Hot off the presses and onto the shelves! Here’s a selection of what’s brand new out in the world today. Blurbs, as usual, provided by the books’ publishers.
HARDCOVER FICTION
The Red House by Mark Haddon
A dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family, from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House is a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.
Mission to Paris by Alan Furst
It is the late summer of 1938, Europe is about to explode, the Hollywood film star Frederic Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich Foreign Ministry has for years been waging political warfare against France, using bribery, intimidation, and corrupt newspapers to weaken French morale and degrade France’s will to defend herself. For their purposes, Frederic Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
Winn Van Meter is heading for his family’s retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Hilarious, keenly intelligent, and commandingly well written, Shipstead’s deceptively frothy first novel is a piercing rumination on desire, on love and its obligations, and on the dangers of leading an inauthentic life.
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HARDCOVER NONFICTION
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing byBarbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bower
In the spring of 2005, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz was called to consult on an unusual patient: an Emperor tamarin at the Los Angeles Zoo. While examining the tiny monkey’s sick heart, she learned that wild animals can die of a form of cardiac arrest brought on by extreme emotional stress. It was a syndrome identical to a human condition but one that veterinarians called by a different name—and treated in innovative ways. This remarkable medical parallel launched Natterson-Horowitz on a journey of discovery that reshaped her entire approach to medicine. Joining forces with science journalist Kathryn Bowers, Natterson-Horowitz employs fascinating case studies and meticulous scholarship to present a revelatory understanding of what animals can teach us about the human body and mind.
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PAPERBACK FICTION
The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
(One of our favorite novels of 2011 is now in paperback!) In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.
Fifty Shades Trilogy Boxed Set by E L James
Now available as a three-volume paperback boxed set, E L James’s New York Times #1 bestselling trilogy has been hailed by” Entertainment Weekly” as being “in a class by itself.” Including Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed!
Jamrach’s Menagerie byCarol Birch
Nineteenth-century London comes vividly alive in this story of a street urchin named Jaffy Brown. After a close call with an escaped tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals. As the years pass, Mr. Jamrach recruits Jaffy and another boy named Tim to capture a fabled dragon during the course of an epic three-year whaling expedition in the East Indies. But when a violent storm sinks the ship, Jaffy and Tim are forced to confront their relationship to the natural world and the wildness it contains.
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier, the acclaimed author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, returns with a dazzling novel set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. With his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine. Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways.
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PAPERBACK NONFICTION
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
The extraordinary New York Times bestselling account of James Garfield’s rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from bestselling author of The River of Doubt, Candice Millard, is now in paperback! Examining the medical reform spurred by Garfield’s unsanitary medical treatment, and reflecting on the surprising political reform brought on by his former political enemy Senator Roscoe Conkling, Destiny of the Republic passionately brings President Garfield’s unknown-but-widely-felt legacy into focus.
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
One of the Ten Best Books of the 2011 in The New York Times Book Review. Names one of the best books of the year by: The Washington Post • The New Yorker • Chicago Tribune • The Economist • Nancy Pearl, NPR • Bloomberg.com • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly. In this brilliant narrative, Amanda Foreman tells the fascinating story of the American Civil War—and the major role played by Britain and its citizens in that epic struggle. In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America.
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