fisherman’s net. But this was no accidental drowning . . .

Local detective Patrik Hedstrom has just become a father. It’s his grim task to discover who could be behind the murder of a child both he and his partner Erica knew well. What he does not know is how this case will reach into the dark heart of Fjallbacka, spanning generations, ripping aside its idyllic façade,perhaps forever.

About Camilla Läckberg

Camilla Läckberg worked as an economist in Stockholm until a course in creative writing triggered a drastic career change. Her novels have all become #1 bestsellers in Sweden. Her thriller The Ice Princess, winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for Best International Crime Novel, has been published in over twenty-five countries. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and five children.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Now that his live-in girlfriend, writer Erica Falck, has presented him with a child, Patrik Hedström ought to be finding a better balance between his personal and professional responsibilities. But his sympathies as both father and cop are demanded by the murder of Sara Klinga, the daughter of Erica’s new friend Charlotte. Who would dump a seven-year-old near a wharf after drowning her, according to forensic evidence, in a bathtub? As Patrik surveys the wreckage of Sara’s extended family, from the pathological philandering of Charlotte’s husband, Dr. Niclas Klinga, to the unaccountable cruelty of Niclas’ mother Lilian Florin, whose name Niclas rejected in favor of his wife’s upon his marriage, Läckberg (The Ice Princess, 2010, etc.) parcels out hints of the tragedy’s roots in the loveless marriage some 75 years ago between flirtatious heiress Agnes Stjernkvist and Anders Andersson, the stonecutter she’d captivated and planned to leave before her father discovered her pregnancy and forced the couple to wed. Meanwhile, back in the present, Patrik and his mostly incompetent colleagues on the Tanumshede police force focus their suspicions on imperious Lilian, who seems to loathe everyone but Stig, the bedridden husband she nurses so assiduously; Kaj Wiberg, the neighbor with whom she’s long feuded over every pretext she can find; and Kaj’s son Morgan, a computer game designer with Asperger’s Syndrome who’d be poorly equipped to take the air even in a much sunnier spot than Fjällbacka. – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: ‘The Stonecutter’ by Camilla Lackberg

The Washington Post Book Review – May 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

It’s got to be something in the fjord water. Or maybe lingonberries are an unacknowledged superfood. How else to explain all the superlative Swedish crime writers who have swarmed into the mystery arena since the mid-1960s? Indeed, the greatest unsolved mystery in the mystery world is no longer what happened to Agatha Christie during her 11-day disappearance in 1926, but, rather, “What’s up with the Swedes?”

And, speaking of Dame Agatha, here’s a young Swedish writer who’s being hailed as “the Swedish Agatha Christie.” Purists out there will snort in derision, but Camilla Lackberg is very, very good. Her novels are outselling those of her late countryman Stieg Larsson, and if she keeps producing mysteries as richly textured and downright breathtaking as her latest, “The Stonecutter,” who knows? Maybe, one day, we might be identifying Agatha Christie as “the British Camilla Lackberg.”

“The Stonecutter” is one of those mysteries that ruin a vacation. Take it to the beach and your eyes will be so locked on its pages, you’ll never even know there’s an ocean in front of you. There are two primary and at least five subsidiary story lines in this thick novel: All of them have to do with doomed relationships and fatally fractured families; all of them slither seamlessly in and around each other in one big snake pit of warped desire. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee’s surrender, Sam–a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army–decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all “belonged.”

At the same time, Sam’s wife, Tilda, is being forced to walk at gunpoint with her owner and two of his other slaves from the charred remains of his Mississippi farm into Arkansas, in search of an undefined place that would still respect his entitlements as slaveowner and Confederate officer.

The book’s third main character, Prudence, is a fearless, headstrong white woman of means who leaves her Boston home for Buford, Mississippi, to start a school for the former bondsmen, and thus honor her father’s dying wish.

At bottom, Freeman is a love story–sweeping, generous, brutal, compassionate, patient–about the feelings people were determined to honor, despite the enormous constraints of the times. It is this aspect of the book that should ensure it a strong, vocal, core audience of African-American women, who will help propel its likely critical acclaim to a wider audience. At the same time, this book addresses several themes that are still hotly debated today, some 145 years after the official end of the Civil War. Like Cold Mountain, Freeman illuminates the times and places it describes from a fresh perspective, with stunning results. It has the potential to become a classic addition to the literature dealing with this period. Few other novels so powerfully capture the pathos and possibility of the era particularly as it reflects the ordeal of the black slaves grappling with the promise–and the terror–of their new status as free men and women.

About Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. was born and raised in Southern California and now lives in suburban Washington, DC, with his wife and children. He is a columnist for the Miami Herald and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in addition to many other awards. He is also the author of the novel Before I Forget (Agate Bolden, 2009); the collection Forward From this Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009, Daily Triumphs, Tragedies, and Curiosities (Agate Bolden, 2009); and Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood (Agate Bolden, 2006).

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Leonard Pitts has a passion for history and a gift for storytelling. Both shine in this story of love and redemption, which challenges everything we thought we knew about how our nation dealt with its most stubborn stain.” —Gwen Ifill, PBS, author of The Breakthrough

“Post-Civil War America is fertile ground for novelists, but few have tilled it with such grace and majesty as Leonard Pitts. In Freeman, Pitts weaves a beguiling, cinematic love story against a rich tapestry of American history, evoking unforgettable characters in a narrative that could easily replace a shelf of textbooks. What a splendid read!” —Herb Boyd, co-editor of By Any Means Necessary—Malcolm X: Real, not Reinvented

“Leonard Pitts, Hr. crafts a novel as well as the great storytellers of our time. Freeman captured my attention from the very first sentence and my heart throughout. Sam and Tilda will stay with me for a very long time. I can’t let them go.” —Sybil Wilkes, The Tom Joyner Radio Show

‘Freeman’: A Liberated Slave In Search Of Family

NPR Book Review – May 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

In Freeman, Pitts explores the turbulent and violent time after the official end of war and assassination of President Lincoln. He draws from historical classifieds to emphasize the steadfast efforts of freed slaves looking to reconnect with their loved ones. Pitts tells NPR’s Audie Cornish that most people weren’t aware of what was going on at the time.

“To me, it’s such a fascinating and little known fact that all of these African-Americans newly freed slaves went to such lengths to reconstitute their marriages and reconstitute their families,” he says.

“Nobody really talks about this, but you’ve got — 20 years after the war — people placing ads and walking across counties and states. And I just liked the idea of using real ads to emphasize that this was a real story. These were real people who were looking for their loved ones.”

At the center of the novel is a love story. Sam Freeman, a liberated slave, embarks on a 1,000-mile journey to Mississippi in search of his wife Tilda. As Sam travels through the South, he encounters many different stories: slaves who are searching for their families, masters who won’t give loved ones back and slaves who are killed on their way out of the South.

