BookPage November 2018

BookPage

®

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

Barbara

NOV 2018

KINGSOLVER

The beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible returns with a provocative novel about two families separated by centuries but connected by the same New Jersey address.

BONUS! HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE INSIDE - Gifts for everyone on your list . . .

1

NOVEMBER 2018

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W

28

features

book reviews

26

36 FICTION

JOHN McPHEE

top pick : Little by Edward Carey

Pieces of a writer’s life

28

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

41 NONFICTION

Two families in crisis, centuries apart

30

top pick : Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

JAMES MUSTICH

by Colm Tóibín

The ultimate to-be-read list

37

44 TEEN

LITERARY DETECTIVES

top pick : Your Own Worst Enemy

by Gordon Jack

Clever tales of sleuths and strong women

39

B.A. SHAPIRO

—Booklist

Humorous and heartfelt, two out-of-town strangers cross paths in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

46 CHILDREN’S

Meet the author of The Collector’s Apprentice

43

“PERFECT FOR READERS WHO ENJOY QUIRKY CHARACTERS IN SMALL-TOWN SETTINGS.”

top pick : The Season of Styx Malone

by Kekla Magoon

VIRGINIA BOECKER Shakespearean drama on stage and off

47

JESSICA HISCHE Meet the author-illustrator of Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave

gifts 31

LITERARY

For the die-hard bibliophile

32

holiday gift guide

QUIRKY

For the true original

34

MUSIC

For the foot tapper

35

4-17 Ideas for every

FASHION

reader on your list

For the aspiring muse

columns 18 18 19 20 21

LIFESTYLES COOKING THE HOLD LIST AUDIO BOOK CLUBS

22 22 23 24

WELL READ COZY MYSTERIES WHODUNIT ROMANCE

Illustrations by Adobe Stock / Gulsen Gunel Cover image credit Steven Hopp

EDITORIAL POLICY

ASSISTANT EDITOR

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Michael A. Zibart

Hilli Levin

Penny Childress

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Julia Steele

Savanna Walker

EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Stephanie Koehler

Sukey Howard

DEPUTY EDITOR

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Elizabeth Grace Herbert and select for review the best books published in a variety of categories.

ADVERTISING OPERATIONS BookPage is editorially independent; only books we highly recommend Sada Stipe are featured.

MARKETING

Cat Acree

Allison Hammond

Mary Claire Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

CONTRIBUTOR

CONTROLLER

Lily McLemore

Roger Bishop

Sharon Kozy

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—Foreword Clarion Reviews

D

e C

PUBLISHER

“AN UNCONVENTIONAL NOVEL THAT IS BOTH ENTERTAINING AND CATHARTIC. . . .THE BOOK’S TWISTS AND TURNS ARE ORIGINAL. . . ”

All material © 2018 ProMotion, inc.

celestial eyes

B O O K PA G E . C O M

3

9781496708496

fa-la-la-la

Fiction

Christmas by Accident

Christmas Cake Murder

In this meet-cute story set in a New England bookstore, an editor meets an uninspired insurance adjuster who has a tendency to embellish his accident reports.

Joanne Fluke, the bestselling queen of culinary capers, cooks up a recipe-filled holiday prequel to her beloved Hannah Swensen mystery series.

Shadow Mountain

Kensington

$17.99

$20

9781629724768

A Town Divided

by Christmas

671626

2

7

671704

978149

Get cozy this holiday season... with charming Yuletide mysteries featuring amateur sleuths solving capers nuttier than a fruitcake!

Kensington

9781617732324

$26 each

A cozy chat with Lee Hollis, co-author of Yule Log Murder

A Christmas pageant sparks a squabble that divides a town for decades. Only love and forgiveness will heal the rift in this humorous, heartwarming holiday tale by Orson Scott Card.

Blackstone $14.95

9781538556856

{

978149

What is your favorite holiday-themed novel?

Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark.

}

Go-to holiday drink?

I must admit, I hate eggnog! But there is something about the holidays that makes me crave mimosas—and plenty of them.

Which holiday dessert would you poison if you had to murder someone?

Apple pie, because I do not like it. Why waste a perfectly good pumpkin pie on a murder?

Guaranteed to lift your holiday spirits!

This Christmas season, you’ll want to give—and receive— these hand-selected, heartwarming reads.

9781496715821

Kensington

$20

9781420148091 9781420148091

4

$15.95

$15.95

9781420148077 $7.99 9781420135749

Holiday Gift Guide

$7.99

Threads of Suspicion

The First Love

Perfect for the suspense lover on your list, this gripping coldcase thriller will keep you turning pages as stakes rise, danger intensifies and justice is served.

In the summer of 1951, a young Amish woman is struggling with a debilitating illness but finds hope in the unlikeliest of places.

The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond In this captivating dual-time suspense novel, two women, separated by a hundred years, must uncover the secrets of their town before it’s too late.

Bethany House $15.99

Bethany House $15.99

Bethany House $15.99

9780764219979

9780764219689

9780764230295

Stuff your stockings with these heartwarming stories! ’Tis the season for a great read—from an unexpected romance to a historic Southern novella and a holiday gift that Narnia lovers will treasure.

726

9780310351

Have yourself a country Christmas!

$17.99

9780310293248

“

$12.99

9780785224

501

$25.99

9781328613042

$30

Thomas Nelson

and cheer and song

gold, it would

$75

above hoarded

be a merrier

9780358003915

9780786042135

If more of us valued food

”

world.

978142

3

604291

978078

014560

1

Get your jingle boots rocked this holiday season with page-turning books that celebrate the “home” in down-home.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Kensington $7.99 each

Don't miss the holy grail of Tolkien texts!

The final work of Tolkien’s Middle-earth fiction, The Fall of Gondolin, is also included in a beautiful boxed set that collects all three of the last novels of Middle-earth.

HMH Holiday Gift Guide

5

Fiction

Blood Communion

The Reckoning

Lestat, rebel outlaw and vampire prince, tells the enthralling story of how he became ruler of the vampire world in the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles.

America’s favorite storyteller returns to Clanton, Mississippi, in this powerful new legal thriller. John Grisham has written 39 consecutive #1 bestsellers, but he has never written a novel like The Reckoning.

Knopf $27.95

Doubleday $29.95

9781524732646

9780385544153

This Scorched Earth

Nine Perfect Strangers

Uncompromising Honor

This moving story depicts a family’s journey from neardevastation in the Civil War to their rebirth in the American West.

From bestselling author Liane Moriarty, author of Big Little Lies, comes her latest novel, in which nine perfect strangers wonder if 10 days at a health resort can really change them forever.

Her voice has always been one of reason, but she shall compromise no longer. The galaxy is about to witness something it has never imagined.

Forge $29.99

Baen $28

Flatiron $28.99 9780765382368

9781250069825

}

The Next Person You Meet in Heaven In this enchanting sequel to the bestseller The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom tells the story of Annie and her unforgettable journey.

A Q&A with Mitch Albom, author of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven Go-to holiday drink?

Don’t drink, so it’s gotta be eggnog, sorry!

What is your favorite or most unique holiday tradition?

Sleeping in on Christmas morning, and only giving presents after coffee!

What is the ideal Christmas morning breakfast?

Cocoa Puffs, milk and ice cubes! The whole box.

What is your favorite holiday movie?

It’s a Wonderful Life.

Harper $23.99

“

I wanted to make

my book expansive in its tastes, encompassing revered classics and commercial favorites, flights

9780062294449

of escapist entertainment and enlightening works

Pachinko

”

Through desperate struggles and hardwon triumphs, one Korean family endures questions of faith, family and identity.

of erudition.

— Excerpt from our Behind the Book feature with James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

Grand Central $15.99

} 6

9781481483506

9781455563920

Holiday Gift Guide

9781984828095 $45

9780525641896 $45

Something for

EVERYONE

9780525633938 $35

9780525492207 $60

Give yourself the gift of audio Whether you’re home for the holidays or heading out on the road, great storytelling on audio helps to make the season bright.

www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com

Writers

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

From Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, this lavishly illustrated book features more than 100 biographies of the world’s greatest writers.

From fiction to poetry, science to science fiction, memoir to travel writing, biography to children’s books and more, James Mustich makes a passionate case for your next read.

9781465474773

Workman

DK $35

$35

9781523504459

9781611599787

9781611599824

The Great American Read: The Book of Books This gorgeously illustrated keepsake is the companion to PBS’s series “The Great American Read.”

Packed with images, revelations and sidebars, this book is perfect for a lifetime lover of reading.

Black Dog & Leventhal

9781611599794

The gifts they'll open over and over!

These three new titles in the bestselling series will inspire, entertain and enlighten, making them the perfect gifts for the holiday season!

9780316417556

Chicken Soup for the Soul

$29.99

$14.95 each

Holiday Gift Guide

7

Are You Scared, Darth Vader?

Disney Lucasfilm

9781484704974

HarperCollins Children’s $18.99

9781484782903

Illustrated in gorgeous and appropriately evocative full-color art, this book is a passport to a world of hidden possibilities. $19.95

9780062840042

$17.99

The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid

Workman

This inspiring debut picture book from “The View” co-host— and new mom—Abby Huntsman explores the value of service and the extraordinary power of giving back.

Come face-to-face with Darth Vader, the most fearsome villain from a galaxy far, far away. But Darth Vader may not be as fearless as you think.

fun for

Kids

Who Will I Be?

Santa Bruce New York Times bestselling author-illustrator Ryan T. Higgins is back with another Bruce tale that’s perfect for the holiday season.

9781523503544

Disney-Hyperion $17.99

9

Elephant & Piggie The Complete Collection The award-winning Elephant & Piggie series is gathered in this complete 25-book collection—plus special metallic Elephant & Piggie bookends!

Disney-Hyperion

9781523504725

2131

3680

9781

Dinosaur Take a magical journey back to the time of the dinosaurs with unique Photicular technology.

Workman

$150

$25.95

9781524773502

Sweetest place to travel If your favorite part of the holidays are the desserts, fly over to Poland and check out the Museum of Gingerbread (pg. 66) in the city of Toruń. Toruń has been famous for its gingerbread since the 1880s, and visitors can bake their own sweet and spicy cookies at the museum.

—from The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide

768

33828

97814

97814

9781433828751

33828

A new series for the youngest readers

Elbow Grease

The new Terrific Toddlers series can help toddlers understand everyday troubles such as separation anxiety, minor cuts and scrapes and taking ownership of their belongings.

Based on superstar entertainer John Cena’s own experience growing up with four brothers, this story for young readers embodies ambition, dedication and heart.

Magination Press

Random House Books for Young Readers $17.99

$8.99 each

8

775

Holiday Gift Guide

An Anthology of Intriguing Animals

Sleepy, the Goodnight Buddy

Children will discover the amazing stories and myths behind more than 100 animal favorites—from tigers to koalas—and pore over incredible photographs and beautiful illustrations.

A boy who hates bedtime gets a very chatty stuffed animal in this hilarious story from New York Times bestselling author Drew Daywalt.

DK

9781465477026

Disney-Hyperion $16.99

9781484789698

$19.99

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief Illustrated Edition

Squint Losing his vision, Flint rushes to create a comic book of his life, and through his superhero, Squint, he finally sees his true potential.

Dramatic full-color artwork by series illustrator John Rocco splashes across the pages of Rick Riordan’s classic novel about the son of a sea god.

Shadow Mountain $16.99 9781484787786

Disney-Hyperion $39.99

9781629724850

Explorer Academy: The Nebula Secret

Disney Ideas Book Bring your love of Disney to life with more than 100 amazing projects and activities, from arts and crafts to party games, puzzles, papercraft and much more.

Adventure and danger await 12-year-old Cruz Coronado at the Explorer Academy, where he and 23 kids from around the globe train to be the next generation of great explorers.

DK

Under the Stars

9781465467195

$16.99

© 2018 Disney/Pixar

$24.99

9781426331596

Why Not? 1,111 Answers to Everything

LEGO Star Wars Ideas Book

Curious kids have questions, and we’ve got answers—1,111 of them, in fact, along with top 10 lists, weird-but-true facts, cool activities and more.

Find a galaxy full of LEGO® Star Wars™ ideas to build—from activities and art, games and challenges to your very own inventions!

National Geographic Kids $19.99

DK $24.99

9781465467058

9781426331916

Holiday Gift Guide

9

Kids & Teens

Discover the world of Roblox!

9780062862600 9780062862662

$9.99

HarperFestival 9780062862648

Bridge of Clay

$24.99

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New School Nightmare

With his first novel since the groundbreaking bestseller The Book Thief, Markus Zusak offers a complex family saga that spans three generations to culminate in a single miracle.

Dragonwatch #2: Wrath of the Dragon King The Dragon King declares war on humans but must become one to get the fabled dominion stone in the second book of the New York Times #1 bestselling sequel series to Fablehaven.

Buffy Summers is just like any other student—except that she’s also a secret vampire slayer. At last, the pop culture phenomenon is a middle grade novel!

