Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
Campbell, Drusilla. When She Came Home. Grand Central. Apr. 2013. 336p. ISBN 9781455510351. pap. $14.99. POP FICTION The author of satisfying human dramas like Blood Orange and Little Girl Gone, Campbell returns with a deeply relevant story. Back from Iraq, Frankie Byrne must confront her daughter’s trouble with school bullies, her husband’s contentiousness, her career [...]
Abé, Shana. The Sweetest Dark. Bantam. Apr. 2013. 352p. ISBN 9780345531704. $16; eISBN 9780345531711. PARANORMAL A New York Times best-selling author and multiple Romantic Times award winner famed for her Drákon series—which features humans who can turn themselves into dragons and living smoke—Abé here crosses into YA territory with the story of Lora Jones. Placed [...]
Bradford, Barbara Taylor. Secrets from the Past. St. Martin’s. Apr. 2013. 384p. ISBN 9780312631666. $27.99. ROMANCE After her famed photographer father’s death, American photojournalist Serena Stone leaves the business of dodging bullets and land mines in the Middle East and returns to New York to write her father’s biography. Alas, she must soon head to [...]
Alderman, Naomi. The Liar’s Gospel. Little, Brown. Mar. 2013. 368p. ISBN 9780316232784. $25.99. HISTORICAL As Mary mourns, the High Priest of the Temple tries to calm roiled waters, a rebel named Bar-Avo hopes to stir things further, and Yehoshuah’s old friend Iehuda abandons God. As told by these four people, this reimagining of Jesus’s life [...]
Bill, Frank. Donnybrook. Farrar. Mar. 2013. 256p. ISBN 9780374532895. pap. $15. LITERARY FICTION Bill’s debut story collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana, raised a collective gasp, so this first novel has been greatly anticipated. The subject is a bloody, three-day, bare-knuckle fight called the Donnybrook, held on a 1000-acre plot in isolated southern Indiana. As bettors [...]
Epstein, Jennifer Cody. The Gods of Heavenly Punishment. Norton. Mar. 2013. ISBN 9780393071573. 384p. $26.95. HISTORICAL After the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo rips apart 15-year-old Yoshi’s old life, she builds a new one with the help of three Americans: downed bomber pilot Cam; Billy, an Occupation soldier guarding a secret; and Anton, an architect who [...]
Archer, Jeffrey. Best Kept Secret. St. Martin’s. Mar. 2013.448p. ISBN 9781250000989. $27.99. THRILLER Archer’s latest falls into the newly trending category of family thriller, when danger threatens not the world but one little patch of it. In a continuation of the “Clifton Chronicles,” all seems well for Harry and Emma, but a bad guy from [...]
Fowler, Therese Anne. Z—: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. St. Martin’s. Mar. 2013. NAp. ISBN 9781250028655. $24.99. HISTORICAL FICTION Fowler won an LJ star for her 2008 debut, Souvenir, settling comfortably into fraught contemporary relationship territory and finding herself compared to Jodi Picoult. Here she does something entirely different, reimagining the tumultuous life of the [...]
Dee, Jonathan. A Thousand Pardons. Random. Feb. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9780812993219. $26; eISBN 9780679645009. LITERARY A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 with Chang-Rae Lee (Jennifer Egan won for A Visit from the Goon Squad), Dee goes au courant with the story of a woman who returns to work after her corporate-lawyer husband loses all following [...]
Berwin, Margot. Scent of Darkness. Pantheon. Feb. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780307907523. $25; eISBN 9780307907530. Downloadable: Random Audio. POP FICTION Berwin’s best-selling debut, Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, was edgy, sort-of magic realism that sometimes went over the edge but was really loved by the people who loved it—it was translated into 19 [...]
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