With these anecdotes, Pitts wanted to recognize the struggle of freed slaves by “giving the full dimension” of their story. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The majestic and haunting beauty of the Italian Alps is the setting of the first meeting of Enza, a practical beauty, and Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, who meet as teenagers, despite growing up in villages just a few miles apart. At the turn of the last century, when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal, he is banished from his village and sent to hide in America as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Little Italy. Without explanation, he leaves a bereft Enza behind. Soon, Enza’s family faces disaster and she, too, is forced to go to America with her father to secure their future.

Unbeknownst to one another, they both build fledgling lives in America, Ciro masters shoemaking and Enza takes a factory job in Hoboken until fate intervenes and reunites them. But it is too late: Ciro has volunteered to serve in World War I and Enza, determined to forge a life without him, begins her impressive career as a seamstress at the Metropolitan Opera House that will sweep her into the glamorous salons of Manhattan and into the life of the international singing sensation, Enrico Caruso.

From the stately mansions of Carnegie Hill, to the cobblestone streets of Little Italy, over the perilous cliffs of northern Italy, to the white-capped lakes of northern Minnesota, these star-crossed lovers meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever.

Lush and evocative, told in tantalizing detail and enriched with lovable, unforgettable characters, The Shoemaker’s Wife is a portrait of the times, the places and the people who defined the immigrant experience, claiming their portion of the American dream with ambition and resolve, cutting it to fit their needs like the finest Italian silk.

This riveting historical epic of love and family, war and loss, risk and destiny is the novel Adriana Trigiani was born to write, one inspired by her own family history and the love of tradition that has propelled her body of bestselling novels to international acclaim. Like Lucia, Lucia, The Shoemaker’s Wife defines an era with clarity and splendor, with operatic scope and a vivid cast of characters who will live on in the imaginations of readers for years to come.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Adriana Trigiani

Adriana Trigiani is an award-winning playwright, television writer, and documentary filmmaker. The author of the bestselling Big Stone Gap series, Very Valentine; Brava, Valentine; Lucia, Lucia; The Queen of the Big Time; andRococo, she has also written the best-selling memoir Don’t Sing at the Table as well as the young adult novels Viola in Reel Life and Viola in the Spotlight. Her books have been published in 36 countries around the world. She has written and will direct the big screen version of her first novel, Big Stone Gap. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Editorial Review

A portrait of early 20th-century Italian immigration, the story starts with two children in the Italian Alps. In one mountain village, serious, hardworking Enza lives with her large family; in another, rascal Ciro and his brother Eduardo are orphans at the convent. When 16-year-old Ciro travels to Enza’s village to dig the grave of her little sister, the two meet for the first time, and Enza falls in love. But soon after, Ciro is sent to America (he caught the priest kissing a girl) to apprentice as a shoemaker. Trigiani’s novels often bask in Italian culture, and this latest is no exception, taking place during the great wave of Italian immigration. New York’s Little Italy is a joyous place, and handsome, outgoing Ciro fits right in. A few years later, Enza and her father go to America (just to make enough money to dig their family out of poverty), and Ciro and Enza briefly meet again. Enza, a talented seamstress, first works in a factory, and then finds her way to becoming a costumer at the Metropolitan Opera House. Life at the Met is a dream for Enza as she works for the great Caruso. Meanwhile, World War I has begun and Ciro leaves behind his comfortable life at the shop (and all the beauties) on Mulberry Street to enlist. In the trenches, he dreams about Enza (though why he never bothered with her before is unclear) while she is getting ready to marry another. Love wins out as Ciro and Enza marry then move to Minnesota to start a business and a family. Much more happens, but Trigiani’s wide rush of plot hardly makes up for a dull heroine and a novel filled with workaday prose. – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: Romantic journey with ‘The Shoemaker’s Wife,’ by Adriana Trigiani

The Washington Post Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Inspired by the lives of her own grandparents, who came to America from northern Italy in the early 20th century, Adriana Trigiani’s “The Shoemaker’s Wife” might be considered the ur-story behind her string of heartwarming family sagas. Free from the high-fashion brand names that infested the past couple of novels, this one is an old-fashioned, romantic tale of two star-tangled lovers, Enza Ravanelli and Ciro Lazzari. Beginning in the Italian Alps, the story travels by various routes to New York’s Little Italy, a Hoboken factory, backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, Minnesota’s Iron Range and the trenches of France. A love story, yes, but also a paean to artisanal work, food, friendship and family.

Ciro lives with his brother, Eduardo, in a convent in the town of Bergamo, deposited there when Ciro was 10 by their mother, who promised to return but did not. Although the sorrow and mystery of this abandonment are a constant presence in their hearts, the boys have made a good life with the nuns. Eduardo serves as secretary, accountant and calligrapher, and Ciro spends his days “tending the fireplaces, milking the cow, churning the butter, twisting fresh braids of scamorza cheese, chopping wood, shoveling coal, washing windows, scrubbing floors.” [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

A stunning debut reminiscent of the beloved novels of John Hart and Tom Franklin, A Land More Kind Than Home is a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small western North Carolina town.

For a curious boy like Jess Hall, growing up in Marshall means trouble when your mother catches you spying on grown-ups. Adventurous and precocious, Jess is enormously protective of his older brother, Christopher, a mute whom everyone calls Stump. Though their mother has warned them not to snoop, Stump can’t help sneaking a look at something he’s not supposed to—an act that will have catastrophic repercussions, shattering both his world and Jess’s. It’s a wrenching event that thrusts Jess into an adulthood for which he’s not prepared. While there is much about the world that still confuses him, he now knows that a new understanding can bring not only a growing danger and evil—but also the possibility of freedom and deliverance as well.

Told by three resonant and evocative characters—Jess; Adelaide Lyle, the town midwife and moral conscience; and Clem Barefield, a sheriff with his own painful past—A Land More Kind Than Home is a haunting tale of courage in the face of cruelty and the power of love to overcome the darkness that lives in us all. These are masterful portrayals, written with assurance and truth, and they show us the extraordinary promise of this remarkable first novel.

About Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches English at Bethany College. He lives with his wife in West Virginia. This is his first novel.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Cash’s debut novel explores Faulkner-O’Connor country, a place where folks endure a hard life by clinging to God’s truths echoing from hardscrabble churches. With Southern idiom as clear as crystal mountain air, Cash weaves the narrative from multiple threads. Jess Hall is the 9-year-old son of Ben and Julie and beloved younger brother of gentle Stump, his mute, autistic sibling. Clem Barefield is county sheriff, a man with a moral code as tough, weathered and flexible as his gun belt. Adelaide Lyle, once a midwife, is now community matriarch of simple faith and solid conscience. Carson Chambliss is pastor of River Road Church of Christ. He has caught Stump spying, peering into the bedroom of his mother Julie, while she happened to be entertaining the amoral pastor. Julie may have lapsed into carnal sin, but she is also a holy fool. Chambliss convinces Julie to bring Stump to the church to be cured by the laying on of hands. There, Stump suffers a terrible fate. Cash’s characters are brilliant: Chambliss, scarred by burns, is as remorseless as one of his rattle snakes; Addie, loyal to the old ways, is still strong enough to pry the church’s children away from snake-handling services; Barefield is gentle, empathetic and burdened by tragedy. Stump’s brother Jess is appealingly rendered—immature, confused and feeling responsible for and terrified by the evil he senses and sees around him. As lean and spare as a mountain ballad, Cash’s novel resonates perfectly, so much so that it could easily have been expanded to epic proportions. – Kirkus Reviews

Wiley Cash’s ’A Land More Kind Than Home’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

In the harrowing opening scene of Wiley Cash’s compelling first novel, “A Land More Kind Than Home,” the minister at the River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following takes up a copperhead, prays over it and hands it to an elderly church member, who holds it “like a baby” to show the strength of her faith. The snake strikes her twice, the second time sinking its fangs into her hand so deeply that the preacher and two deacons have to pry it loose. Thereafter, she’s carried away and left to die alone in the tomato patch behind her house. This is the first, though by no means last, instance in which the charismatic minister, Carson Chambliss, a man with a shady past, turns faith into a deadly weapon.

Like his fellow North Carolinian Ron Rash, Cash adeptly captures the rhythms of Appalachian speech, narrating his atmospheric novel in the voices of three characters: 81-year-old Adelaide Lyle, who represents the moral conscience of the community; the adolescent Jess Hall, who has a dangerous knack for discovering things adults would rather keep hidden; and the middle-aged sheriff Clem Barefield, who has never recovered from a loss he suffered years ago. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

I should give up reviewing books, and I am sure, after this review is done, I won’t receive any more free copies. My problem is, I am a publisher myself, and I compare whatever I read with the writing of my authors, and my authors come up (yet again) on top.

Needless to say, but I consider my reading the first 60 or so pages of Lis Wiehl’s Eyes of Justice a waste of time. Yes, I gave up after 60 pages, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Sorry, but I am not a hardcore Lis Wiehl fan. As a matter of fact, I’d never heard of her (excuse my ignorance) until I received a review copy, but I was looking forward to a good read.

From the inside flap:

Cassidy, Allison, and Nicole fight for justice everyday–Cassidy as a crime reporter, Nicole as an FBI agent, and Allison as a federal prosecutor. Together they’re a Triple Threat to be reckoned with. A force that, together, has solved the toughest mysteries.

Until a ruthless killer finds a way to isolate and murder one of the three.

When the authorities keep the survivors at arm’s length in the investigation, the women’s desire for justice goes into overdrive. They find an unexpected ally in a quirky private investigator named Ophelia whose unorthodox methods seem to offer a possible breakthrough in the case.

Yet just as the police appear to have the killer in custody and justice within sight, the murderer strikes again. Not knowing whom to trust, the team must engage in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse where nothing can be taken at face value…and nothing will ever be the same.

A riveting Triple Threat mystery that will leave readers shocked and satisfied.

Well, I am shocked, but unsatisfied, because that description alone contains three incomplete sentences and one sentence ending with a preposition.

But, first of all, let’s have a look at the book itself: It is a hardcover with text printed in large fonts with double spacing, apparently in an attempt to pump up the spine size to 308 pages where 200 would have been sufficient. The price: A mere $26.99, meaning, in combination with the sloppy writing style, it’s a rip-off.

Let me quote the first paragraph:

When the authorities questioned Channel Four’s receptionist later about the phone call, Marcey King couldn’t recall a single distinguishing characteristic about the voice of the person who had made it. Age, accent, attitude–all she could remember was that it belonged to a man. A man insisting that he had to speak to Cassidy Shaw, the TV station’s crime reporter.

- Source: Eyes of Justice by Lis Wiehl with April Henry

Sorry, but “A man insisting that he had to speak to Cassidy Shaw, the TV station’s crime reporter.” is not a complete sentence. However, this is one of the not-quite-so-bad sentences. There are worse examples. Really. There are. Examples. Yes, I am kidding, but it represents the sloppy writing style. And yes, as an author you can take some liberties. Some. But not. All the time.

Well, let’s keep an open mind and say that this is just Lis Wiehl’s (with April Henry’s) writing style, and let’s assume that this is not entirely Ms. Wiehl’s work but merely her brain-child completed by Ms. Henry. It has been done before (Tom Clancy comes to mind) , but it is also a certain sign of declining quality due to lack of authenticity and originality.

Add to this the similarities to James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club or Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles, and it becomes clear that someone is copying ideas and scraping a story line for the purpose of raking in the money. The victims are those people who actually spend $26.99 – Amazon has already reduced the price by 39% to get the price into a competitive range, and that may be what the publisher had in mind. It’s a common trick to keep the profit high.

All this wouldn’t be so bad wasn’t there the more-than-boring story line. After 60 pages (possibly more, but I didn’t get there) TV reporter Cassidy Shaw was still dead and… well, nothing more. There was no substance, no tension, no surprises, but plenty of “fillers.” “Fillers” are  those words that extend a sentence with a number of fitting, but effectively unnecessary words, you know those words that provide more substance, but could be left out, because you already got the meaning, but it needs to be emphasized to fit more words into the novel and reach the much desired minimum of 300 pages that the industry considers a standard… Did you get that? Imagine a book full of such sentences, and you get the picture. But again. There are. Incomplete Sentences. All over the book.

I am sure, somewhere in the book comes the big twist, the big surprise, but it’s probably like a firework that ends after a mere ten seconds. After all, there are not enough pages left to get you on a roller coaster ride. Again. Sloppy Work. Boring.

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the “landscape of the dispossessed” with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose” (Nobel Prize Committee)

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers’ trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.

Müller has distilled Leo’s struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man’s soul.

About Herta Müller

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Editorial Review

Müller was born in 1953 and raised in a German-speaking enclave of Romania. In 1945 the Red Army had deported thousands from these enclaves to forced labor camps on the Russian steppe. Years later, the recollections of one of the former deportees inspired her to write this novel. Her narrator, 17-year-old Leo Auberg, has just started having sex with men in the park, fearfully, risking jail; when the soldiers come calling, he’s glad to escape his watchful small town. That gladness disappears on the cattle cars. Dignity goes too, as the deportees are ordered off the train to do their business in a snowy field. What follows are dozens of short sections as Leo riffs on conditions in the camp. He will do different kinds of work: unloading coal, servicing the boilers, loading pitch in a trench. That last assignment is life-threatening, but before he succumbs to a fever Leo notes that “the air shimmered, like an organza cape made of glass dust.” The poetic sensibility sets the novel apart. There is a much-hated adjutant, a German like themselves, but it is hunger, death’s henchman, that is their greatest adversary. Leo fights it in practical ways: begging door to door, saving or trading his bread (echoes of Solzhenitsyn). But he also uses a kind of reverse psychology when he calls this devil hunger an angel. The inversion is crucial to Leo’s morale and survival. Keep the enemy off balance. Flatter him; be gallant. This may sound whimsical, but there is steel in the writing. – Kirkus Review

Haunted By ‘Hunger’ In The Soviet Gulag

NPR Book Review – May 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that I had not read Herta Muller for a number of reasons before the appearance of Nadirs, her brilliant collection of short takes about a family of German-speakers living in the Romanian countryside. I don’t know that I would have picked it up if Muller, a Romanian-born writer who works in German, had not won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. I can tell you I was pretty happy that I did. Nadirs was — is — a terrific work of short fiction, showing off Muller’s powers as a world-class creator of fiction driven by visionary power. I was ready when her latest novel, The Hunger Angel, arrived in the mail. It’s a latecomer to the crowd of books written about internment during World War II — doubly so, because the war ends when the internment of the main character begins.