Knopf Books for Young Readers $26

9781984830159

Shadow Mountain

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

$18.99 9781629724867

9780316480239

$13.99

The Darkest Star

$10.99

Jam-packed with everything you need to know about the world’s largest online platform for play, these books are a must-have for fans of all ages.

Mother Knows Best: A Tale of the Old Witch

Jennifer L. Armentrout, the bestselling author of the Lux series, brings her trademark drama and intrigue to a new, swoon-worthy series.

Tor Teen

In the fifth book in Serena Valentino’s Disney Villains series, readers learn the origins of Mother Gothel from Tangled.

$18.99

Disney Press

The Cruel Prince From bestselling author Holly Black comes the first book in a new series about a mortal girl who finds herself caught in a web of royal faerie intrigue.

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

$17.99

$12.99

9781368009027 9780316310314

9781250175731

Artemis Fowl

Muse of Nightmares

Dear Evan Hansen

The international bestseller about a teenage criminal mastermind and his battle against dangerous fairies is set to be a major motion picture from Walt Disney Studios in August 2019.

Fans of Leigh Bardugo and Neil Gaiman will love Laini Taylor’s highly anticipated, thrilling sequel to her New York Times bestseller Strange the Dreamer.

From the creators of the hit Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen comes a novel inspired by the groundbreaking musical.

Disney-Hyperion

$18.99

$19.99

$8.99 9781368036986

10

Poppy

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

9780316341714

Holiday Gift Guide

9780316420235

Great

gifts

Ghouls live among us This set includes all 14 volumes of the original Tokyo Ghoul series plus an exclusive double-sided poster.

VIZ Signature $149.99

Anthony Bourdain's Hungry Ghosts

RWBY Official Anthology, Vol. 1

Horror comics with food themes by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose include illustrations from stellar artists along with recipes and a guide to the legends behind these tales.

Defeating monsters and stopping evil is a tough job, but Team RWBY is up for any challenge! Well, except for homework.

0

0318

9747

9781

VIZ $12.99

Berger Books $14.99

9781974701575 9781506706696

Born to Dance

Paint by Sticker: Cats

Celebrate young, wellknown dancers as well as little future stars in this joyous collection of photographs.

The latest rage in adult activity books is now purrfect for cat lovers!

Create gorgeous illustrations of felines one sticker at a time.

Workman

Workman

$17.95

$14.95 9780761189343

696

9781421582

9781523504480

Behind Nintendo's beloved Zelda games Explore 30 years of Zelda history with rare art and character lore in The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. Or dive into the newest chapter of Hyrule history with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Dark Horse $39.99 each 9781506706382

9781974701

599

My Hero Academia: Heroes and villians battle it out everywhere!

Don’t miss this #1 bestselling manga and its new spinoff series!

Shonen Jump $9.99 each

9781506710105

Holiday Gift Guide

11

Explore books to

Stars and icons Legends of stage and screen tell fascinating true stories in all their own words, from Sally Field, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Abbi Jacobson.

Grand Central

9781538747155 $50 9781538763025 $29

The Dogist Puppies

“

How to Be a Good Creature

This is an adorable, funny and endearing look at over 800 cuddly puppies from popular photographer Elias Weiss Friedman, aka the Dogist.

Artisan $14.95

9781579658694

9781538713297 $28

In highly readable prose

accompanied by a wealth of

Sy Montgomery reflects on 13 friendly animals that profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic and lifeaffirming memoir featuring illustrations

by Rebecca Green.

pictures, How Do We Look

explores both the depiction and reception of ancient art . . .

HMH

9780544938328

$20

[Beard] is a plain-spoken, downto-earth guide, from the top of her long, flowing gray hair down

Bob Langrish's World of Horses

National Geographic Spectacle

Dramatic, poignant and personal, Bob Langrish’s photos are a testament to the ancient and abiding relationship between horses and humans.

This dazzling photo collection of natural and man-made wonders, unusual phenomena, amusing curiosities and epic spectacles highlights the miraculous beauty of our planet.

9781426219689

Storey $40

National Geographic

9781635861259

$40

The Best Damn Answers to Life's Hardest Questions

. . . And Then You Die of Dysentery Pack your wagons, it’s time to hit the Oregon Trail, 21st-century style! This quirky, nostalgic sendup of the computer game features hard-earned lessons from the trail.

Full of illustrated flowcharts, lists and rants, this book mixes humor and invaluable advice, making it an uplifting gift.

Workman

HMH

which allow her to get up close and personal with a cavalcade of

”

art masterpieces.

Excerpt from our September 2018 interview with Mary Beard The Travel Atlas The ultimate world atlas for travelers makes it easy to plan adventures and discover remarkable places around the planet.

9781523501458

Lonely Planet $50

$12.95

$14.99

9781787016965 9781328624390

12

to her fashionable sneakers,

Holiday Gift Guide

Where You Go Charlotte Pence offers a touching and personal portrait of her father, Vice President Mike Pence, and the most important life lessons he has taught her.

New

Nonfiction

Center Street $26 9781546076186

The Fifth Risk

Accessory to War

Bestselling author Michael Lewis takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders.

From the bestselling author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry comes an exploration of the age-old complicity between sky-watchers and war-fighters.

Norton $26.95

Confronting Nazi evil — new in the mega-selling Killing series

Norton $30

9781324002642

9780393064445

How Do We Look

Black Flags, Blue Waters

From prehistoric Mexico to modern Istanbul, Mary Beard (SPQR) looks beyond the canon of Western imagery to explore the history of art, religion and humanity.

America’s golden age of piracy comes to life with tales of vicious mutineers, treasure and high-seas intrigue featuring Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and a young Benjamin Franklin.

Liveright

Liveright

$24.95

$29.95

9781250165541

9781631492105

9781631494406

Stop Mass Hysteria

Trump's Enemies

Michael Savage provides his view of historical accounts of the many times that mass hysteria has gripped the American public and how it impacts the goals of conservatives.

The authors lay out their views of the bureaucratic pitfalls that have faced President Trump and his determination in the face of opposition.

This is the epic saga of the “Nazi hunters,” the brave men and women who tracked down SS fugitives and brought them to justice.

Holt $30

Center Street $27

Center Street $28 9781546082934

9781546076223

Holiday Gift Guide

13

Carla Hall's Soul Food

At

Home Cooking with Scraps This innovative cookbook proves just how delicious and surprising the often discarded parts of produce can be.

Workman $19.95

From Carla Hall, a “Top Chef” fan favorite and the former co-host of ABC’s hit show “The Chew,” comes a celebration of soul food’s storied history, with 140 delectable recipes.

Harper Wave $29.99

9780062669834

Home Cooking with Kate McDermott

The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs

The author behind the award-winning Art of the Pie offers nourishing, unfancy and unfailingly delicious recipes for every day and every season.

This is the cookbook that every young chef needs! For the first time ever, America’s Test Kitchen brings their expertise and know-how to young chefs. Kid-tested and kid-approved!

Countryman $29.95

9780761193036

9781682682418

Jabberwocky

Beer Hacks

Perfect gifts for all the cookbook lovers on your list!

These three gorgeous cookbooks are inspired by the tastes and traditions of the Southern kitchen, from modern updates on classic dishes to down-home favorites from country music star Martina McBride.

9780848756659

$35

9780848757632 9780848754419

With these 100 tips and tricks, readers will learn the very best and most creative ways to serve, share, store and savor their favorite brews.

Workman 9781523501106

$16.95

Oxmoor House

$30

$35

Kitchen Yarns

Homebody

Cozy Minimalist Home

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, bestselling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls with her signature humor and tenderness.

This is an inspiring home design book from the New York Times bestselling author and Magnolia co-founder Joanna Gaines.

You can have a warm, inviting home without spending tons of money! A cozy, minimalist home goes beyond pretty and sets the stage for connection, relationships and rest.

Harper Design $40

Norton $24.95

Zondervan 9780062801975

9780393249507

14

9781492670025

$19.99

Holiday Gift Guide

$24.99 9780310350910

GIFTS for Book Lovers Order at BookPage.com/SHOP Save 10%! Use Coupon Code BOOKPAGE at checkout.

TABLET HOLDER $14.99

WOODEN READING REST $24.95

BOOKAROO NOTEBOOK TIDY ASSORTED COLORS $12.99

THE REALLY TINY BOOK LIGHT

BOOKAROO PEN POUCH

ASSORTED COLORS

ASSORTED COLORS

$9.99

$9.99

LITERARY LETTER METAL BOOKMARKS $5.99 each

LUXE LETTER KEYRING $7.99 each

Holiday Gift Guide

15

Inspired Next Level Thinking

Top books for all ages

Joel Osteen, bestselling author and pastor, invites readers to set aside their shortcomings and instead focus on achieving new levels of success.

These books should be on your family’s shelf!

FaithWords $24

9781546025962

Every Man's Bible 9781462751204 $19.99

9781433648212 $49.99

With thousands of study notes, reallife application points and sound advice from leaders on myths and misinformation, this is a Bible for every battle every man faces.

9781433644207 $39.99

Tyndale House 9781414381077

9781462796755 $12.99

9781462777662 $19.99

9781462776344 $16.99

9781535914611 $19.99

Excerpt from Fervent 9781535939799 $22.99

“A prayer that’s seeking passion should not be about manufacturing a better feeling or jostling up a better mood. It’s simply about holding out your open hands— in thanksgiving first, in gratitude for God’s faithfulness and His goodness and His assured, accomplished victory over the enemy. Then asking. Asking for what He already wants to give you. Then waiting (expecting) to receive the promise of newness and freshness from His Spirit as you go along, more each day—praying until, as the prophet Hosea said . . . He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth. (Hos. 6:3)” —Priscilla Shirer 9781433679599 $16.99

9781433688676 $16.99

B&H Publishing 16

$49.99

Holiday Gift Guide

Living In His Own Words

Great holiday gifts for the whole family

Readers can discover the true spirit and heart of Billy Graham, a powerful man of faith, through classic quotes, Scriptures he loved most and inspirational reflections.

Whether they’re for a family member, friend or yourself, these titles are sure to bring holiday cheer to all who receive them.

Tyndale Momentum $14.99

9781496436436

Believe It

9780310766391

MVP quarterback Nick Foles shares his path to victory, his challenges and the faith that has guided him. This bestseller is perfect for the pro-football fan on your gift list!

$17.99 9780310765035

$16.99

9780310765059 $29.99

Tyndale Momentum $26.99 9781496436498

Excerpt from Daily Guideposts 2019 “...In my mind’s eye, Jesus listened, nodding now and again as I spoke. I mentioned the book I was currently writing and sought His wisdom and guidance as I do with all my novels. Then a strange thing happened—Jesus turned, looked at me, smiled, and said, as clearly as if He’d spoken the words out loud, Debbie, I have the most wonderful books for you to write . . . in heaven.

9780310355854 $24.99

Lord, it thrills me to know there are plots waiting for me in heaven! Thank You for Your unending gifts.”

—Debbie Macomber

9780785221609 $26.99

9780310354468 $19.99

9780310354475

9780718039851 $24.99

$19.99

9780718096144 $22.99

9780718098865

$22.99

HarperCollins Christian Holiday Gift Guide

17

columns Fort nights Over here at Lifestyles central, I see my fair share of whimsical books, and many of them I unabashedly love. This month’s whimsy award goes to Blanket Fort: Growing Up Is Optional (Morrow Gift, $18.99, 112 pages, ISBN 9780062742759) by a husband-and-wife creative team who are mysteriously (and whimsically) only known to readers as Grackle + Pigeon. Everyone knows kids

love to build blanket forts, but why should they have all the fun? “Let’s face it—adulting is hard,” the book’s intro reads. “Can’t we just not deal for a while and take refuge in a pile of pillows and blankets and maybe, just maybe, redefine what adulting actually means?”

In Blanket Fort, it means getting your craft on with aluminum tent poles, clamps and all the fabrics you can find. Use them to drape and clip your way to a reading nook, office space, movie-viewing nest, campsite chill-out zone and other enchanting, tentlike spaces.

Textile lovers will bask in the ideas presented here, many of which seem like a cool way to level up your next party’s decor.

LOVE LETTERING I’ve always loved pretty paper and stationery, and I enjoyed dabbling in hand lettering in my youth. But calligraphy made me think, it’s lovely, but I’ll never possess the patience to build that skill. So I’m pleased to find these words from calligrapher Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls in the opening of her gorgeous new book: “I found that once I let go of the idea that my letterforms had to be ‘perfect,’ I felt a weight was lifted and everything started to flow.” With that encouraging tone, The Gift of Calligraphy: A Modern Approach

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COOKING

LIFESTYLES

BY SYBIL PRATT

B Y S U S A N N A H F E LT S

Polished confidence to Hand Lettering with 25 Projects to Give and to Keep (WatsonGuptill, $25, 224 pages, ISBN 9780399579202) welcomes you to slow down, relax and dip a metal nib in ink and use it to make your mark. Imasa-Stukuls first covers basics like tools, guide sheets, warm-up strokes and forming and connecting letters. She then outlines projects like a message in a bottle, gift wrap, labels, tags and place cards, and in a nice touch, the visual how-tos are hand-drawn.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES If you’ve watched “Queer Eye,” then you don’t need me to explain why a book based on the show is squeal-worthy. (If you haven’t watched, then put down this magazine right now, honey, and get over to Netflix.) In Queer Eye: Love Yourself. Love Your Life. (Clarkson Potter, $29.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781984823939), each member of the Fab Five supplies their own backstory and offers life tips in their respective categories: selfcare and grooming guidance from Jonathan, style advice from Tan, life coaching from Karamo, home design and furnishing smarts from Bobby and cooking expertise from Antoni. Also, each of the five shares fave recipes, and yes, Jonathan’s is Hamburger Casserole. (“I got the idea for this casserole by watching Rachel Ray make a layered ice cream cake about twenty years ago. Yumm-o!”) Last come tips on how to throw a most excellent party. Vibrant and packed with photos of the team, this book is every bit as delightful as the show, and both are required survival gear for the world we live in.

