HARDCOVER FICTION
Barefoot Dogs: Stories by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
“What people lose defines how they live their lives and this vibrant collection of stories illustrates this point with a literary verve that is electrifying! When the patriarch of a rich and thriving Mexican family is kidnapped, the family scatters across the world to save themselves. Ruiz-Camacho focuses on the lives of the rich and privileged in Mexican society, so used to servants and having things done for them that when the Arteaga family is left to its own devices, they have difficulty coping. This is a very entertaining and moving collection of interwoven stories highlighting the profound talent of a new author. Thought-provoking and memorable.” —Raul Chapa
“There is truly nothing like an Alice Hoffman novel, and Nightbird is no exception. Twig and her town of Sidwell, Massachusetts are rife with all the best parts of Hoffman’s particular style of magic: girlhood friendships, first loves, overgrown gardens, flight. I couldn’t put it down–what an absolute treat! It is so wonderful to have Alice Hoffman writing for twelve-year-old girls.” –Demi
Black didn’t know its name, but he knew it lay deeper and higher than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst.
The Valley is a riveting tour de force that changes our understanding of the men who fight our wars and announces John Renehan as one of the great American storytellers of our time.
A psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.
Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomas, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife’s homeland.
Dennis Lehane vividly recreates the rise of the mob during a world at war, from a masterfully choreographed Ash Wednesday gun battle in the streets of Ybor City to a chilling, heartbreaking climax in a Cuban sugar cane field. Told with verve and skill, World Gone By is a superb work of historical fiction.
Signs Preceding The End of The World by Yuri Herrera
“Signs Preceding the End of the World” is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.
Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld
In this grippingly original novel Yuri Herrera explores the actual and psychological crossings and translations people make–with their feet, in their minds, and in their language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.
A darkly comic debut novel about an idealistic young farmer who moves his family to a Mississippi flood basin, suffers financial ruin and becomes increasingly paranoid he’s being framed for murder. Drawing on elements of classic Southern noir, dark comedy, and modern dysfunction, Jamie Kornegay’s novel is about the gravitational pull of one man’s apocalypse and the hope that maybe, just maybe, he can be reeled in from the brink.
HARDCOVER NONFICTION
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
“Larson is one of the best narrative historians and this book brings the tragedy of the sinking of the liner Lusitania home in compelling ways. He keeps a tally of who is who in this drama and fills the pages with important details, from Captain Turner, the flawed and quietly brave commander of the doomed ship, to Captain Schweiger, the U boat commander who killed so many. There is also an insight into the common passengers and the variety of lives that were being led – from families to individual people – before the destruction of the ship. Larson includes detail illustrating why the British Admiralty was so keen on blaming Captain Turner for the sinking – it turns out that they had their own secrets to keep. Contrary to popular belief, the sinking of the Lusitania did not draw America into the conflict in Europe – that would take another two years and an invertebrate telegram sent to the Mexican embassy. This is a detailed and informative read that is unforgettable.” –Raul
The Secret Game: A Basketball Story in Black and White by Scott Ellsworth
In the wartime fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing the game forever. Within six months, his Eagles would become the highest scoring college basketball team in America, a fast-breaking, hard-pressing juggernaut that would shatter its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. The last student of James Naismith, basketball’s inventor, McLendon had opened the door to its future.
Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation’s sporting past. The riveting true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how a handful of forgotten college basketball players not only changed the game forever, but also helped to usher in a new America.
The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecelia Ruiz
Simon remembers every act of sin ever confessed to him. Pavel forgets what he has just played and rehearses the same melody over and over. Unable to recall faces, Veronika uses different perfumes to remember the ones she loves. The Book of Memory Gaps is a collection of darkly humorous mini-stories that examine our curious and capricious unconscious. With concise, lyrical prose and a discerning command of color, Cecilia Ruiz captures the delicate and fleeting nature of memory, as well as its immense power–after all, who would we be without it?
Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture by Stan Slap
You want maximum business performance? Look under the hood and you’ll find your employee culture: it is the power that drives the enterprise engine. To harness that rumbling power you’ve got to solve the mystery of what an employee culture actually is, how it operates and how to move it forward. These are the keys that this book will put right in your hands.