Young (and gay) Leo Auberg, aRomanian-born of German descent, is 17 when the Nazis are defeated. He is arrested in a sweep by the occupying Soviets to find indentured laborers for Russia’s coal and mineral industry. From January 1945 until the beginning of 1950, Leo works from before sunrise to after dark shoveling coal, hauling concrete and lugging bricks. He is consistently overworked and underfed — haunted by chronic hunger, or what he calls “the hunger angel” who lurks, and looking for an opportunity to seize him and pull him over into the darkness of death. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself.

Hedged in by her parents’ genteel country life, she plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who wears duck-egg blue ties and introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, post-war Soho. She learns to be a reporter, to know art and artists, to embrace her life fully and with a deep love at the center of it. She creates many lives–all of them unconventional. And when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn’t hesitate to have the baby on her own terms.

Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily navigates the first weeks of motherhood. She doesn’t recognize herself: she finds herself walking outside with no shoes; she goes to the restaurant for lunch at nine in the morning; she can’t recall the small matter of giving birth. But for her boyfriend, Ted, fatherhood is calling up lost memories, with images he cannot place.

As Ted’s memories become more disconcerting and more frequent, it seems that something might connect these two stories– these two women– something that becomes all the more heartbreaking and beautiful as they all hurtle toward its revelation.

The Hand That First Held Mine is a spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood. Like her acclaimed The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, it is a “breathtaking, heart-breaking creation.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Maggie O’Farrell

MAGGIE O’FARRELL is the author of four previous novels, including the acclaimed The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which was a B&N Recommends Pick, and After You’d Gone. Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland. She has two children.

Editorial Reviews

O’Farrell (TheVanishing Act of Esme Lennox) interweaves two seemingly unconnected stories—that of Lexie Sinclair, living in post-WWII London, and Elina Vilkuna, a denizen of present-day London. Lexie is a rebellious 21-year-old, and when she meets handsome and sophisticated Innes Kent, she realizes he’s the one who can help her find the adventure and excitement she craves. Their affair coincides with her moving up in the ranks at the magazine he edits, but a tragedy changes Lexie’s life forever. Fifty-odd years later, Elina, a painter, faces her own struggles: she recently had a son with her boyfriend, Ted, and, after a rough child-birth, Ted and Elina struggle to recalibrate their relationship as it evolves into parenthood. While O’Farrell brings Lexie to life, she does not achieve the same with Elina and Ted, who come across as just another bland couple facing the challenges of having a child. The two plots are, naturally, connected, but the contemporary plot doesn’t really get moving until too late in the book. If the contemporary storyline was developed half as well as the historical plot, this would be a wonderful book. As it is, it feels lighter than it should. – Publishers Weekly

Lexie Sinclair longs to escape her rigid upbringing in the English countryside. So she rebels — finding a lover, moving to London and becoming a journalist. But when she has a baby we see the focus of her life change, her independence eroding. Leaving the house each morning “she senses a thread that runs between her and her son … unspooling bit by bit” so that by the end of the day she is “unraveled, almost mad with desire to be back with him.” Intercut with Lexie’s story we follow a present-day couple, Elina and Ted, in the days and weeks after the traumatic birth of their first baby. Maggie O’Farrell perfectly captures the first-time-parent’s sense of the earth tilting. For Ted, fatherhood evokes deep, mysteriously fragmented memories of his own early childhood. In the end, these two stories come together and show the strength of the bond between mother and child. – NPR Book Review

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

New York, 1933. The city and the nation are in the depths of the Great Depression. The crime families of New York have prospered in this time, but with the coming end of Prohibition, a battle is looming that will determine which organizations will rise and which will face a violent end.

For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important that his family’s future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father’s true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny-17 years-old, impatient and reckless-wants something else: To follow in his father’s footsteps and become a part of the real family business.

An exhilarating and profound novel of tradition and violence, of loyalty and betrayal, The Family Corleone will appeal to the legions of fans who can never get enough of The Godfather, as well as introduce it to a whole new generation.

About Ed Falco

Ed Falco is the author of three novels, four story collections, and numerous plays, poems, essays, and critical reviews. Among his many awards and honors are an NEA fiction fellowship, and the Southern Review‘s Robert Penn Warren Prize. He is a professor of English at Virginia Tech, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Playing around in the Godfather universe is a tightrope act. The original novel is a pulpy, popular synthesis of influences, while its film adaptation is a timeless classic. The video games are slushy Grand Theft Auto knock-offs, and Mark Winegardner’s sequels are labyrinthine marathons with epic casts. This time, the franchise falls back on more workmanlike writer Falco (Saint John of the Five Boroughs, 2009, etc.), who reels the story back to its roots though moments resurrected from unproduced scripts by Mario Puzo. It’s 1933, and the Don is at the height of his power. Peter Clemenza is Vito’s capo and Genco Abbandando remains consigliere. Michael and Fredo squabble underfoot but it’s Sonny’s explosive temper that film fans will recognize. Meanwhile, dutiful college student Tom Hagen is having a harmless fling—that turns out to be not so harmless when psychotic Luca Brasi decides to kill Tom for messing with his broad. In other boroughs, Giuseppe Mariposa conspires with Emilio Barzini and Phillip Tattaglia in his slow tango with the Corleones, while a pair of Irish brothers adds a new element to this dangerous mix. What works well is Falco’s depiction of Vito Corleone, which captures both the cool reserve of young Vito and the insight he demonstrates as Don. “To understand the truth of things,” he cautions Sonny, “you have to judge both the man and the circumstances. You have to use both your brains and your heart. That’s what it’s like in a world where men lie as a matter of course—and there is no other kind of world, Santino, at least not here on earth.” More obsessive fans also get a reveal about a member of the Don’s family, as well as a juicy unveiling of Luca Brasi’s back story pulled from The Godfather. – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: ‘The Family Corleone,’ by Ed Falco, a prequel to ‘The Godfather’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Mario Puzo (1920-99) was one of 12 children born in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen to two illiterate Neapolitan immigrants. Puzo graduated from City College, loved the novels of Dostoyevsky and in his 20s began writing stories for pulp magazines. He published two little-noticed novels, and then, in his late 30s, deeply in debt (he gambled) and with a wife and five children, he set out for entirely mercenary reasons to write a novel about the Mafia, an organization about which he knew almost nothing.