Ina Garten is back and better than ever. Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks (Clarkson Potter, $35, 272 pages, ISBN 9780804187046) is Garten’s 11th cookbook and a super seminar on how to incorporate the time-tested kitchen tricks she’s come to rely on into your own cooking. Though she’s a true selftaught cook, Garten’s years as a caterer and specialty food-store own-

er and her close association with professional chefs and bakers have taught her how to make “flavors sing and presentations pop.” Now she shares her pro tips with us, along with a carefully curated collection of recipes, from cocktails, appetizers (Sausage & Mushroom Strudels) and breakfast delights to soups, salads and dinner (flaky Flounder Milanese topped with Arugula Salad), finished off with veggies, sides and desserts (Fresh Fig & Ricotta Cake). Sprinkled throughout this comestible cache, like informative amuse-bouches, are short essays on measuring, prepping, baking and testing for doneness like a pro. This is bound to be one of the season’s go-to gourmet gifts.

TESTED AND TRUSTED Cook’s Illustrated magazine, champion of a thoughtful and no-nonsense approach to home cooking, is celebrating its 25th anniversary by giving us a present— Cook’s Illustrated Revolutionary Recipes (Cook’s Illustrated, $45, 576 pages, ISBN 9781945256479).

The “revolution” here is not exotic ingredients or wild flavor combos; it’s an insistent pursuit of perfect recipes and the foolproof way to make everything from poached eggs and the crispiest of Crispy

Fried Chicken to rich Ragù alla Bolognese or a No-Knead Brioche.

Each of these 180 recipes is a master class, starting with an essay that breaks the dish apart and explores how and why it works. Included along with the carefully detailed cooking directions, blackand-white photos and line drawings are tips on techniques and prep, what to look for when buying ingredients and intriguing variations to extend your repertoire.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS I read a lot of cookbooks, and it’s rare when I want to make— and eat—almost every recipe.

But that’s what happened when I went through Dorie Greenspan’s latest, Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook (Rux Martin, $35, 368 pages, ISBN 9780544826984). She’s out-“Doried” herself this time: The 150 recipes included here are fabulous and introduced with wonderfully written and informative header notes. Greenspan’s impeccable instructions, make-ahead advice and ideas for swapping out major ingredients are all seasoned with her casual, practical ease, culinary savvy and style. There are dishes for every occasion, with innovative riffs like Gougères with a zippy addition of Dijon mustard; classic Flounder Meunière with an added pizazz of Onion-Walnut Relish; a hot, spicy, slightly sweet Beef Stew with a handful of cranberries; Clam Chowder made with lemongrass, coconut milk and ginger; and of course, Greenspan’s ever-splendid desserts (check out her Apple Custard Crisp). Dining with Dorie never disappoints.

THE HOLD LIST

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ART FORGER

Each month, BookPage editors share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.

Wed, bed, behead The rules of Kiss/Marry/Kill are simple: You’re given the names of three people, and you must choose whom you’d kiss, marry or kill. In the literary version, Wed/Bed/Behead, we’ve selected books we’d love to reread forever and ever (Wed), read for pure enjoyment (Bed) or read for the love-to-hate characters or for the emotional wreckage (Behead).

Bed: THE ALICE NETWORK by Kate Quinn A story about a female spy ring always has a place in my bed. In 1947, a young American woman named Charlie St. Clair is sent to Europe due to a surprise pregnancy, and there she meets a prickly Englishwoman named Eve Gardiner, who was a spy in German-occupied France during World War I. The two women come together to investigate a few buried secrets, and the ensuing tale is an absolute treat. —Cat, Deputy Editor

Behead: THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10 by Ruth Ware Ware’s take on the paranoid-heroine trope is set in one of the most claustrophobic settings imaginable: a cruise ship. Travel writer Lo Blacklock hasn’t been herself since she survived a traumatic break-in, and her grasp on reality seems a little questionable, especially when she hears a body being tossed overboard. Readers will delight in seeing her spiral in pursuit of the truth. —Cat, Deputy Editor

Bed: THE KISS QUOTIENT by Helen Hoang As giddy and infectious as the first rush of love, The Kiss Quotient follows Stella, an econometrician with Asperger’s, on her quest to learn about sex and dating by hiring a smooth, very handsome male escort named Michael. Hoang’s debut is a master class in character-specific, slow-burning love scenes, and the joy of Stella and Michael’s unexpected connection practically sings off the page. —Savanna, Editorial Assistant

Wed: THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy Like a long-lived marriage, my relationship with this melancholic, New Orleans-set romance has grown and shifted over time. I first read the adventures of Binx, a disaffected young stockbroker, and his enchanting cousin Kate in my teens, returned in my 20s because I missed the South, and again in my early 30s after Katrina wrecked the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I’ll tell you a secret that applies both to favorite books and good marriages: The joy is in the anticipation. —Stephanie, Editor

Behead: ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan When was the last time you ugly-cried on an airplane? I read this book in my late teens, when I still thought happy endings were a real thing. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive McEwan for the mistakes made by the living, breathing characters that populate this masterful novel of war, love and class differences. —Cat, Deputy Editor

A NOVEL

B. A. SHAPIRO “A clever and complex tale of art fraud, theft, scandal, murder, and revenge . . . Readers will be swept away by this thoroughly rewarding novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A platinum potion of art, love, and scandal . . .

A big story, from a big talent.”

—JACQUELYN MITCHARD, bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean

“A tour de force.”

—DAWN TRIPP, bestselling author of Georgia

AND AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

ALGONQUIN BOOKS www.algonquin.com

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AUDIOBOOKS YOU’LL LOVE A LATTE READ BY ROBERT BATHURST The new Chief Inspector Gamache audiobook from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

“[Narrator Robert Bathurst] engages us completely....If you haven’t listened to this series, start at once.”

— AudioFile on A Great Reckoninge

columns Seeing double Listener beware! Untrue (Hachette Audio, 10 hours) is Wednesday Martin’s unvarnished, cogently argued, colorfully detailed take on women who are “untrue.” She’s talking about women’s sexuality, adultery, cheating and “stepping out,” and she doesn’t mince words or use euphemisms.

So if you’re uncomfortable with sexual straight talk, this book is not for you. But if you’re perfectly OK with it, there’s much to shake

READ BY THE AUTHOR With a final twist that will shock even his most ardent listeners, Heads You Win is #1 New York Times bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s most ambitious and creative work since Kane and Abel.

READ BY CAROLINE LEE “Lee’s performance is emotionally shrewd and irresistibly entertaining...

Before you know it, Lee and Moriarty have you hopelessly hooked.”

—AudioFile on Truly Madly Guilty, Earphones Award winner

READ BY THERESE ANNE FOWLER A Well-Behaved Woman is the riveting audiobook about ironwilled Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The frontman of one of the greatest bands of all time tells the story of his rise from nothing to rock ‘n’ roll megastar.

AVAILABLE FROM 20

up your perceptions. Martin sees the sexual double standard, with its misunderstanding of women’s hearts and libidos, as “one of our country’s foundational concepts” along with life and liberty. To explore female infidelity and sexual autonomy, she talked to and synthesized the work of experts— primatologists, anthropologists, psychologists and more—who challenge our received notions of female promiscuity and see it as a behavior with a “remarkably long tail.” Martin reads her own provocative, stereotype-slaying words with elan.

GILDED AGE GHOSTS

READ BY THE AUTHOR

MACMILLAN AUDIO

AUDIO

BY SUKEY HOWARD

I’m not a big fan of paranormal fiction, but Rose Gallagher, the protagonist of Erin Lindsey’s Gilded Age thriller Murder on Millionaires’ Row (Macmillan Audio, 10 hours), is so disarmingly charming and fabulously feisty that I happily followed the spectral happenings that swirl around her from the get-go. Though 19-yearold Rose grew up in the roughand-tumble Five Points, a notorious Dickensian slum in Lower Manhattan, she’s now a maid in a Fifth Avenue townhouse owned

by Thomas Wiltshire, an elegant, eligible young Englishman. Rose, of course, has a full-throttle crush on her boss, and when he goes

missing, she uses all her grit and innate talent to solve the mystery of his disappearance. When that’s achieved, she finds herself in Thomas’ world, in which special Pinkerton operatives investigate supernatural events, work with witches and return errant shades to the afterlife.

This engagingly fun first installment in Lindsey’s new series is delightfully performed by Barrie Kreinik.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO The United States imprisons a higher portion of its population than any other country in the world, and roughly 130,000 inmates are in privately owned, for-profit prisons. Less than a decade ago, Shane Bauer, a senior reporter for Mother Jones, unknowingly crossed into Iran while hiking and was held for 26 months in an Iranian jail. In 2014, to investigate life inside a corporately run penitentiary, Bauer took a low-paying job as a guard at a facility in Winnfield, Louisiana, owned by the Corrections Corporation of America (now rebranded as CoreCivic). His on-the-ground reporting in American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (Penguin Audio, 10.5 hours) is powerful and disturbing.

The conditions he experienced at Winnfield were horrendous, from dangerous understaffing that left prisoners with no classes and few activities, to subminimal medical care, unbridled sexual harassment and pervasive violence. And Bauer’s incisive examination of how the profit motive has shaped our prison system since the end of slavery amplifies his indictment.

James Fouhey expertly narrates this vital exposé.

BOOK CLUBS

BY JULIE HALE

New in paperback Acclaimed author Amy Bloom dramatizes the love that blossomed between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena “Hick” Hickok in her well-crafted novel White Houses (Random House, $17, 256 pages, ISBN 9780812985696). In 1945, following a separation of eight years, Hick pays Eleanor a visit.

Franklin Roosevelt is dead, and World War II is nearing an end.

The reunion sparks memories for Hick, who looks back on her life.

After a rough upbringing in South Dakota, she becomes a successful journalist, covering politics for The Associated Press. She meets Eleanor in 1932, and their connection intensifies over time. Hick moves into the White House and eventually works for the Roosevelt administration. As chaotic political events unfold, the love between the two women proves to be a lasting force. Skillfully mixing fact and fiction, Bloom creates a poignant portrait of the pair—two kindred spirits who were ahead of their time. Fans of historical novels will find much to savor in Bloom’s moving book.

UNHAPPY HOLIDAYS Ali Smith follows up her acclaimed 2017 title, Autumn, with Winter (Anchor, $15.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781101969953), the second entry in her series of season-inspired novels. It’s Christmas 2016, and Art is headed to Cornwall, where his mother, Sophia, awaits him and his girlfriend— with whom he just broke up. So when Art meets Lux, a lesbian Croatian woman, he pays her to pretend to be his ex, and they arrive at Sophia’s for what turns out to be an unforgettable holiday. The

presence of Sophia’s radical, estranged sister, Iris, creates friction as the foursome debate Brexit and the state of politics in America. Past events come into play through scenes of Iris’ involvement in protests and the first meeting between Sophia and Art’s father. Smith employs a daring narrative style in this book that is at once a powerful family novel and a shrewd exploration of the Trumpian era. Readers will be eager for the next installment in Smith’s compelling series.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich, known for her realistic portrayals of American Indian life, moves into the realm of speculative fiction with Future Home of the Living God (Harper Perennial, $16.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780062694065). Twenty-six and pregnant, Cedar Hawk Songmaker is living in a dying world.

Instead of progressing, evolution appears to be moving in reverse: Plants have a prehistoric quality, and pregnant women are bearing primitive infants. Cedar was adopted by a kind, forward-thinking couple in Minneapolis, but she hopes to connect with her Ojibwe birth mother. Presented as a letter written by Cedar to the child she carries, this haunting tale portrays America as a police state in which pregnant women are imprisoned.

When Cedar is captured and held in a hospital, she must fight to survive. Convincingly rendered and filled with suspense, this futuristic tale is a remarkable departure for Erdrich. Her storytelling skills are on full display in this all-too-resonant narrative.

Fresh Book Club Reads

for the fall THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER’S DAUGHTER

by Hazel Gaynor

“A splendid read—The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter is not to be missed!”

—Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author

A DANGEROUS DUET

by Karen Odden

“A captivating tale of mystery, history, and a dash of romance—with an ahead-of-her-time heroine.”

