New Books! 1/20/15

HARDCOVER FICTION 

The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward
Julie’s new release pick of the day! “Austin author Amanda Eyre Ward takes on the timely and relevant subjects of immigration and American privilege in her new novel. This is a book that works to understand our community; not just our neighborhoods in Austin, but America as a whole. It’s important reading for anyone who has an opinion on immigration.” Signed copies are available. Join us Wednesday, January 28 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of The Same Sky! 

 

Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Only nine people have ever been chosen by renowned children’s author Laura White to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth member has been selected: a young literature teacher named Ella. Soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. Praised as “Twin Peaks meets the Brothers Grimm” (The Telegraph), the uncanny brushes up against the everyday in the most beguiling and unexpected of ways in this new novel.

 

Glow by Ned Beauman
William Gibson highly recommended this novel when he was here talking to us about THE PERIPHERAL. He said GLOW is the: “…most insane thing I’ve read in the 21st century. I found it hilariously funny…Like if you inscribed all three (of Beauman’s) novels on the head of a pin, then inscribed Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 on that same pinhead. This doesn’t do it justice. It’s a slender little novel and immensely clever, very funny, horribly sad.

 

See How Small by Scott Blackwood
Austinite Scott Blackwood’s affecting new novel, This new novel written by a former Austinite follows the survivors of the victims of one of the most brutal events in Austin’s memory, the murder of four teenage girls working at an ice cream shop. Ben Fountain calls Blackwood’s writing, “as fine as any being written today”. Join us Tuesday, January 27 at Zilker Clubhouse as we celebrate the book’s launch. The event is a fundraiser for the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation. Free to APLFF. Tickets are $10 for non-members available through the Library Foundation website: austinlibrary.org.

 

Morte: A Novel by Robert Repino
Former housecat turned war hero, Mort(e) is famous for taking on the most dangerous missions and fighting the dreaded human bio-weapon EMSAH. But the true motivation behind his recklessness is his ongoing search for a pre-transformation friend—a dog named Sheba. When he receives a mysterious message from the dwindling human resistance claiming Sheba is alive, he begins a journey that will take him from the remaining human strongholds to the heart of the Colony, where he will discover the source of EMSAH and the ultimate fate of all of earth’s creatures.

 

If I Fall, If I Die by Michael Christie
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia and Vampires in the Lemon Grove: “This is a bruiser of a tale, one you will feel in your shins and your solar plexus.  Michael Christie is a virtuosic prose stylist and boy is he so very wise and so funny on families and friendships, fear and joy, and the physics of sky and pavement. If I Fall, I Die is a death-defying coming of age story; it’s also as weird and as convincing a love story as I have ever read.  And so beautifully told that you’ll want to pass it on immediately.”

 

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
The first and only diary written by a still-imprisoned Guantanamo detainee. Since 2002, Mohamedou Slahi has been imprisoned at the detainee camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United States has never charged him with a crime. Although he was ordered released by a federal judge, the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is no sign that the United States plans to let him go. Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he disappeared into U.S. custody and daily life as a detainee. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir—terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious.

 

The Book of Love: Improvisations on a Crazy Little Thing by Robert Rosenblatt
Roger Rosenblatt explores love in all its moods and variations–romantic love, courtship, battle, mystery, marriage, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, delirium, ecstasy; love of family, of friends; love of home, of country, of work, of writing, of solitude, of art; love of nature; love of life itself.

 

God, Guns, Grits and Gravy by Mike Huckabee
This new book from Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, is an exploration of today’s fractious American culture. Huckabee will be here at BookPeople Thursday, February 5 at 11am to sign copies of his book. Tickets for the signing line are now available. Visit bookpeople.com for more info.

 

Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America S Only Family Internment Camp During World War II by Jan Jarboe Russell
From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp. Russell speaks about & signs her new book here Mon 1/26 at 7pm.

 

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, the author’s grandparents, Anna and Armand, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the South of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever. A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife’s name aloud after she left him.

 

PAPERBACK FICTION

Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
When Flannery, a young scientist, is forced to return to Austin from five years of research in Nigeria, she becomes split between her two homes. Having left behind her loving fiance without knowing when she can return, Flan learns that her sister, Molly, has begun to show signs of the genetic disease that slowly killed their mother. As their close-knit circle of friends struggles with Molly’s diagnosis, Flannery must grapple with what her future will hold. Join us TONIGHT for the launch party with Mary Helen Specht!

 

Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell by Rob Thomas
In the second book in the New York Times bestselling mystery series, Veronica Mars is back with a case that will expose the hidden workings of one of Neptune’s most murderous locations. We’re lucky to call Rob Thomas, the creator of the television series Veronica Mars and the co-creator of the television series Party Down, an Austinite. Rob Thomas speaks & signs here at BookPeople Friday, January 30. Books and tickets are now available for the signing.

 

The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin
Now ninety-two, Mrs. Anna Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco. Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada where sixty thousand revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind. With her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.

 

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun
Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows.  Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, has succumbed to the telltale red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech and cloudy mind before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world.  Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her. He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. All around, sleep has become an infinitely precious commodity. Money can’t buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it.