I remember reading “The Godfather” when it was published in 1969. Like millions of others, I couldn’t put it down. Puzo had drawn brilliantly on the pulps and Dostoyevsky to create a crime story like no other. His powerful narrative carried violence to shocking new levels (even horses weren’t safe). Most strikingly, in Puzo’s fictional universe, leaders of the Mafia, previously regarded as ignorant, homicidal thugs, were transformed into men of honor, men of respect, American businessmen who were sometimes obliged to do harm to others, although the best of them, such as Puzo’s Don Vito Corleone, deeply regretted that necessity. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Vampire’s Ascending & Vampire’s Trill – by Lorelei Bell

I had won Vampire’s Trill in a contest so when it came and I realized it was the second book, I went out and got the first. Well, I read them both within a day of each other because they are just so well written with a lot to the story that keeps you involved.

Sabrina (Brie) has been a Touch Clairvoyant since she was born and no that does not mean she has a little clairvoyance, it means that her ability comes through touch. Consistently having to wear gloves in your everyday life can bring on questions, stares and other such things making you feel out place, but better to feel odd than to go into trances from touching things with too much memory to them. Only recently seperated from a scumbag who had cheated on her and looking for a job, Brie decides that working for a vampire might just be the right way to go. The world doesn’t know about vampires and neither should she except that she had known since she was ten when her mother had said one final goodbye that vampires were real and her mother was one.

The night of the interview would be the night that seemed to start everything for Brie, though she would have no clue that had been in motion for a very long time. Before even making it to the interview an attack alters the way things would have gone down and Brie is thrust directly into a world not only full of vampires but shifters, werewolves, elves, leprechauns, demons, and witches. Crooked schemes and betrayals are abundant when everyone wants more power than they have and only a few people around can be trusted. But who can Brie trust? Can she trust in Nicholas the vampire who is in charge of her area and who hired her or Liam and Heath who are to watch over her? With so many players in the picture can everyone be trusted or has the inner circle been infiltrated?

With everything going down and things in their current situation even the one person Brie knows she can trust for sure can’t be there for her and what’s worse is her believing he could fix it. Dante had become a lot to her since they had met and now things even with him couldn’t be the same. It almost seemed as if no relationship was clicking just right, not friends or lovers. Still, trying to stay alive and getting things back to normal would have to take top priority over everything. Not to mention finding out who had been brain behind the master plan but would there be a way to put things right?

I know that none of the character names I have mentioned mean a thing to you now but they will. Lorelei is great at getting you involved with her characters and sucking you into their world. While you can see some influence of other writers the story is uniquely all her own and wonderfully written. Another thing you notice is that are a lot of characters to get to know in these two books but the really cool thing is you dont find yourself getting confused because there is enough character involvement and background (current story) that you get to know who all the players are without the overlong simple description. In fact one thing you dont see in this book is simple description. Lorelei shows you the world she creates she doesn’t just tell you about it. These are two really great reads that I think a lot people can enjoy. Not for the young readers though, there are a few adult scenes:)

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

A delightfully funny novel packing a clever punch, from the author of the New York Times bestselling Julie and Rome

A mom in her early fifties, Clover knows she no longer turns heads the way she used to, and she’s only really missed when dinner isn’t on the table on time. Then Clover wakes up one morning to discover she’s invisible–truly invisible. She panics, but when her husband and son sit down to dinner, nothing is amiss. Even though she’s been with her husband, Arthur, since college, her condition goes unnoticed. Her friend Gilda immediately observes that Clover is invisible, which relieves Clover immensely–she’s not losing her mind after all!–but she is crushed by the realization that neither her husband nor her children ever truly look at her.  She was invisible even before she knew she was invisible.

Clover discovers that there are other women like her, women of a certain age who seem to have disappeared.  As she uses her invisibility to get to know her family and her town better, Clover leads the way in helping invisible women become recognized and appreciated no matter what their role.  Smart and hilarious, with indomitable female characters, Calling Invisible Women will appeal to anyone who has ever felt invisible.

About Jeanne Ray

Jeanne Ray worked as a registered nurse for forty years before she wrote her first novel at the age of sixty. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and her dog, Red. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Julie and Romeo, Julie and Romeo Get Lucky, Eat Cake, and Step-Ball-Change.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

A former reporter turned full-time doctor’s wife and mother of two adult children, Clover Hobart had pretty much made her peace with the fact that her wow factor had been turned down a few notches. Nothing, however, prepared her for the shock of waking up one morning to discover that she was invisible—full-blown, H.G. Wells, science-fiction invisible. Trouble is, nobody noticed. Talk about adding insult to injury. Luckily, Clover sees an ad inviting invisible women to meet at the local Sheraton, and suddenly she’s thrust into an amorphous support group who determine that their common denominator is a postmenopausal cocktail of hormone replacement, bone loss, and antianxiety medications. Wearing their newfound invisibility like a shield of invincibility, Clover and company tackle the drug company responsible for this travesty and in the process begin repairing relationships that might have helped them disappear in the first place. Women of a certain age will devour Ray’s sly satire on the perils of big pharma, middle age, and the unseen consequences of living the quiet life. - Carol Haggas, Booklist

“Women of a certain age will devour Ray’s sly satire on the perils of big pharma, middle age, and the unseen consequences of living the quiet life.” –Booklist

“Offers a lot of witty charm.” –Kirkus

“Jeanne Ray is truly wise and funny about family, friendship, and love—about the ways in which we see (and don’t see) each other.  Calling Invisible Women is an utter delight.” –Hilma Wolitzer

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

She was the most famous woman in America. And nobody knew who she was.

It is 1850. Margaret Fuller–feminist, journalist, orator, and “the most famous woman in America”–is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. She is bringing home with her an Italian husband, the Count Ossoli, and their two-year-old son. But this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controversy. When the ship founders in a hurricane off Long Island and Fuller and her small family drown, her friends back home, Emerson and others of the Transcendentalist Concord circle, send Henry David Thoreau to the wreck in hopes of recovering her last book manuscript. He comes back declaring himself empty-handed–but actually he has found a private and revealing document, a confession in letters, of a strong and beloved woman’s life like no other in the 19th century. Her account of the life of the mind and body, of experiences in Rome under siege, of dangerous childbirth and great physical and moral courage–are eventually revealed to her one reader, Thoreau’s youngest sister, Anne

What does one sensitive but ordinary woman makes of a publicly disgraced woman like Fuller, and how do women make use of what they learn from other women? Miss Fuller is a historical novel that also poses timeless questions about how we see and treat the exceptional and dangerous agents of change among us. And it shows the price that any one person might pay, who strives to change the world for the better.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About April Bernard