—Susan Elia MacNeal, New York Times bestselling author

MARILLA OF GREEN GABLES

by Sarah McCoy

“Marilla of Green Gables is a must read for anyone who adored Avonlea and Anne and ever wondered, what came before?”

—Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author

THE WEIGHT OF AN INFINITE SKY

by Carrie La Seur

“Few writers can capture the poetry of the West like Carrie La Seur.”

—Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire series

 @Morrow_PB

 @bookclubgirl

 William Morrow  Book Club Girl

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WELL READ

Tell all the truth Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate, not only for her brilliant, sui generis poetry but also for the reclusive life she lived. Yet just beyond the door of her self-constructed hermitage, all manner of intrigue and scandal was afoot, as her married brother, Austin, carried on an affair with his also-married neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, for more than a decade. At the time, this not-verywell-hidden indiscretion rocked closeknit Amherst, Massachusetts, but the true historical and literary significance of the connection rests in the fact that Todd, along with her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, would become central forces in bringing Emily Dickinson’s work to the public posthumously and therefore shaping how we continue to understand the poet’s work. In After Emily (Norton, $27.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9780393249262), Julie Dobrow tells the full story of this remarkable mother and daughter for the first time.

Todd pushed against the parameters erected for women of her time, applying her intelligence and talents to music, painting and travel writing. Her diaries indicate that she was comfortable with the sexual aspects of love, and her marriage to David Todd, an astronomer, seems to have been remarkably open, with each aware of the other’s flirtations. After her husband took a teaching job at Amherst College, the Todds enjoyed the patronage of their influential neighbors, the Dickinsons. Mabel Todd was soon engaged in an emotional—and ultimately physical—affair with Austin Dickinson, who was twice her age. Dobrow suggests that this pair truly were soul mates, trapped in unhappy, or at least unfulfilling, marriages to others.

Yet Todd also appears to have been quite self-centered in her pursuits.

Her only child, Bingham, was

22

COZY MYSTERIES

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

BY HEATHER SEGGEL

Parrot under oath raised by her grandparents until she was 8 years old, and when she came to live in Amherst with Todd, she was a victim of the damaging atmosphere generated by her mother’s affair—even if she didn’t fully understand what was going on at the time.

Emily Dickinson herself is a shadow figure in the story told here, much as she remained largely in the shadows of her own home in life. Indeed, Todd never met the poet face-to-face, despite living across a meadow from Dickinson and maintaining an intimate relationship with her brother. After the poet died, Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia, discovered the trove of poems the poet had never shared with the world, and she entrusted Todd with the task of getting them published. Todd found new purpose in this mission, but some of her decisions—including what Bingham would later call “creative editing,” such as changing some of Dickinson’s singular syntax and grammar—remain controversial.

Still, Todd and Bingham’s role in preserving this great American Emily poet’s writing Dickinson is immeasuris a shadow able. Their commitment figure in the to publishing events of and promoting After Emily. their erstwhile neighbor’s work continued well into the 20th century, even as the family weathered personal crises.

This narrative of Todd’s and Bingham’s lives is elegantly and movingly told, if overly detailed at times.

Both women were perhaps pack rats, and Dobrow encountered the blessing and the curse of 700 boxes of primary source material—hundreds of thousands of pages— among their private papers. She has done an admirable job sifting through the detritus to distill the essence of these women, their work and the world they inhabited.

E.J. Copperman’s second entry in the Agent to the Paws series, Bird, Bath, and Beyond (Minotaur, $26.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781250084293), finds animal talent agent Kay Powell on the set of a TV show with a parrot whose owner has the flu. When the show’s (human) star turns up dead, the parrot is surprisingly talkative, and since he’s Kay’s client, she’s drawn into the search for a killer. The well-populated story zips along— Kay’s parents visit, the show’s cast and crew are all suspects, and the human-animal banter is snappy.

Glimpses of show business at its best and worst (the hard work, the giant egos) and the ways animals are used on film give this clever tale a realistic feel. So far, Kay is two for two when it comes to adopting her animal clients. As the series evolves, what kind of zoo will she end up with? For cozy fans, it will be fun to find out.

TILL DEATH DO US PART The town of Tinker’s Cove, Maine, is in an introspective mood at the start of Silver Anniversary Murder (Kensington, $26, 304 pages, ISBN 9781496710338). A quarrelsome couple is renewing their vows, and everyone’s invited. Lucy Stone reaches out to her best friend, Beth, to reminisce about her own wedding day, only to learn that Beth has died. But was it suicide, or did one of Beth’s four ex-husbands help her off that balcony? To find out, Lucy goes back to New York City and reflects on her own past while searching for clues. This is bestselling author Leslie Meier’s 25th Lucy Stone mystery, but the small-town hospitality of Tinker’s Cove welcomes all readers, new and old alike. Lucy is

observant by nature, and her reporter’s instincts are both an asset and a liability; anyone with something to hide had better do it well, or else keep Lucy out of the way. The resolution to this mystery takes a few unexpectedly dark turns, but Lucy lands on her feet. After all, it’s hardly her first time to be embroiled in matters of life and death.

TOP PICK IN COZIES In the 1950s, Brighton, England, was bucolic and lovely—if you disregard the hooligans, Teddy Boys and other criminal mischiefmakers lurking about. In A Shot in the Dark (Bloomsbury, $27, 304 pages, ISBN 9781635570557), author Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) fame introduces Inspector Steine, a police captain who wants nothing more than for crime to simply relocate itself so he can enjoy his ice cream in peace. When a well-known theater critic is gunned down just before he’s supposed to share crucial evidence in an old case, earnest Constable Twitten is determined to buck departmental tradition and actually solve a crime. This farcical tale is packed with interwoven plotlines, clues strewn about like confetti and a comically oblivious chief inspector. It reads like a stage comedy, and in fact Truss has written four seasons’ worth of Inspector Steine dramas for BBC Radio. There are no dark and stormy nights here, just gorgeous seaside views marred by occasional corpses. The ’60s are coming, but for now, women are still largely ignored; this turns out to be its own kind of liberation, since who would suspect them?

Sharp and witty, A Shot in the Dark is a good time.

WHODUNIT

BY BRUCE TIERNEY

One toe over the North Korean line Martin Limón’s fine series of military police procedurals, set in South Korea in the mid-1970s, features George Sueño and his sidekick, Ernie Bascom—U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agents who are the go-to guys when there’s a murder or some similarly sensitive issue regarding the military in the Land of the

304 pages, ISBN 9781250070005).

Back in 1991, there was a Sweet 16ish party at a Scottish manor house that had seen better days, and something seriously awful happened. Now in present day, whether by happenstance or by design, several of the 1991 revelers find themselves back at the same B & B, which has been restored and is

book uses some source material from original Bond author Ian Fleming, and of all the Bond books that have come out since Fleming’s death, this one may hew closest to the originals. The racy English sports cars, check. The sultry femme fatale, check. The oversize (both in girth and in ego) villain, check.

Oh, and here’s a bonus: For those who have ever wondered why Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred, this book is where you will find the answer.

“Smart . . . and very funny.”

—James Patterson, New York Times best-selling author

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY Morning Calm. The Line (Soho Crime, $26.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9781616959661) finds our heroes investigating the murder of a young Korean soldier whose body is found a few feet north of the line dividing North Korea from South.

Technically, Sueño and Bascom shouldn’t have dragged the body back across the line into the South, but they’ve never been sticklers for details like that. When a suspect presents himself, the powers that be are eager to pin the murder on him. Sueño and Bascom think the whole thing is just a little too pat, however, and despite explicit orders to the contrary, they decide to delve into the matter. They find themselves caught up in a criminal enterprise that involves fraud, smuggling and perhaps human trafficking, plus the aforementioned murder. I have read every Limón book since 1992’s Jade Lady Burning, and I have every intention of continuing to do so; they are that good.

A SECRET THAT CAN’T BE KEPT Catriona McPherson successfully channels the mystery chops of Agatha Christie and the dialogue skills of Noël Coward (apologies for the dated references, but this book has that sort of feel about it) in her standalone psychological thriller Go to My Grave (Minotaur, $26.99,

virtually unrecognizable. The eight guests are all family members, by blood or by marriage. But there is bad blood—and bad marriage—on display here, and another something awful is poised to take place.

I’m not giving anything away to say that even a newbie reader of suspense fiction will feel a Stephen King-esque prickle of menace as things start to get out of hand, and even the most jaded of suspense aficionados should be gobsmacked by the twist at the end.

BECOMING BOND Occasionally an author’s estate or a publisher gets the idea to craft a prequel to a popular series, and Anthony Horowitz performs this duty for ace British spy James Bond in Forever and a Day (Harper, $26.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780062872807).

As the book opens, M (the big boss of MI6) is discussing the death of agent 007, which initially seems odd, as this is at the inception of Bond’s illustrious career. But it turns out that the 007 under discussion is the previous holder of that particular license-to-kill number, and Bond is quickly promoted to take on his predecessor’s responsibilities. His mission takes him to the south of France, where he engages the first of the legendary villains that will characterize the adventures of Bond’s later life. The

Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series has been a mainstay of my professional and pleasure reading since the Shamus Award-winning The Guards (2001). The series follows the downfall of Galway cop Taylor and his efforts to climb out of the (very deep) hole he created for himself with his alcoholism and his exceptionally poor choices of friends and lovers. The opening pages of In the Galway Silence (Mysterious Press, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 9780802128829) find Taylor a little more settled than before: There is a romantic interest that tentatively seems to be working out, a bit of money in the bank, and he has the drinking under control for the most part. When bad stuff starts happening, only Taylor’s harshest critic could assign the responsibility to him—although it goes without saying that Taylor is his own harshest critic. One child is kidnapped and brutalized, another murdered, and a killer is on the rampage. Taylor knows who the culprit is and is powerless to do anything about it.

But you can push Taylor only so far, and when he snaps, he’s gonna go bat%#@& crazy, which is the high point of Bruen’s books for most readers. Taut plotting, a staccato first-person narrative, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters and the windy, wet Irish milieu conspire to put Bruen’s novels into a class by themselves.

A hilarious and heartfelt memoir about life as a hapless writer, single parent, impassioned city girl, and epileptic

by Alisa Kennedy Jones @iamgothamgirl.

“Like a candid conversation with an amusing friend.”

—Kirkus Reviews

@Imagine_CB

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‘Tis the season for fireside reads!

Love is a battlefield Gena Showalter’s paranormal romance Shadow and Ice (HQN, $7.99, 496 pages, ISBN 9781335041104) pulses with exciting and near-unrelenting action.

Irreverent heroine Vale London manages to maintain her equilibrium when she suddenly encounters supernatural soldiers engaged in

a battle, even as she unwittingly and unwillingly becomes one of the competitors. When she reluctantly partners with immortal warrior Knox of Iviland, their fierce yet unexpected attraction is just another war to wage—and one they end up losing. Superb world building—from the governing body pulling the strings to the special powers of each combatant—fulfills the authorial promise of this high-concept romance. Readers will be enthralled by Showalter’s details and root for her ruthless yet sympathetic characters in this notto-be-missed adventure.

Ruben wants the chance to show Dani and her daughters just how magical Christmas in Haven Point can be...

In the snowy Highlands of Scotland, Suzanne McBride is dreaming of the perfect cozy Christmas with her three adopted daughters.

But tensions are running high…

Pick up your copies today.

Available in print and ebook.

HQNBooks.com

24 18_350_BookPage_Christmas.indd 1

ROMANCE B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY

series, Van Fleet ably explores her characters’ vulnerabilities and flaws in alternating first-person narratives.

Gavin and McKenna aren’t perfect, but their imperfections will make readers root for them to overcome their doubts and fears. Frank language and sizzling love scenes make Recklessly Ever After a fast-paced and steamy read.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE

Two people in desperate straits save each other in the latest historical by Grace Burrowes, My One and Only Duke (Forever, $7.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9781538728956). Facing execution for a crime he didn’t commit, wealthy banker Quinn Wentworth proposes marriage to minister’s daughter Jane Winston, saving her from poverty and also providing an escape from her sanctimonious father. Grateful to this man she’s barely met, Jane agrees, and they marry. Then at the last FINDING FOREVER second, Quinn unexpectedly inherits a dukedom and is pardoned.

Painful pasts stand in the way of future happiness in ReckHe offers Jane an annulment, but lessly Ever After (Sourcebooks she’s willing to stick by her vows.

When they begin to live together Casablanca, $7.99, 320 pages, as husband and wife, Burrowes ISBN 9781492670742) by Heathdelves into the heart of the marer Van Fleet. Although their best riage-of-convenience trope: the friends have become lovers, Gavin St. James and McKenna Brewer physical and romantic tension crearen’t particularly comfortable in ated by a sudden intimacy between each other’s company. There’s a siz- two people who are still essentially zling attraction between them, but strangers. Both Quinn and Jane soon discover they delight each he’s a forever-type guy, and she’s sworn off believing in a long-term other in the bedroom, but they relationship. But the closeness of must learn trust and compromise their friend circle makes it hard to to build a real life together. This stay apart, and one night they give curl-up-and-enjoy read includes in, which leads to consequences a mystery—who set Quinn up for that can’t be ignored. Along with certain death?—as well as intrigugratifying glimpses of characters ing family members who definitely from the previous books in this deserve their own stories.