Under the Hood is informed by immaculate research, including surveys of more than 15,000 employees from companies the world over. It’s packed with original tactics that have driven performance for many organizations and countless managers. And it includes jaw-dropping inside stories of employee cultures from the likes of Samsung, Oracle, Progressive, CNN during wartime, Paul McCartney’s band, and the Super Bowl film crew.
It’s all delivered in classic Stan Slap style: profound and provocative, heartfelt and often hysterical. This is not simply a management book; it is the business case for humanity. Management advice doesn’t get realer or more important than this.
The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis by Garry Wills
Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, offers a challenge to his church. Can he bring about significant change? Should he?
As Wills contends, it is only by examining the history of the Church that we can understand Pope Francis’s and the Church’s challenges, and, as history shows, any changes that meet those challenges will have impact only if the Church, the people of God, support them. In reading the Church’s history, Wills considers the lessons Pope Francis seems to have learned. The challenge that Pope Francis offers the Church is its ability to undertake new spiritual adventures, making it a poor church for the poor, after the example of Jesus.
Meet Me In Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City by Mark Adams
A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely on the clues Plato left behind.
Meet Me in Atlantis is Adams’s enthralling account of his quest to solve one of history’s greatest mysteries; a travelogue that takes readers to fascinating locations to meet irresistible characters; and a deep, often humorous look at the human longing to rediscover a lost world.
Resilience: Hard Won Wisdom For Living A Better Life by Eric Greitens 
Two years ago, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn’t seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he’d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help. Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, and Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives.
“Resilience “grapples with real hardship. The lessons are deep, yet practical, and the advice leads to clear solutions. This is a profoundly hopeful book: We all face pain, difficulty, and doubt. But with resilience, we can lead vital, flourishing lives.
PAPERBACK FICTION
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler’s clandestine ‘Lebensborn’ project, which strove for a ‘racially pure’ Germany. Haya’s reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled. Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.
I Can See In the Dark by Karin Fossum
Riktor doesn’t like the way the policeman storms into his home without even knocking. He doesn’t like the arrogant way he walks around the house, taking note of its contents. The policeman doesn’t bother to explain why he’s there, and Riktor is too afraid to ask. He knows he’s guilty of a terrible crime and he’s sure the policeman has found him out. But when the policeman finally does arrest him, it’s for something totally unexpected. Riktor doesn’t have a clear conscience, but the crime he’s being accused of is one he certainly didn’t commit. Imprisoned and desperate to break out, he fights to clear his name without further incriminating himself, in a gripping standalone novel
For Today I Am A Boy by Kim Fu
At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name Juan Chaun, “powerful king.” To his parents, newly settled in small-town Ontario, he is the exalted only son in a sea of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his immigrant father’s dreams of Western masculinity. Peter and his sisters grow up in an airless house of order and obligation, though secrets and half-truths simmer beneath the surface. At the first opportunity, each of the girls lights out on her own. But for Peter, escape is not as simple as fleeing his parents’ home. Though his father crowned him “powerful king,” Peter knows otherwise. He knows he is really a girl. With the help of his far-flung sisters and the sympathetic souls he finds along the way, Peter inches ever closer to his own life, his own skin, in this darkly funny, emotionally acute, stunningly powerful debut.
PAPERBACK NONFICTION
The Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade
Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though–the Western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the past decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She discovered an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders.
“The Bright Continent” calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less–to transform bad government and bad aid into an opportunity to innovate–is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me by David Stuart MacLean
“The Answer to the Riddle Is Me raises questions of human identity, pharmaceutical recklessness, and existential despair as it navigates the faulty byways of a compromised personality. Expanded from his celebrated essay on NPR’s This American Life, David Stuart MacLean’s fascinating memoir is a brilliantly sparse redemption story that illuminates the fragile threads that hold us all together.” –Steve(n)
BookPeople 
Reblogged this on B. Shaun Smith.
Interesting perspective…Enjoyed reading the stories