April Bernard is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Her first novel, Pirate Jenny, was published in 1990; her most recent collection of poems is Romanticism (W.W. Norton, June 2009). Her previous poetry collections are Blackbird Bye Bye,Psalms, and Swan Electric. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books,The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and Slate. She has taught widely and was for many years a magazine and book editor in New York City. Her honors include a Guggenheim award, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whitney Humanities Fellowship at Yale University, a Sidney Harman Fellowship, and the Stover Prize. She joined the English Department faculty at Skidmore in 2009 as Director of Creative Writing and is also on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. The author lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Editorial Review

Bernard (Romanticism: Poems, 2009, etc.) juxtaposes two lives, two paths taken by very different 19th-century women, one conventional and the other extraordinary. Attending one of Margaret Fuller’s famed Conversations, Anne Thoreau, Henry’s adopted younger sister, is first preoccupied by her own plain dress and awkward manners. Yet Anne is quickly entranced by the charismatic Fuller with her bold call to each woman to embrace her inner Minerva, her own feminine wisdom that should stand alongside masculine wisdom. Fuller’s early feminism both attracts and frightens Anne. Indeed, the disapproving eyes of not only conventional society matrons but also her own professed friends, the men of the Transcendentalist Concord circle, shadow her constantly. After serving abroad as one of the first women foreign correspondents, Fuller and her family tragically drown as their ship founders off the coast. Henry rushes to the wreck and finds, among other things, a letter to Sophia Hawthorne. When he contacts the Hawthornes, however, Nathaniel, disturbed by reports of Fuller’s unconventional behavior, refuses to allow Henry to deliver it. Intrigued by the tale, Anne begins to wonder more about Fuller. Only after her children have grown and Henry himself has died does Anne seek out and read Fuller’s heartbreaking letter. The thrill of being an intrepid reporter, Anne discovers, is tempered by financial strains and illness. The price is steep, yet Fuller’s accounts of love and adventure justify the cost of her unconventional life, making her watery death much more tragic. – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: ‘Miss Fuller’ by April Bernard

The Washington Post Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

Our founding fathers and mothers of American literature mostly made their home in Concord, Mass., during the middle of the 19th century, and besotted English majors have told stories about them over the years:

Nathaniel Hawthorne courting one of the beauteous Peabody sisters and writing their initials in a window with a diamond to confirm their love for eternity (tourists can still find his scratching there today); Henry David Thoreau living on the shores of Walden Pond but hauling his laundry home for his mother to wash; and Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson, sitting on a tree stump waiting for intellectuals to stroll by so that he might snare them in endless conversation, which meant that intellectuals got a little more exercise, nimbly staying out of his way.

April Bernard, the director of creative writing at Skidmore College, is the latest in a long line of writers to be beguiled by these thinkers, and in her new historical novel, “Miss Fuller,” she captures them in all their quirky, inspiring and difficult ways. Thanks in good part to Ralph Waldo Emerson, they invented an American moral code and tried to live by it: Plain living and high thinking (which, for some of them, also functioned as a good excuse for being poor). If “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” as Emerson wrote, mightn’t there be other ways to organize “work” so that folks might have ample time to think? [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

Nancy Atherton’s seventeenth cozy mystery featuring the beloved Aunt Dimity-the original paranormal detective

When Amelia Thistle moves to Finch, her new neighbors welcome her with open arms-and inquiring minds. Among them is Lori Shepherd, who isn’t fooled by Amelia’s unassuming persona. Amelia is, in fact, a world-famous artist with a rabid and eager-to-stalk fan base.

In order to keep peace in Finch, Lori must help Amelia conceal her identity. Amelia, meanwhile, sets about working on the riddle that brought her to town in the first place. A fragment of a family diary hints that one of Amelia’s ancestors might have been Mistress Meg, the Mad Witch of Finch. Following the clue, Lori hunts through Finch’s darkest and most secret corners, all the while dodging nosy neighbors and Amelia’s frantic fans. With Aunt Dimity’s otherworldly help, Lori inches closer to the true story of Mistress Meg-and Amelia.

Returning to the charming world of Finch, Nancy Atherton’s latest novel is sure to delight faithful Aunt Dimity readers, Anglophiles, and cozy mystery fans.

About Nancy Atherton

Nancy Atherton is the bestselling author of sixteen other Aunt Dimity mysteries. The first book in the series, Aunt Dimity’s Death, was voted One of the Century’s 100 Favorite Mysteries by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

Absolutely all the residents of Finch, a remote Cotswold village, are in place on a rainy October morning to get their first glimpse of Amelia Thistle, the new owner of Pussywillow Cottage. Ensconced in a window seat in the local tearoom is Lori Shepherd, an American who settled in Finch after inheriting a cottage from her mother’s dear friend, “Aunt” Dimity. After two local art specialists bolt from the tearoom upon seeing Thistle, Lori learns that the cottage’s new owner is, in fact, renowned artist Mae Bowen, who has a fanatical group of followers from whom she is seeking anonymity. Thistle/Bowen is also seeking information on a seventeenth-century witch to fulfill a mission of her recently deceased brother. Differing from others in the Aunt Dimity series, there is no murder here, but there is a crime. Lori marshals the village, from the vicar to her own sons, to solve the crime, using the otherworldly Aunt Dimity to fill in gaps in their knowledge of Finch. Fans of the series will enjoy seeing Lori’s twin boys growing up and the increased involvement of her father-in-law in the life of the village. –Karen Muller, Booklist

Ex-pat American Lori Shepherd, her attorney husband and their two horse-crazy sons live on the outskirts of the Cotswold village of Finch. Lori is just one of the many residents casually hanging about to see the arrival of newcomer Amelia Thistle. Two of Lori’s artistic friends soon identify Amelia as Mae Bowen, a famous artist who formerly lived in a gated house to escape her rabid fans. Lori breaks village tradition by paying an uninvited visit to Amelia, who’s still grieving the loss of her husband and brother. Amelia has come to Finch determined to recover the rest of a missing manuscript her great-grandfather had discovered in which Gamaliel Gowland, the 17th-century rector of Finch’s church, describes Margaret Redfearn, presumed to have been a witch. Once Amelia reveals her identity to several people, Lori, the current rector and his wife, and Lori’s father-in-law, who’s smitten by Amelia, join in the hunt. Not only do they have to decipher the cryptic clues they find in each newly discovered page, but they must also protect Amelia from the fans who have tracked her down. Even Aunt Dimity, a spirit who communicates with Lori by writing in a special book, gets into the act with her usual sage advice. – Kirkus Reviews

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal”—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child.

Among the Bravos is the Silver Star–winning hero of Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and Support Our Troops bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into the company of the Cowboys’ hard-nosed businessman/owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again Cowboys cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Among these faces Billy sees those of his family—his worried sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical sergeant who opened Billy’s mind and died in his arms at Al-Ansakar.

Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.

Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a devastating portrait of our time, a searing and powerful novel that cements Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

About Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His coverage of post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.