9/14/18 10:20 AM

The Instant New York Times Bestseller Based on the Powerful True Story of Love and Survival A beautiful, illuminating novel of hope and courage based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov “A moving testament to the power of kindness, ingenuity, and hope.”

—People “I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone, whether they’d read a hundred Holocaust stories or none.”

—Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project

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features

JOHN McPHEE

Annals of a long career

D

espite the fact that John McPhee’s delightful new collection of essays, The Patch, is his 33rd book, he thinks it’s “ridiculous” to call him a prolific writer.

“Here’s the thing,” he says during a call to his home in Princeton, New Jersey. “Every day you go over there [to his office at Princeton University] and try to get going. And you don’t get going, and you don’t get going—and you spend your whole day staring at the wall. Then a little panic sets in because you’re getting nothing done. Then maybe between 5 and 6 in the afternoon, you get something done. Then you go home, and the next day is the same, and the next day is the same. In other words, you spend most of your time not only alone, but getting nothing done!”

McPhee says he imagines the “something” at the end of day—a paragraph or two—as a few drops in the bucket. “If you do that 365 days or 330 days a year, the bucket is going to have some water in it.”

But still, a lot of people haven’t written 33 books, right? “And a lot of people aren’t 87 years old,” he replies, laughing.

At 87, McPhee is still writing and teaching his influential undergraduate writing class at Prince-

THE PATCH

By John McPhee

FSG, $26, 256 pages ISBN 9780374229481, eBook available

ESSAYS

26

ton, where he grew up as the son of a University team physician.

McPhee has an office in Guyot Hall in “a kind of fake medieval turret that used to be a paint closet,” and he rides his hybrid bicycle roughly 2,000 miles a year.

Readers of The Patch first learn about McPhee’s bicycle riding in an amusing essay called “The Orange Trapper.” But while a bike getaway is an important part of the story, the essay is really about McPhee’s obsession with collecting golf balls. The titular “Orange Trapper” is a device he uses to sate his particular appetite. McPhee writes that he quit playing golf altogether at age 24, but as this and another great essay (“Linkland and Bottle”) convey, he’s still very interested in the details of the sport and the changing nature of the ball itself.

“My fascination with golf was from the war years, when I was a little kid and caddying at a local golf course. [The scarcity during] the Second World War made it clear that hunting for balls was like a treasure hunt. That’s the source of my compulsion to find golf balls.”

Clearly, McPhee is also obsessed with the arduous task of producing precise, invigorating nonfiction narratives. He is probably best known for his stunning narrative of America’s geological history, sections of which appeared over the years in the New Yorker magazine and in separate books. When collected into the single, strapping volume Annals of the Former World, McPhee was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. But he has written books on an astonishing range of other subjects—oranges, the Alaskan wilderness, America’s nuclear power technology and basketball player Bill Bradley, to name a few.

McPhee’s writing and teaching has influenced generations of writers

of literary nonfiction.

The range of McPhee’s interests is on joyous display in the second section of his new book, which he calls “an album quilt.”

“It occurred to me that there was a lot of material that I had written in various places, including for private purposes, that had never been in book form, and there was a lot of fun in some of it,” he explains. “I wanted to do a piece with fragments of that stuff, fragments that would be amusing and interesting to “It’s called an read in 2018.” album quilt So over time, McPhee because each went through block in an years of matealbum quilt rial, amassing is unique; it a collection of doesn’t repeat some 250,000 words from the other nearly 60 years blocks.” of writing. He threw out almost 200,000 words in the editing process.

“The goal was not to preserve anything. I kept 56 items, some of which are a fraction of a page, and the longest of which are about four pages. I wrote a cover story in Time magazine on Sophia Loren, for example, and there are two or three paragraphs from that story because they were the ones that fit this idea. I put them together without dates or an index. I wanted it to have a kind of antique impression, talking about Jackie Gleason, talking about Richard Burton, a passage on Cary Grant and so on.

It’s called an album quilt because

© YOLANDA WHITMAN

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

each block in an album quilt is unique; it doesn’t repeat the other blocks. That seemed like a good title.”

McPhee dedicates The Patch to his 10 grandchildren. He lists them in alphabetical order—he doesn’t want to appear to express preference. “My grandchildren are much beloved to me,” he says.

The title piece of the collection is about McPhee’s father. The essay describes in exquisite, meditative detail fishing with a friend for chain pickerel, a tricky fish other fishers consider a nuisance, around a patch of lily pads on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The magic arises from how he links this memory of fishing with the stroke and eventual death of his father. These brief nine pages are a beautiful encapsulation of all that makes McPhee a great writer.

“There’s no accident that this piece is number one in the collection,” McPhee says. “And the number one reason that I am pleased that this collection is going to exist is that this piece is in it.”

This poignant essay—along with other gems—make The Patch worthy of any curious, thoughtful reader’s attention.

cover story

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Big drama from a beloved novelist

W

hen Barbara Kingsolver starts writing a novel, she identifies an intriguing, vital question, one without a clear answer.

What question, it seems natural to ask, did she ponder for her latest novel? Her response is somewhat startling.

We speak by phone from her home in southwestern Virginia, where she’s “happily in my beautiful office, looking out the window at trees.” Her voice sounds relaxed and gracious, and when I confess that I originally hail from a small town in southern West Virginia, not too far away, she says, “Well, you and I could talk in our native tongues if we wanted to.” As a bit of twang from her Kentucky roots creeps into her voice, she notes that her accent “depends on where I am in my book tour, whether I’m the nice radio Barbara, or if I’ve been home lately, then my vowels will shift a little.”

When it comes to the key question that prompted her remarkable new novel, Unsheltered, Kingsolver responds with no trace of a Southern accent: “WTF?!”

Here’s what prompted her expletive outburst: “I was watching so many things that we’ve mostly spent our lives trusting in—such as, if you work hard, there will be a job at the end of the college degree. There will be a pension at

UNSHELTERED

By Barbara Kingsolver

Harper, $29.99, 480 pages ISBN 9780062684561, audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

28

the end of your career. There will always be more fish in the sea. The poles will stay frozen. Every single one of those is now up for debate.”

She quickly corrects herself.

“No, not even up for debate— wrong! What are the rules of civil governance? What does it mean to be a patriot, to be a good American? What does it mean to be president? You know, everything that we’ve spent a long time believing in as the correct way to proceed is looking less and less true.”

In a nutshell, Kingsolver explains her “WTF moment” as rough shorthand for, “What do we do and why, when it looks like all the rules that we’ve believed in are no longer true?”

She takes a breath and asks, “Is that an answer?”

The result of Kingsolver’s latest search for answers is yet another tour de force of fiction, a riveting successor to novels like Flight Behavior and The Poisonwood Bible. In alternating chapters, Unsheltered tells the stories of two families inhabiting the same address, the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vinewood, New Jersey— one family living in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the other in the 1870s.

“There have been many moments in history when civilizations started to unravel,” Kingsolver says. “So, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to look back at some others, set up a contrast and then try to make these two stories into one story?”

Both families are teetering on the brink of financial ruin in the midst of a societal shift. Modern-day Willa Knox is an unemployed editor whose magazine has folded; her husband is a professor whose college has closed. Their free-spirited adult daughter has suddenly appeared on their doorstep after a long absence, and a

tragedy upends the life of their Harvard-educated son, bringing a newborn baby into the fold.

In the 1870s, a science teacher named Thatcher Greenwood is chastised for teaching the principles of Charles Darwin. He also befriends a brilliant scientist living next door. She is Mary Treat—a real-life, little-known naturalist who corresponded with Darwin.

“The fiction that I most admire is ambitious in its scope,” Kingsolver admits. She grew up reading “great, globally ambitious “I’m always writers” like writing about Melville and this dynamic Doris Lessing, “people conflict who were not between content with individual household expression drama. They wanted to and tackle conflict communal on a larger belonging.” scale. . . .

That’s the kind of novel I love to try to write.

And I would much rather write it in fiction because I love creating character, and I love painting with those brushes.”

Kingsolver always imbues her fictional worlds with plenty of fascinating factual backbone, and this book is no exception.

“I love delving into a completely new subject with each book,” she says. “They say every writer is just writing the same book again and again, and if that’s true, I’m always writing about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging.

But the settings and the specifics

© ANNIE GRIFFITHS

INTERVIEW BY ALICE CARY

are always changing. . . . I love that, because I was one of those college kids who wanted to major in everything.”

Once Kingsolver decided to use Mary Treat as a fictionalized character, she traveled to Vineland, New Jersey, to study her writings. A treasure trove awaited, including letters from Darwin. In her acknowledgments, the author describes holding one such missive as “one of the most electric moments in my life.”

Even more surprises were in store. Kingsolver discovered that Vineland was a Utopian community created in the mid-1800s by an eccentric real-estate mogul named Charles Landis, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain modern politician. Landis, she says, “wanted to steal every scene because he’s a loud mouth.

If he’d had a cell phone, he would have been tweeting. He was just the perfect sort of narcissist bully antihero that I needed to anchor my other story.”

Kingsolver quickly discovered other “uncanny and chilling” parallels to modern politics. For instance, in 2016, one presidential candidate—whom she alludes to but never names in her novel nor this interview—famously suggested that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, while Landis actually shot

a man in the back of the head right on Vineland’s Main Street.

Landis’ target was a newspaper editor with whom he disagreed.

After the editor succumbed to his injuries several months later, Landis was—shockingly—found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, perhaps among the first uses of this defense in America.

“I’m writing about the bleakest things,” Kingsolver acknowledges.

“As I see the two-sentence summaries of this book starting to come out, I say, ‘Who would want to read that?’”

Fans needn’t worry. As always, Kingsolver has worked hard to ensure that her novel is enjoyable. “That’s my contract with the reader.” Despite their immense struggles, these characters experience numerous comic, uplifting and revelatory moments.

One of the most magical parts of Unsheltered is how Kingsolver skillfully blends her two narratives into one unified tale, with past and present repeatedly mirroring each other. For instance, Willa stares at a portrait of Landis, studying the “famous autocrat, with his ruddy cheeks and odd flop of hair.” Years earlier, Mary Treat says of Landis: “The man is like his hero Phineas Barnum, with the gilded offices in Manhattan Island.”

“I really invested a lot of the craft and elbow grease—whatever you call hours in the chair—into making [the earlier] story fully as engaging as the modern story and making it feel seamless.” Kingsolver began writing in the fall of 2015 and finished in January 2017, the month of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. “While I was writing,” she says, “part of me thought this will be completely history by the time this novel is published, and no one will even remember this guy.” She calls the unexpected election results “bad for the world, good for the book.”

After the election, Kingsolver took stock of her almost-finished manuscript, saying, “I understood that this book that I had thought could be important was going to be important. It made me feel even more strongly that I wanted to get this book into the world.”

Two-volume, slip-cased collection of nearly 10 decades of the best New Yorker cartoons

Stories and images from 45 contemporary women artists, with assignments that tap into your inner creativity

Charmingly funny animals celebrate their friendships throughout the year.

Literary-inspired cocktails with pun-filled drink titles

A must have for the crazy cat person in your life

Everything you need to grow your own catnip for that special feline friend

www.runningpress.com Running Press | A Division of Perseus Group LLC A Subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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features

BEHIND THE BOOK

Choose your words wisely

I

magine being asked to cull 1,000 volumes from the shelves of a library to represent a lifetime of reading. Where would you start?

What principles would govern your selection? How would you explain the reasons for your choices?

That thought experiment will give you some idea of why it took me 14 years to get 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die between covers. Since I have been a bookseller for most of my adult life, I knew from the start that my project could never be the last word on a reading life, nor should it attempt to be. What I most hoped it would convey are the pleasures of browsing and the serendipity that bookstores nourish—pleasures that are a preface to all the stories readers compose out of their own lives.

One of my first jobs was working in an independent bookstore in Briarcliff Manor, New York. I learned to listen to customers and, eventually, to make useful, interesting and potentially life-changing recommendations.

That last hyphenated adjective may sound grandiose, but the truth is that devoted booksellers— as Roger Mifflin, the protagonist of Christopher Morley’s The Haunted

1,000 BOOKS TO READ BEFORE YOU DIE

By John Mustich

Workman, $35, 960 pages ISBN 9781523504459, eBook available

LITERATURE

30

Bookshop (one of my 1,000 books), put it—are missionaries who seek “to spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty.”

With that mission in mind, in 1986 I co-founded a mail-order catalog called A Common Reader and spent the next two decades running that venture, which, luckily for me, consisted of writing about books old and new, of every subject and style—an occupation that prepared me as well as any could for the task of writing this book.

