Tuesday, you’ve come back to me! AND you’ve brought gifts!!! That’s right, new releases and as always the blurbs are provided by the publishers.
PAPERBACK FICTION
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The Art of Forgetting by Camille Noe Pagan
Marissa Rogers has always been just fine as a beta. After all, hadn’t taking charge without taking credit been paying off? It’s what vaulted her to senior editor at a glossy-if somewhat tedious-diet magazine and let her be best friends with gorgeous, charismatic, absolutely alpha Julia Ferrar. And then Julia is hit by a cab. Her external injuries are minor, but brain damage steals her memory and alters her personality. To help her friend, Marissa must assume the alpha role and help Julia recover her past. As Julia heals, she begins dredging up memories Marissa would rather forget-including the fact that Julia once asked her to abandon the love of her life.
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Quentin Coldwater escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discover that Fillory – a fictional utopia – was actually real. But even as a Fillorian king, Quentin finds little peace. His old restlessness returns, and he longs for the thrills a heroic quest can bring. Accompanied by his oldest friend, Julia, Quentin sets off – only to somehow wind up back in the real world and not in Fillory, as they’d hoped. As the pair struggle to find their way back to their lost kingdom, Quentin is forced to rely on Julia’s illicitly-learned sorcery.
Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan
Francis “Gil” Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, but bad fortune and pride have driven him and his long-suffering daughter Maureen into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. When an aging rancher commissions Gil to create a memorial statue of his son who was killed in action, Gil believes it will be his greatest achievement. But as work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than they ever expected, and that he is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
PAPERBACK NONFICTION
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Blue Nights by Joan Didion
This new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound.
The Eighty-Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts
Harry de Leyer first saw the horse he would name Snowman on a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. The recent Dutch immigrant recognized the spark in the eye of the beaten-up nag and bought him for eighty dollars. On Harry’s modest farm on Long Island, he ultimately taught Snowman how to fly. Here is the dramatic and inspiring rise to stardom of an unlikely duo. One show at a time, against extraordinary odds and some of the most expensive thoroughbreds alive, the pair climbed to the very top of the sport of show jumping. Their story captured the heart of Cold War–era America—a story of unstoppable hope, inconceivable dreams, and the chance to have it all. They were the longest of all longshots—and their win was the stuff of legend.
HARDCOVER FICTION
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Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif
Alice Bhatti is the new junior nurse, but that’s the only ordinary thing about her. She’s just been released from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. But more to the point, she’s the daughter of a part-time healer in the French Colony, and it seems she has, unhappily, inherited his part-time gift. With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice begins to bring succor to the patients lining the hospital’s corridors and camped outside its gates. But all is not miraculous. Alice is a Christian in an Islamic world, ensnared in the red tape of hospital bureaucracy, trapped by the caste system, torn between her duty to her patients, her father and her husband—who is a former bodybuilding champion, now an apprentice to the nefarious “Gentleman’s Squad” of the Karachi police, and about to drag Alice into a situation so dangerous that perhaps not even a miracle will be able to save them.
The Watchers by Jon Steele
Beneath Lausanne Cathedral, in Switzerland, there is a secret buried before time began, something unknown to angels and men, until now… Marc Rochat watches over the city at night from the belfry of the cathedral. He lives in a world of shadows and “beforetimes” and imaginary beings.
Katherine Taylor, call girl and daydreamer, is about to discover that her real-life fairy tale is too good to be true. Jay Harper, private detective, wakes up in a crummy hotel room with no memory. When the telephone rings and he’s offered a job, he knows he has no choice but to accept. Three lives, one purpose: save what’s left of paradise before all hell breaks loose.
Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon
Before the study, her life was an endless blur of school lunches and doctor’s appointments, family dinners, budgets, and trying to discern the fastest-moving line at the grocery store. She was Alice Buckle: spouse of William and mother to Zoe and Peter, drama teacher and Facebook chatter, downloader of memories and Googler of solutions. But these days, she is also Wife 22. And somehow, her anonymous correspondence with Researcher 101 has taken an unexpectedly personal turn. Soon, she’ll have to make a decision—one that will affect her family, her marriage, her whole life. But at the moment, she’s too busy answering questions.
Join us Wednesday, June 13th at 7PM when Melanie Gideon will be in store speaking and signing her new book Wife 22. For more details, click here.
The Yard by Alex Grecian
Victorian London is a cesspool of crime, and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives—known as “The Murder Squad”—to investigate countless murders every month. Created after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, The Murder Squad suffers rampant public contempt. They have failed their citizens. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own . . . one of the twelve . . . When Walter Day, the squad’s newest hire, is assigned the case of the murdered detective, he finds a strange ally in the Yard’s first forensic pathologist, Dr. Bernard Kingsley. Together they track the killer, who clearly is not finished with The Murder Squad . . . but why?
HARDCOVER NONFICTION
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Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley presents the definitive, revealing biography of an American legend: renowned news anchor Walter Cronkite. An acclaimed author and historian, Brinkley has drawn upon recently disclosed letters, diaries, and other artifacts at the recently opened Cronkite Archive to bring detail and depth to this deeply personal portrait. He also interviewed nearly two hundred of Cronkite’s closest friends and colleagues, including Andy Rooney, Leslie Stahl, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Les Moonves, Christiane Amanpour, Katie Couric, Bob Schieffer, Ted Turner, Jimmy Buffett, and Morley Safer, using their voices to instill dignity and humanity in this study of one of America’s most beloved and trusted public figures.
Join us Friday, June 8th at 7Pm when Douglas Brinkley will be in store speaking and signing his new book Cronkite. For more information, click here.
BookPeople 