Editorial Review

Though the shell-shocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield. – Kirkus Reviews

Ben Fountain’s ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’

The Washington Post Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

There’s a moment early on in “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” a masterful gut-punch of a debut novel by Ben Fountain, when readers will discern a clear literary echo. A movie producer is describing to a group of American soldiers the way Hollywood operates: Studio executives refuse to commit to a project until a bankable, A-list star is committed. But of course, the producer explains, no big movie star is willing to commit until a major studio does so first.

The soldiers “emit an appreciative ahhhhh. The paradox is so perfect, so completely circular in the modern way, that everyone can identify.”

That’s some catch, as Yossarian might say, after letting out a respectful whistle. The brief exchange between naive grunts and a grizzled veteran of Tinseltown is an obvious homage to Joseph Heller. But it’s also a bold announcement that “Catch-22” is about to be updated for a new era. [Read the full article...]

A Young Soldier Pauses on Dallas Cowboys Turf

The New York Times Book Review – May 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

The players are at the Texas Stadium outside Dallas. They are larger than life, immortalized on the Jumbotron, bathed in glory. Pompom-waving cheerleaders celebrate their triumphs. Spectators thrill to the sight of their heroics on the field. Strangers want a piece of them, but access is limited. Still, Billy Lynn, the favorite, finds himself getting “passed around like everybody’s favorite bong.”

By the way, the Dallas Cowboys are also here. So is another pro football team; after all, this is the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving home game, with Destiny’s Child as its musical attraction. But Ben Fountain’s inspired, blistering war novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is about a group of special guests at the stadium: eight American soldiers who have become known as the Bravos.

Ever since Fox News showed them fighting a fierce battle in Iraq, the Bravos have been wildly famous. They are just completing a two-week Victory Tour of the homeland.

Nobody wants to mention that they are hours away from being sent back to war. And nobody wants to think too hard about what kind of American heroes they really are.

Mr. Fountain, whose only previous book was the short-story collection “Brief Encounters With Che Guevara,” sets up this Thanksgiving game as an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war. Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience. Although Beyoncé’s girl group is on red-hot display during halftime, this book leaves no doubt that Billy is the real destiny’s child in the story. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

America’s most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.

Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he’s hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.

A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood—and his home.

About Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is the author of ten novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to A Mercy (2008). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prize–winning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it’s about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. “She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine,” thinks the soldier. He discovers that “while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her.” As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to “dogs” reveals itself as more than gratuitous. – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: Toni Morrison’s ‘Home,’ a restrained but powerful novel

The Washington Post Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Toni Morrison doesn’t have to prove anything anymore, and there’s artistic freedom in that calm. Her new novel, “Home,” is a surprisingly unpretentious story from America’s only living Nobel laureate in literature. (The accolades keep accruing: Last week, the White House named Morrison one of 13 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.)

At just 145 pages, this little book about a Korean War vet doesn’t boast the Gothic swell of her masterpiece, “Beloved” (1987), or the luxurious surrealism of her most recent novel, “A Mercy” (2008). But the diminutive size and straightforward style of “Home” are deceptive. This scarily quiet tale packs all the thundering themes Morrison has explored before. She’s never been more concise, though, and that restraint demonstrates the full range of her power.

Restraint is also foremost in the mind of her 24-year-old protagonist, Frank Money, a troubled Army vet. He returned from Korea a year earlier with a head full of atrocities he witnessed during the war, described in scenes as quick and unexpected as a sniper’s bullet. He and his two buddies enlisted just to get out of Lotus, Ga., “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield.” But his friends are dead now, and all he’s got left are a vicious temper and memories of “a boy pushing his entrails back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering with bad news.” [Read the full article...]

Soldier Is Defeated by War Abroad, Then Welcomed Back by Racism

The New York Times Book Review – May 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre.

“Home” encapsulates all the themes that have fueled her fiction, from the early novels “Sula” and “The Bluest Eye,” through her dazzling masterwork, “Beloved,” and more recent, less persuasive books like“Love” and “Paradise”: the hold that time past exerts over time present, the hazards of love (and its link to leaving and loss), the possibility of redemption and transcendence.

Once again we are introduced to characters who must choose between the suffocating but sustaining ethos of small-town life and the temptations and pitfalls of the wider world. Once again we are made to see the costs and consolations of caring too much — for a family member, a lover or a friend.

“Home” is the story of Frank Money, who joins the Army as a ticket out of stifling Lotus, Ga. — where “there was no future, just long stretches of killing time” — and his return there after his service in the Korean War, on a mission to rescue his younger sister, Cee. It is the story of a man who has witnessed the atrocities of war and the deaths of his two best friends, a man who has terrible flashbacks to the war and savage impulses of his own that he finds difficult to master. [Read the full article...]

Home’: Toni Morrison’s Taut, Triumphant New Novel

NPR Book Review – May 15, 2012 (Excerpt)

There are topics you may think you’ve had enough of — racism, slavery, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust — but then you read a book like Toni Morrison’s new novel and realize, as Samuel Beckett put it, “All has not been said and never will be.” Home is gorgeous and intense, brutal yet heartwarming — and could only have been written by the author of Belovedand Sula. Deceptively slight, it is like a slingshot that wields the impact of a missile.

Morrison’s last novel, A Mercy (2008), set on a farm in 17thcentury New York, focused on the roots of slavery and racism. With Home, the Nobel laureate jumps forward some 275 years, to the mid-20th century, pre-civil rights era South, where blacks were still treated, as several characters note, “like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” Like fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson’s novel of the same name, Morrison’s Home revisits the theme of the prodigal son.

Her hero — and he is a hero — is 24-year-old Frank Money, recently returned from the horrors of the Korean War. He’s haunted by the deaths of his two “homeboys” and a moral lapse that has shaken him to his core. He has no intention of returning to Lotus, Ga., the hometown he has always loathed, until he receives a letter about his younger sister, Cee, which reads: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn

Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.

At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne’s head?

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of ten previous novels, including Wolf Hall, which sold more than 200,000 copies and won the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Her previous works include her novel, A Place of Greater Safety, and her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She lives in England with her husband.

Editorial Reviews

‘This is a beautiful and profoundly human book, a dark mirror held up to our own world. And the fact that its conclusion takes place after the curtain has fallen only proves that Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as our most brilliant writers.’ – Olivia Laing, Observer

‘As soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret that the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle.’ – The Times

‘Mantel is a writer who sees the skull beneath the skin, the worm in the bud, the child abuse in the suburbs and the rat in the mattress…Turning her attention to Tudor England, she makes that world at once so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks…This is a splendidly ambitious book…I wait greedily for the sequel, but “Wolf Hall” is already a feast.’ – Daily Telegraph

A Canny Henchman, Targeting the Queen

The New York Times Book Review – May 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

Two years ago something astonishingly fair happened in the world of prestigious prizes: the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for 2009 both went to the right winner. The book was Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” and it would have dwarfed the competition any year. “Wolf Hall” was a historical novel that ingeniously revisited well-trod territory (the early marriages of Henry VIII), turned the phlegmatic villain Thomas Cromwell into the best-drawn figure and easily mixed 16th-century ambience with timeless bitchery.