Still, that task was daunting: A book about 1,000 books could take so many different shapes. It could be a canon of classics; it could be a history of human thought and a tour of its significant disciplines; it might be a record of popular delights (or even delusions). But the crux of the difficulty was a less complicated truth: Readers read in so many different ways, any one standard of measure is inadequate. No matter their pedigree, inveterate readers read the way they eat: for pleasure as well as nourishment, indulgence as much as well-being, and sometimes for transcendence. Hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next.

Keeping such diversity of appetite in mind, I wanted to make my book expansive in its tastes, encompassing revered classics and commercial favorites, flights of escapist entertainment and enlightening works of erudition.

There had to be room for novels of imaginative reach and histories with intellectual grasp. And since the project in its title invoked a lifetime, there had to be room for books for children and adolescents. What criteria could I apply to accommodate such a menagerie, to give plausibility to the idea

that Where the Wild Things Are belongs in the same collection as In Search of Lost Time, that Aeneas and Sherlock Holmes or Elizabeth Bennet and Miss Marple could be companions, that a persuasive collection could begin, in chronological terms, with The Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed on Babylonian tablets some 4,000 years ago, and end with Ellen Ullman’s personal history of technology, Life in Code, published in 2017?

I came upon the clue I needed in a passage written by the critic Edmund Wilson, describing “the Readers miscellaneous read the way learning of the bookstore, they eat: for unorganized pleasure by any larger as well as purpose, the nourishment, undisciplined undirected cuindulgence riosity of the inas much as dolent lover of well-being. reading.” There, I knew instinctively, was a workable framework: What if I had a bookstore that could hold only 1,000 volumes, and I wanted to ensure it held not only books to be savored but also books that could be devoured in a night?

A shop where any reading inclination might find reward, and where a reader’s search for what to read next would be guided by serendipity as well as intent. I’d arrange my books alphabetically by author, so that readers could find their way easily but make unexpected discoveries as they turned the pages, from, for example, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s magnificent

© TRISHA KEELER PHOTOGRAPHY

BY JAMES MUSTICH

work of scientific observation and imagination, On Growth and Form, to Flora Thompson’s celebration of life in an English country village, Lark Rise to Candleford, followed

by Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Kay Thompson’s marvelous children’s book Eloise at the Plaza.

For a long time as I labored over building my metaphorical bookstore, a thousand books felt like far too many to get my head around, but now that I’m done, it seems too few by several multiples. Which is to say 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is neither comprehensive nor authoritative; it is meant to be an invitation to discovery and a tool to prompt conversations about books and authors that are missing as well as those that are included, because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to more important ones, like who to be and how to live. Happy reading!

Along with his experience as a bookseller, lifelong book lover James Mustich worked as an editorial and product development executive in the publishing industry. His popular mail-order book catalog, A Common Reader, ended publication in 2006. He has collected a sweeping compendium of significant books in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, a brilliant guidebook that’s filled with thoughtful essays and delightful asides. Mustich lives in Connecticut with his wife, Margot.

gifts

LITERARY

BY JULIE HALE

For library dwellers and book hoarders

T

he shelves are brimming with extra-special titles for bibliophiles. If there’s a discerning reader on your gift list, check out our must-have recommendations below. Here’s to a very literary holiday!

Poets and novelists can be solitary souls, but as Alison Nastasi reveals in Writers and Their Cats (Chronicle, $16.95, 112 pages, ISBN 9781452164571), they often have a rare appreciation for pets, especially of the feline variety. Featuring photos of 45 famous authors and their cat sidekicks, Nastasi’s purrrfectly charming book is filled with surprises, including a picture of a kitten-covered Stephen King. Sensational shots capture Alice Walker, Neil Gaiman, Gillian Flynn, Haruki Murakami and other beloved authors with cats at writing desks, in libraries and cozied up on sofas.

For the writer, what’s the allure of le chat? According to Nastasi, “The cat represents traits most appealing to the creative personality—qualities like mystery, cleverness, fearlessness, unpredictability, and sensuality.” Her book is catnip for literature lovers and an extraordinary celebration of kindred spirits.

RA-RA-RUSSIAN LIT Author Viv Groskop takes heart from the tales of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Pushkin in The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian

Literature (Abrams, $25, 224 pages, ISBN 9781419732720) and looks at the morals and messages that can be gleaned from the masters’ works. With insight and humor, she examines 11 books and plays, revealing how her own experiences have been informed by timeless titles such as Dr. Zhivago, The Master and Margarita and War and Peace.

By chronicling the heartaches, dramas and hardships of daily existence, Russian literature can provide solace to the reader who seeks it. If you’re enmeshed in an ill-fated romance, Groskop prescribes A Month in the Country.

Tormented by inner conflict? Pick up Crime and Punishment. Stories, Groskop says, “are as good at showing us how not to live as they are at showing us how to live.” Read and heed.

BOOK LOVER’S BOUNTY An delightful compendium of literature-related history and trivia, Jane Mount’s Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany (Chronicle, $24.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9781452167237) is one of the season’s standout gift selections.

In this splendid treasury, Mount explores literary genres and shares the reading recommendations of librarians and booksellers from across the country. She also presents nifty lists of literature-based enterprises, like blockbuster book-into-movie projects (Emma, The Shining) and famous songs inspired by great books (Bowie’s “1984,” Springsteen’s “The Ghost of

Tom Joad”).

An avid reader since childhood, Mount has been painting what she calls Ideal Bookshelves, renderings of fellow bibliophiles’ favorite books, since 2008.

Readers will enjoy perusing the colorfully illustrated, artfully assembled stacks that have become Mount’s trademark. Her artistic talents are on full display here in enchanting illustrations of meticulously detailed spines, book jackets, authors and notable libraries and bookstores.

Bibliophile is bliss for the book lover, from cover to cover.

spoken (the March home in Little Women) to utterly inhospitable (Castle Dracula), the residences in this delightful volume run the gamut. Becca Stadtlander’s dainty illustrations make this a tour that readers will want to take again and again.

GALLERY OF GREATS Growing up, photographer Beowulf Sheehan took refuge in books, and he pairs his twin

LITERARY LIVING Susan Harlan explores the estates, castles and cottages that © Underwood & Underwood / New York Times. appear in classic works Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. From Writers and Their Cats of fiction in Decorating a

by Alison Natasi, published by Chronicle.

Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with passions to perfection in Author: Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, (Black Dog & Leventhal, $40, 256 Ishmael, and Other Literary Nopages, ISBN 9780316515153), a galtables (Abrams Image, $19.99, 208 lery of 200 acclaimed contempopages, ISBN 9781419732379). Harrary writers, from Margaret Atwood lan, who teaches English literature to Colson Whitehead. at Wake Forest University, brings Sheehan took his first author scholarly expertise and epigramportraits in 2005 at the PEN World matic wit to this guide to famous Voices Festival; by 2017, he’d phofictional figures’ digs. tographed around 700 writers. His Casting the literary hero as photos capture the idiosyncrasies homeowner, the book features and moods of each of his subjects, Apartment Therapy-style interwhether it’s a brooding Karl Ove views with a wide cast of characters Knausgaard or a radiant Chimamwho expound upon design ideas anda Ngozi Adichie. In the book’s and DIY projects. There’s plenty of introduction, he shares on-the-job decorating advice on offer: “If you anecdotes involving the likes of own an abbey, don’t feel obligated Donna Tartt, Chinua Achebe and to adopt an overly monastic style,” Umberto Eco. Emma’s Mr. Knightley counWith a foreword by Salman sels. “That would be badly done Rushdie, this revelatory volume indeed!” From opulent (Pride and will bring a sparkle to any biblioPrejudice’s Pemberley) to plainphile’s holiday.

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gifts

QUIRKY B Y L I LY M c L E M O R E

Thoughtful gifts for the offbeat reader

W

e all have a few delightfully odd friends or family members: your nephew who just moved back from New Zealand after 14 years herding sheep, your conspiracy-theorist cousin, your friend who’s always mastering some obscure talent. These five books might be the perfect solution to the riddle of what to get the person on your list who’s just a little . . . out there.

You were hoping to witness our ancient ancestors in action thousands of years ago. But then your time machine broke, and now you are stranded among people whose sole form of communication seems to be grunting. Thankfully, though, you have a handbook: How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler (Riverhead, $27, 464 pages, ISBN 9780735220140), written by bestselling author and computational linguistics expert Ryan North. And luckily for any stranded time wanderers, North is incredibly funny, so you’ll be entertained while inventing fundamental technology for your fellow, albeit less-developed, man. This guide offers everything you need to build a civilization in no time (relatively speaking, as it took our ancestors 150,000 years to figure out how to talk). North covers language invention (English is not suggested; it’s kind of a wreck), measurements and horseshoes (which allow horses to work comfortably year-round, and as North writes, putting shoes on an animal “honestly seems like one of our most adorable achievements”).

Avoid the pitfalls of our ancestors with this handy guide.

COMICALLY SPEAKING It’s OK. We know your secret.

Sometimes, life gets busy, and all you have time to read in the New

32

few new tricks up their sleeves.

ROAD TRIPPING

Despite being the creator and star of Comedy Central’s very funny “Broad City” with her friend Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson is a private, contemplative person, more comfortable alone than in a crowd. In her 30s, she fell in love Yorker are the cartoons—in fact, their phones? Allan Zola Kronzek for the first time—and then, just as suddenly, the relationship was the cartoons may be your favorite has provided the answer: a little part of the famed literary magmagic. In Grandpa Magic: 116 over. She was devastated, and after azine. We have a feeling there’s struggling through the fourth seaEasy Tricks, Amazing Brainteasson of “Broad City,” she got in her more than a few people harboring ers, and Simple Stunts to Wow car and drove across the country to this secret, and for them, there’s the Grandkids (Workman, $16.95, reaffirm her identity as indepenThe New Yorker Encyclope208 pages, ISBN 9781523501052), dent and capable. In her dia of Cartoons: A vulnerable yet laugh-outSemi-serious A-to-Z loud collection of essays, I Archive (Black Dog Might Regret This (Grand & Leventhal, $100, Central, $28, 320 pages, 1,536 pages, ISBN ISBN 9781538713297), 9780316436670), a Jacobson shares her handsome, two-volthoughts on love, heartume, slip-cased break, insecurities, tiny collection spanning coffee cups, snacks and a nearly 10 decades and lot more. It’s the perfect gift featuring almost 3,000 for any “Broad City” fan, cartoons from the and it wonderfully captures magazine. Each was Jacobson’s voice in all of chosen for inclusion its kind, slightly neurotic,

by Bob Mankoff, the tangent-prone hilarity. She cartoon editor of the also narrates the audioNew Yorker from 1997- © The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons / Cartoon by Victoria Roberts book, making it ideal for 2017. There’s no lack someone going on their own road of humor in its format either, as it Kronzek shows readers how to use trip of self-discovery. is divided alphabetically into seceveryday items like straws, cards, tions such as Crash Test Dummies, coins, toothpicks and even dinner MATH FIENDS Elvis, Grim Reapers, Kayaks, Octorolls in simple tricks and sleights If you know a numbers or logic puses, Wise Man on the Mountain of hand that are fun, easy to maslover, The Riddler (Norton, $16.95, and (of course) Psychiatrists. ter and guaranteed to impress a range of ages. And don’t worry, you 224 pages, ISBN 9780393609912) DAZZLE THEM

by Oliver Roeder, the puzzle editor don’t have to have grandchildren Do you ever feel that holiday for the statistics and analysis webto enjoy this book. Illustrations of comedown, after all the presents site FiveThirtyEight, was crafted for Kronzek, as your genial grandpa have been unwrapped and the cof- guide, provide instructions for them. These puzzles aren’t for the fee pot is empty? It’s only 10 a.m.— the tricks, and Kronzek includes faint of heart, though. They’ll test what do you do with the rest of riddles and brainteasers of varying your geometry, logic and probathe day, and how can you keep the bility skills, and thankfully, Roeder degrees of difficulty as well. By kids from falling under the spell of provides thorough, entertaining dinnertime, everyone will have a answers to each puzzle. If you’re not currently working at NASA, you will probably need to think outside the box to solve these puzzles.

Mind-bending questions ask you to consider the radius of a martini glass, Bayes’ theorem, the probability of a house being robbed in a town full of thieves and more.

Just like a few loved ones on your gift list, The Riddler is a puzzler, indeed.

Love is just around the corner...

#ReadForever

Forever-Romance.com

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gifts

MUSIC

BY HILLI LEVIN

Where words leave off, music begins

F

ive new gift-ready reads are here for the music lover in your life. From operatic rock to Americana, from classical to soul, we’ve got a pitch-perfect match no matter their genre of choice.

Queen superfans may be looking forward to the upcoming biopic Bohemian Rhapsody—starring “Mr. Robot” lead Rami Malek as iconic frontman Freddie Mercury—but the publication of Martin Popoff’s lovingly compiled Queen:

photos of the band, gig posters and fun ephemera, Popoff’s freewheeling guide is definitely one to display.

TWEEDY’S TRUTH

Since 1994, the Chicago-based alternative rock-turned-Americana band Wilco have been pioneers of the indie scene, winning multiple Grammys and inspiring countless other musicians in their wake. Founder, frontman and lead songwriter Jeff Tweedy finally opens up to his devoted fans in his first memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (Dutton, $28, 304 pages, ISBN 9781101985267).

Put your well-loved copy of “Yankee Joni Mitchell from Women Who Rock. Illustration by Anne Muntges, Hotel Foxtrot” reproduced with permission from Black Dog & Leventhal. on the turntable Album by Album (Voyageur, $30, and settle in as Tweedy takes you 224 pages, ISBN 9780760362839) through his childhood, early creative days in Chicago, the writing is an event in its own right. Popoff, and recording of celebrated alwho claims Queen is “absolutely the greatest band to ever walk this bums like 2004’s “A Ghost Is Born” and lays out some of his biggest earth,” takes a deep dive into the struggles and triumphs. band’s catalog and discusses each record in lively, conversational A CLASSICAL TRADITION Q&A’s with musical figures like Sir Let’s be honest: Classical music Paul McCartney, Dee Snider, David has a bit of an image problem.

Ellefson of Megadeth, Patrick MyFor many, the mere mention of ers (lead in the Broadway musical the genre conjures up images of Killer Queen) and more. Starting the snooty bourgeoise in stuffy with Queen’s 1973 self-titled symphony halls. But BBC radio debut, the book moves chronohost Clemency Burton-Hill aims logically, and every chapter begins to change your perceptions and with a detailed and passionate make you a bona-fide classical essay from Popoff on each album’s fan with Year of Wonder: Clasmerits. Absolutely packed with

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sical Music to Enjoy Day by Day (Harper, $25.99, 448 pages, ISBN 9780062856203). For each day of the year, Burton-Hill provides a piece of music by a wide range of composers—from a soaring hymn by medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen to stripped-down contemporary pieces composed by Philip Glass—along with a short rundown of the piece’s history and a description of what to listen for.

LADIES LEADING THE WAY Music journalist Evelyn McDonnell has written extensive biographies of groundbreaking artists like Joan Jett and the Runaways and Bjork, and she lends her decades of experience to editing Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl.

(Black Dog & Leventhal, $35, 416 pages, ISBN 9780316558877). The goal of this gorgeous coffee table book is “to tell a narrative story by focusing on key select figures who were true game changers.”

And although the title suggests a focus on rock artists, the included essays offer “portraits of diversity, from Patsy Cline’s country melancholy to Joni Mitchell’s folk jazz to Missy Elliott’s avant rap.”

Written by women and illustrated by women, this is a powerhouse collection that is completely, unapologetically

celebratory. Revel in the greatness of Women Who Rock.

THE ONO FACTOR Speaking of women getting some well-deserved credit in the music industry, did you know that Yoko Ono was only recently co-credited as a writer on John Lennon’s 1971 single “Imagine”?

And now, her role in shaping Lennon’s late-period music and art is fully explored in Imagine John Yoko (Grand Central, $50, 320 pages, ISBN 9781538747155), a celebration of their partnership.

Compiled by Ono and replete with photos from her personal archives, facsimiles of Lennon’s handwritten lyrics, stills from their narrative videos, excerpts from key interviews conducted during their collaborative period, concept sketches and photos of Ono’s pivotal art exhibits and more, this book will be a must-have for any fan of this world-changing pair.

In a time when Ono’s activism seems as relevant as ever, she offers a rallying cry in the powerful preface: “Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world. Power works in mysterious ways. We don’t have to do much.

Visualize the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE. It’s time for action. The action is PEACE.”

FASHION

BY ALICE CARY

Elements of style

B

y definition, fashion is always in flux. As New York Times “On the Street” photographer Bill Cunningham explains, “An idea that is elegant at its time is an outrageous disgrace ten years earlier, daring five years before its height, and boring five years later.”

These three books offer engaging looks at how trends evolve in the fashion world.

When Cunningham died in 2016, the world lost a trailblazing fashion icon. Thankfully, he left behind one last gift: a secret manuscript that’s now a book, Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs (Penguin Press, $27, 256 pages, ISBN 9780525558705).

And what a gift it is! You’ve never had such an effervescent guide through the style world—even fashion haters won’t be able to resist his charm.

Cunningham lived and breathed fashion from his earliest days, even though his mother “beat the hell out of him” when she caught him parading around their home in his sister’s dress as a preschooler. Despite his family’s shame, he doggedly pursued his passion, working after school in Jordan Marsh and Bonwit Teller department stores, where the gorgeous gowns made him think he’d “die of happiness.” With endless optimism, believing that “good came from every situation,” the Harvard dropout-turned-hat maker managed to transform being drafted into the Army in 1950 into a zany gig leading soldiers on weekend tours of Europe. Back home, he lived hand-to-mouth in his millinery shops and gate-crashed fashion shows, all the while making a name for himself.

Fashion Climbing is a multilayered fashion excursion and a heartfelt memoir that grabs you and never lets go. If only Cunningham had left behind a sequel covering the rest of his joyful, fashion-filled life.

STAN BY ME Sometimes it’s best to simply embrace your worst feature. Early on, tennis player Stan Smith felt that was his feet: “One of the few

disappointments of my tennis career were my big size 13 feet— yet the shoe I eventually wrapped around them enabled me to become better known than I could have ever imagined.” After being deemed too clumsy at age 15 to be a Davis Cup ball boy, Smith trained hard, eventually becoming a tennis great. Later, Smith’s sneaker deal with Adidas in the early 1970s led to a fashion craze and then a 1989 Guinness World Record, with 22 million pairs of those eponymous sneakers sold, more than any other “named” shoe.

Stan Smith: Some People Think I’m a Shoe (Rizzoli, $55, 336 pages, ISBN 9780847862740)—a weighty tome that’s nearly as big as Smith’s foot—is a self-contained sneaker museum, detailing the many incarnations and influences of his famously green-trimmed, white-leather shoe, which originally featured the name of French tennis star Robert Haillet. With detailed, personal commentary from the modest, affable Smith, this fact-filled compendium takes the form of an alphabet book, with entries like “V is for Versatility,” explaining how Stan Smiths became hiphop’s favorite footwear. As Smith

confesses, “I guess that I have become somewhat of a modern sneakerhead since my closet is full of both everyday and rare shoes that all happen to be Stan Smiths.”

Stan Smith is a unique blend of sports history, funky fashion chronicle and chic celebrity memoir.

TICKLED PINK

Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence, 1794.

From Pink, edited by Valerie Steele. Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

Perhaps like me, you have a love-hate relationship with the color pink. If so, you’ll enjoy exploring those complicated emotions with Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color (Thames & Hudson, $50, 208 pages, ISBN 9780500022269).

Consider just a few of its many shades: Drunk Tank pink, Kissing pink, Millennial pink, Naive pink and, of course, Princess pink.

You’ll learn that Asians, especially the Japanese, seem to like pink more than Europeans do, while in the United States, pink has

been called “the most divisive of colors.” And guess what: Pink didn’t become associated with girls in the U.S. until the 1930s, and the “pinkification of girl culture” didn’t take over until the 1970s and ’80s, spurred by Barbie’s wardrobe.

This lavishly illustrated pink menagerie features everything from French fashion of the 1700s to a 1956 ad for a pink Royal Electric typewriter and plenty of political pussy hats, plus the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rihanna and Mamie Eisenhower all looking pretty in pink. Pink’s publication coincides with a major exhibition on view now at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Editor Valerie Steele, the chief curator of the exhibit, includes an intriguing mix of essays written by a costume designer, an art historian, a gender studies expert and more.

Whatever you think of pink, there are fascinating tidbits on every page of this eye-catching history.

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reviews T PI OP CK

FICTION

LITTLE

An illuminated Madame Tussaud REVIEW BY CHIKA GUJARATHI

It might not be so wrong to review Edward Carey’s new novel, Little, with the simple declaration that it is exceptionally good. Filled with delightfully macabre illustrations, Little is about the journey of Marie Grosholtz, a rather odd-looking, diminutive child born in a tiny Swiss village in 1761. An orphan by the time she is 8, Marie finds herself in the care of the equally lonely and eccentric Dr. Curtius, a wax sculptor for the village hospital.

There, amid the real bones and organs, Marie is not scared but instead intrigued and anxious to learn the magic of plaster and wax to replicate anything at all. Soon, the master and his little apprentice escape to Paris, where they meet Widow Picot and her son, Edmond.

With a head for business, the widow knows how to cash in on Dr. CurBy Edward Carey tius’ skills, and the Monkey House is born as a spectacle for the locals Riverhead, $27, 448 pages to marvel at wax heads of famous (and infamous) personalities. Money ISBN 9780525534327, eBook available and fame follow, but not for Marie, whose unseemly looks overshadHISTORICAL FICTION ow her artistic talents, and she is banished as a worthless servant and denied money, power and love.

If this seems dark, it’s because it is. But Carey portrays Marie as one of the most ambitious characters you will ever meet. She is funny and kind, but above all, she is relentless in her pursuit of opportunities, which she first finds as a teacher to a princess at Versailles, then as a sculptor of wax head castings during the bloody French Revolution and later as the legendary Madame Tussaud. Marie is little only in name.

An irresistible tale, Little will please all readers, especially those who love Visit BookPage.com to read period adventures and old-fashioned stories of triumph over human folly. a Q&A with Edward Carey.

Illustration © Edward Carey. Reproduced by permission of Riverhead.

NINE PERFECT STRANGERS

By Liane Moriarty Flatiron $28.99, 464 pages ISBN 9781250069825 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION

The Tranquillum House seems like the ideal place for rest, relaxation and repair. Owned by Masha, a former high-powered executive who switched careers after a heart attack, the bucolic wellness center is a refuge for broken souls with deep pockets.

There’s Frances, the semifamous romance novelist who is hitting a midcareer slump; Jessica and Ben, lottery winners whose good fortune is ruining their marriage; the Marconi family, reeling from the loss of their son; and Carmel,

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a mother of four daughters whose husband left her for a younger woman. They’ve all gathered for 10 massage- and hike-filled days at the center.

But Masha is toying with introducing a new protocol to her strictly regimented program. It’s risky, but if it yields the results she expects, it’ll put Tranquillum House—and her—on the map. If it fails, it could put her guests in danger. As the guests start to suspect they’re getting more than they paid for, they must decide how much they’re willing to do in the name of wellness.

Liane Moriarty is simply unparalleled at infusing flawed characters with humor and heartbreak. Her singular brand of storytelling was most recently showcased when her bestselling novel Big Little Lies was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Nine Perfect Strangers is a worthy follow-up, offering

an irresistible take on our wellness-obsessed culture, where the weirder the treatment, the better.

—AMY SCRIBNER

A LADDER TO THE SKY

By John Boyne

Hogarth $27, 384 pages ISBN 9781984823014 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

but let’s just say Yorkshire-born Swift is more determined than your average aspiring writer. He has two dreams: to become a celebrated author, and to have a child. And he’ll steal from anyone, starting with 65-year-old German writer Erich Ackermann, whom Swift meets in 1988 when he’s a young waiter in Berlin.

Soon, Ackermann, a gay man with long-suppressed desires, asks the fulsome Swift to accompany him to literary events around the world. Ackermann also shares details of his past, including his membership in the Hitler Youth and a fateful wartime decision regarding a childhood friend.

Swift betrays Ackermann by using his story as the basis for Two Germans, his debut novel. Boyne then presents scenes, most of them told from the perspectives of other characters, that chronicle the extremes Swift pursues to further his career. No one is safe, including Dash Hardy, an older gay writer Swift accompanies to Gore Vidal’s Italian villa; Swift’s wife, Edith, whose literary career is poised to take off just when Swift’s has stalled; and even Swift’s own teenage son.

Boyne sometimes paints in broad strokes, but he compensates with many wonderful touches.

Exchanges between Vidal and Swift are deliciously venomous, and the digs at contemporary publishing are spot-on, as when Swift describes a debut novel he dislikes as, “Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange.”

A Ladder to the Sky is an entertaining, if deeply cynical, portrait of the literary world.

—MICHAEL MAGRAS

FAMILY TRUST

By Kathy Wang

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky. It would spoil the pleasure of reading John Boyne’s latest novel to describe most of its plot points,

Morrow $26.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780062855251 Audio, eBook available DEBUT FICTION

Silicon Valley, with all its excesses, lies at the heart of Kathy Wang’s insightful, witty and acutely honest

spotlight

DETECTIVES

BY G. ROBERT FRAZIER

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Powerful women stand apart in new crime fiction

F

or readers who enjoy fascinating characters, gritty plots and unforgettable settings, Jonathan Lethem and Katrina Carrasco have crafted two detective novels with a distinctive edge.

The Feral Detective (Ecco, $26.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780062859068) is Lethem’s first mystery since his award-winning 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, while Carrasco’s The Best Bad Things (MCD, $27, 400 pages, ISBN 9780374123697) is an unforgettable debut.

Both novels spotlight smart female protagonists whose determination and feisty dispositions see them through a barrage of incredible situations that would send a lesser person running.