Despite a hugely complicated cast of characters and Ms. Mantel’s teasing way of preferring pronouns to proper names, it wound up providing an experience of sheer bliss. It was a hard act to follow. But the follow-up is equally sublime.

In answer to what will surely be everyone’s first question about Ms. Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies”: Yes, you can read it cold. Knowledge of “Wolf Hall” is not a prerequisite to appreciating what “Bring Up the Bodies” describes, because Ms. Mantel sets up her new book so gracefully. All of Cromwell’s scheming to expedite Henry VIII’s casting off of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to marry Anne Boleyn is behind him. So is the schism with the Roman Catholic Church that the first book so thoroughly outlined, maneuver by crafty maneuver. [Read the full article...]

‘Wolf Hall’ Sequel: Cromwell In All His Complexity

NPR Book Review – May 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Hilary Mantel’s new book opens, the spark has gone out of Henry VIII’s second marriage. His roving eye leaves Anne Boleyn and begins to settle on Jane Seymour, another woman at court. The monarch doesn’t go to a marriage counselor or divorce lawyer, not when Thomas Cromwell is his chief adviser.

Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and worldwide acclaim. It is also the latest in a planned trilogy about Cromwell.

Historically, Cromwell is considered a dangerous and unscrupulous bully. In Mantel’s books, he is — like any other man — much more than his reputation.

“He’s a work in progress, as far as I’m concerned. I’m far from being able to add him up. I’m not even trying at this point,” Mantel tells Weekend Edition host Scott Simon.

She says some people expected the follow-up to Wolf Hall to be about Cromwell’s fall, since the first book narrated his rise.

“But actually it’s not like that at all. He will go on and on rising in the world until he becomes Earl of Essex,” Mantel says, “and then his fall, when it came in 1540 — long after the action of this present book — was very, very sudden. In a few weeks, it was all over.” [Read the full article...]

Book World: Hilary Mantel’s ‘Bring Up the Bodies’

The Washington Post Book Review – May 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

The dead cluster around Thomas Cromwell in this darkly magnificent sequel to “Wolf Hall.”

He keeps them with him, giving the names of his beloved wife and daughters to the falcons he flies with his king, Henry VIII, and nursing memories of his disgraced mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, whose persecutors will soon suffer Cromwell’s vengeance. Deceased enemies also linger in his thoughts: He’s forced to reconsider his hatred for his brutal father, and he can’t seem to dismiss Thomas More, whom he maneuvered to execution in 1535. More’s bitter aphorisms resurface to remind Cromwell of the dangerous path he has chosen in serving Henry’s capricious royal will.

There will be plenty of fresh corpses by the time Hilary Mantel’s narrative completes its mordant course through the nine months required to send Anne Boleyn to the scaffold and clear the way for Henry’s new love, Jane Seymour. With ruthless efficiency, Master Secretary Cromwell facilitates this judicial murder, as well as the concomitant deaths of four men who made the mistake of crossing him. “He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.” Cromwell knows the risks he runs in bending the law to the king’s desires. “Your new friends will make short work of you once she is gone,” warns Anne’s brother. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ is a compelling re-creation

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – May 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

Hilary Mantel’s novel about the Tudor political puppet-master supremo Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall,” winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for fiction, was so richly packed with character and action that it was bound to burst its banks. Originally intended to take Cromwell through the four years that it took him to fall from the pinnacle of power (where we left him at the end of “Wolf Hall”) to his own appointment with the executioner’s ax, “Bring Up the Bodies” forms the middle volume of what is to be a trilogy.

The good news is that it is more than the equal of its predecessor when it comes to intensity and drama, its portrait of Cromwell ever more evocative and nuanced as he disposes of a queen, more elevated than a mere cardinal (Wolsey) and saint (Thomas More), whose downfalls were front and center in “Wolf Hall.” The shadow that hangs ever so subtly over “Bring Up the Bodies” is that in Cromwell’s masterly transformation of Anne Boleyn from Henry VIII’s crowned consort to a headless body in the Tower of London, he may, for all his devious triumph in bringing off such a coup, finally have bitten off more than even he will be able to chew. [Read the full article...]

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One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

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About Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is the New York Times bestselling author of Divergent, the first book in a trilogy that she began writing while still a college student. Now a full-time writer, Ms. Roth and her husband call the Chicago area home.

Editorial Review

With both the Dauntless and Abnegation factions shattered by the Erudite attack, Tris and her companions seek refuge with Amity and Candor, and even among the factionless. But the Erudite search for “Divergents” continues relentlessly. They have a secret to protect—one they fear could prove more catastrophic than open warfare; one they will slaughter to keep hidden… Rather than ease readers back into this convoluted narrative, the book plunges the characters into immediate danger without clues to their current relationships, let alone their elaborate back stories. The focus is firmly on the narrator Tris, who, devastated by guilt and grief, reveals new depth and vitality. While taking actions less Dauntless than recklessly suicidal, she retains her convenient knack for overhearing crucial conversations and infallibly sizing up others. Her romance with Tobias is achingly tender and passionate, and her friends and enemies alike display a realistic spectrum of mixed motivations and conflicted choices. The unrelenting suspense piles pursuit upon betrayal upon torture upon pitched battles; the violence is graphic, grisly and shockingly indiscriminate. The climactic reveal, hinting at the secret origins of their society, is neither surprising nor particularly plausible, but the frenzied response makes for another spectacular cliffhanger. – Kirkus Reviews

Interview: Veronica Roth on her book ‘Insurgent’ and feminism

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

In Veronica Roth’s bestseller “Divergent,” a young woman chooses to leave her family and align herself with a group that seems better suited to her true identity. “Insurgent,” out Tuesday, sees Tris coming to a better understanding of what that decision really means in a book that is every bit as action-packed and questioning as the series kickoff. We caught up with the 23-year-old Chicago-based author to talk about her highly anticipated second book in the “Divergent” trilogy and strong female characters in dystopian young-adult fiction.

Jacket Copy: “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and dozens of other titles in this burgeoning dystopian genre showcase strong female protagonists. Do you see a new shape of feminism emerging here?

Veronica Roth: That’s a complicated question. What’s interesting about these characters is that a lot of their strength is expressed in a physical way. Tris is physically weak but she learns how to be skilled in a physical way. Katniss isn’t super buff, but she knows how to defend herself. I think that’s something that needs to be explored more. Characters like Tris and Katniss, their worth and strength is not limited to their physical abilities. They’re very much in control of their own destinies. In “Insurgent,” Tris says, “Where I go, I go because I choose to.” That element of “I can do it. I can control my life,” that everything that happens, good or bad, happens because of the choice of the main character, that’s sort of a new thing. [Read the full article...]

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