Phoebe Siegler, the lead character in The Feral Detective, is a fiercely independent, modern-day woman with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. When a close friend’s teenage daughter, Arabella, goes missing from her university in Portland, Oregon, Phoebe welcomes the opportunity to drop everything and go find her. A credit card receipt points Phoebe to California’s high desert, where she enlists the aid of mysterious private detective Charles Heist, whom she quickly dubs “the feral detective” after meeting his unusual pet, an opossum named Jean that’s living in his desk.

Rather than sit back and wait for Heist to do his job, Phoebe insists on accompanying him on his quest into the desert. In this landscape that is as dangerous as it is beautiful, Phoebe meets an assortment of enigmatic characters living off the grid (including a tribe of women known as Rabbits who are feuding with a clan of men known as Bears) and discov-

ers Heist’s bizarre relationship with this desert underworld. But with Arabella in danger, Phoebe and Heist must risk it all to get her home safely.

Risks, meanwhile, are par for the course for Alma Rosales, a take-no-prisoners woman of the 1880s who doesn’t hesitate to bust a few knuckles in The Best Bad Things. A former agent with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Alma uses her sharp wit and guile to deceive her targets any way she can, even by disguising herself as a man.

“Wearing only her own skin and hair, she is unbound,” Carrasco describes Alma. “Unbound. Powerful. She can mold her form into any shape.”

It’s this effort—when she’s disguised as goon Jack Kemp—that gets Alma in trouble with local smuggler Nathaniel Wheeler and a step closer to exposing crime boss Barnaby Sloan’s opium operation in Port Townsend, one of the nation’s busiest ports of entry in 1887. Alma infiltrates the smuggling operation at the behest of her lover/employer Delphine Beaumond, while secretly working to get back in with the Pinkertons.

The complicated plot, subplots, violence and double-crosses all serve to keep readers hooked from start to finish.

While both books offer memorable characters and wild situations, the authors’ vivid use of language, deep points of view and evocative settings make these novels a special joy to read.

It will take a miracle to return to yesterday.

O N S A L E NOW 37

reviews debut novel of a Chinese-American family in crisis mode.

Patriarch Stanley Huang is dying of pancreatic cancer. His imminent passing is mourned by his two grown children, Kate and Fred; their mother and Stanley’s ex-wife, Linda; and his current wife, Mary.

At the same time, each wonders just how their finances might be affected by his will, which has always remained a mystery. Stanley has hinted to Mary that he’s worth millions, but Linda is skeptical since she was the money manager during their marriage and knows that Stanley is clueless when it comes to investing.

Fred, though graduating with honors from Harvard Business School, is mired in a huge investment firm with little room for advancement. He begins to imagine the perks a few million would bring, though his discreet questions about the will are completely ignored. Kate also works for a tech company as a middle manager—and at the moment is the sole breadwinner in her family, as her husband has been on the verge of launching a startup for what seems like an endless number of months.

An infusion of funds from her father’s will would obviously be most welcome.

Lydia has invested wisely over the years since her divorce from Stanley. She’s financially stable, but she wants to make sure Fred and Kate get their fair share and don’t lose out to Mary, whom Lydia knows expects to be handsomely rewarded for caring for her dying husband.

An intriguing side plot explores Lydia’s involvement with an online dating site that harbors a global financial scam—one that, coincidentally, Fred barely escapes investing in himself.

Wang also graduated from Harvard Business School and worked in the tech field before deciding to write this engaging blend of family saga and Silicon Valley exposé. In Family Trust, her dissection of the glamorous appeal of this superficial slice of life succeeds on many levels and will appeal to a wide variety of readers.

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—DEBORAH DONOVAN

FICTION A WELL-BEHAVED WOMAN

By Therese Anne Fowler

St. Martin’s $27.99, 400 pages ISBN 9781250095473 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

In comparison to our current crop of dingy squillionaires and robber barons, the Vanderbilts, Belmonts and Astors were so much more entertaining, with their monstrous Fifth Avenue chateaux and even more monstrous “cottages,” their frivolous costume balls, their genteel contempt for the hoi polloi and their obsession with bloodlines, both their own and those of their thoroughbred racehorses.

Therese Anne Fowler’s biographical novel isn’t about careless people, but people who care too much about the wrong stuff.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont married for money, as did just about everyone else in her set. She hasn’t a scintilla of a sense of humor.

She is a hypocrite and a coward.

She may feel bad about letting her lady’s maid go because she is black, or for shunning one of her friends because he penned a silly book, but she does it anyway. She all but imprisons her beautiful, dimwitted daughter, Consuelo, because she wants her to marry the Duke of Marlborough and not the older, less well-heeled Winty Rutherfurd.

(Fowler leaves out how Alva used to beat Consuelo with a riding crop but leaves in how she threatens to shoot Rutherfurd dead.) Fowler skillfully depicts both the doomed, cruel, ridiculous society that Alva married into and how she tries, in her plodding yet ruthless way, to navigate it. It is ever so tempting to believe that Edith Wharton’s ghastly Undine Spragg contains some of Alva’s DNA. But don’t feel sorry for the Vanderbilt women. Both Alva and Consuelo lived to ripe old ages, and both gained some wisdom, no doubt born of pain. The end of Fowler’s absorbing book finds them at a suffragette rally in London’s Hyde Park, spellbound by the

words of a true heroine who really knew how to buck the patriarchy.

As the book says, “[Alva] was no Emmeline Pankhurst.” Indeed.

—ARLENE MCKANIC

THOSE WHO KNEW

With this novel, Novey provides a depiction of true strength through the community of survivors—those who have withstood tragedies enacted against them by powerful people who ultimately feared their own powerlessness.

—T O M E I S E N B R A U N

By Idra Novey

Viking $26, 256 pages ISBN 9780525560432 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

At the heart of Idra Novey’s poetic second novel, Those Who Knew, is an inherently political story that reveals the nature of toxic masculinity and its effects on the world. While sussing out the manifold fears that drive men’s often destructive pursuit of power, Novey explores the strength of women—which is so often rejected and abused in that pursuit—and troubles over silence in the face of abuse.

A college professor living in an unnamed island nation, Lena is uneasy with her family’s wealth in the aftermath of the country’s former dictatorial regime. Her friend, Olga, who runs a bookstore doubling as a weed shop, is an older survivor of the Terrible Years, when she and her lover were imprisoned and abused. As news breaks of the death of a young woman named Maria P., Lena grows suspicious of the involvement of a rising senator, Victor, with whom she’d been romantically involved in their collegiate years. With nothing to go on but the mysteriously materializing articles of clothing that she is sure belonged to Maria, Lena begins to question her own silence in the years since Victor nearly took Lena’s life in an enraged outburst.

Throughout this meditation on the role of silence, the story weaves together Olga’s daily bookshop log, news reports and interviews, ongoing scenes from Victor’s brother’s autobiographical stage plays and multiple points of view to present a world as richly nuanced as it is lacking in specifics of place and time.

THE KINSHIP OF SECRETS

By Eugenia Kim

HMH $26, 304 pages ISBN 9781328987822 Audio, eBook available COMING OF AGE

A family separated by war and difficult choices maintains an unwavering bond in Eugenia Kim’s thoughtful second novel. Picking up where The Calligrapher’s Daughter ends, The Kinship of Secrets finds Calvin and Najin Cho settled in America with their daughter, Miran, while their younger daughter, Inja, remains in the care of Najin’s extended family in South Korea.

The first harrowing glimpses of the Korean War extend their separation longer than expected, causing unimaginable physical hardship on one side and painful emotional turmoil on the other. Najin’s hope to reunite her family is met with disappointment after disappointment as the months turn into years and then decades.

Oceans apart, Inja and Miran grow up, and though their respective lives are dissimilar, their individual desires mirror each other’s.

Najin may be physically present in Miran’s life, but she’s also emotionally removed and consumed with worry for Inja. Inja, who was only an infant when her parents and Miran left for America, has no lasting memories of Najin but yearns to know her. When long-kept family secrets are finally revealed, the truth enables both Miran and Inja to connect with each other and with their mother. The sisters mature, morphing into opinionated teenagers and college students, eventually becoming independent young women molded by key

events of the 1960s and ’70s.

Covering such a broad span of history is an ambitious undertaking, and The Kinship of Secrets is not without its stumbles. While at times the author’s prose tells more overtly than it shows, she’s able to capture an abundance of feeling.

Drawn from her own family history, Kim’s story unfolds with the weight of lived experience.

Through these relationships, The Kinship of Secrets explores the meaning of love and sacrifice and how often they are one and the same.

also becomes consumed by this ancient presence and what it means for her own sins.

The simple premise of a shadowy figure who stalks you and witnesses your sins, even if you’re not prepared to confront them, is the driving force of Melmoth, and Perry doesn’t waste a word of this lean, taut novel, effectively conveying an ever-encroaching sense of absolute dread. The story builds, unfolding layers of darkness without ever becoming garish or pretentious, until by the end you’re happily trapped in its eerie embrace.

—MELISSA BROWN

—MATTHEW JACKSON

MELMOTH

By Sarah Perry

Custom House $27.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780062856395 Audio, eBook available GOTHIC FICTION

Making a brand-new myth is a tricky thing. It takes a deft storytelling hand to weave folklore where none may have existed before, along with a keen eye for little details of horror and beauty that can convince a reader that the dark tale unfolding before them is as abiding as the legends that creep around their own homelands. In Melmoth, Sarah Perry brings us a gorgeously wrought tale that feels as timeless as its title character and as real as the monster you’re sure is sitting at the foot of your bed.

Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman working as a translator in Prague, has a relatively simple and quiet life, and while it’s not exciting, that’s exactly what she wants. Everything changes when her friend Karel reveals a letter passed on to him from an old friend—a letter claiming to reveal not only long-ago sins of history but also a mysterious figure called Melmoth, an eternal witness damned to wander the earth for all time and seek out those cursed by their own sins. Karel is troubled by the letter and the files that accompany it, and he seems consumed by it all . . . until he disappears. Left with nothing but confusion, Helen

meet B.A. SHAPIRO

the title of your new book?

Q: What’s

© LYNN WAYNE

FICTION

the book in one sentence.

Q: Describe

your favorite thing about this book?

Q: What’s

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Sarah Perry.

SUGAR LAND

By Tammy Lynne Stoner

Q: What inspired you most about1920s Paris?

Red Hen Press $16.95, 344 pages ISBN 9781597096270 Audio available DEBUT FICTION

As a lesbian in the 1920s, Miss Dara knows a thing or two about being an outcast. When she falls in love with her best friend, Dara runs from her hometown and everything she knows to work as a kitchen girl at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas.

Dara works herself to the bone, befriending a black inmate named Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Lead Belly, the soon-to-be famous singer who sings his way to a pardon.

Dara lives a lonely life, dodging the aggression of the head cook and burning all the letters from her former lover. Then one day, she receives a marriage proposal from the warden. She decides to settle down with him, despite her heart’s true urgings.

Dara learns to enjoy domesticity and connects with the warden’s two daughters as they grow up.

When the warden dies, Dara and her stepdaughters grieve in their own ways. Dara spirals into depression. She binge eats, gains weight and continues to repress her true

Q: Who is your favorite historical character to write about?

Q: Name three books that should be in every library.

Q: Words to live by?

THE COLLECTOR’S APPRENTICE Seeking revenge and redemption, a young Belgian woman escapes to the art world of 1920s Paris in B.A. Shapiro’s The Collector’s Apprentice (Algonquin, $27.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9781616203580), an inventive mystery that features historical figures Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse. Shapiro is also the author of The Muralist and The Art Forger. She lives in Boston and Florida with her husband and their dog, Sagan.

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reviews desire—to be with a woman.

With a lively sense of humor and a great sense of place, Tammy Lynn Stoner’s debut is a Southern novel from a voice that rings true.

As Dara navigates these difficult circumstances, she realizes she’s constructed a prison around herself, keeping everyone out. With the help of her stepdaughters, one of whom dresses and presents herself as a man, Dara reclaims her life and comes out to her family.

A novel of exploration, bravery and redemption, with keen insight into race, class, gender identity and social norms, Sugar Land is the story of a woman learning to come home to herself.

—J E S S I C A B A T E S

FRIDAY BLACK

By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Mariner $14.99, 208 pages ISBN 9781328911247 eBook available SHORT STORIES

With Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah draws a connective thread through a collection of bleak and absurd short stories set in a satirical reality based on a socially and economically collapsing America.

The book leads with a parody of the present day, in which a chainsaw-wielding mass killer is exonerated for his racially motivated hate crime by a defense attorney who swoons a jury with invectives of “freedom.” Meanwhile, teenager Emmanuel troubles over his representative blackness on a 10-point scale as he takes part in the race riots immediately following the killer’s acquittal. Adjei-Brenyah deftly interweaves these two narratives to draw a parallel between the story’s stark reality and our own, illuminating the state of emergency that is blackness in present-day America.

After the opening story, AdjeiBrenyah pivots to a dystopian future in which the government has poisoned its own water supply. In this future, “emotional truth-clouding” is looked down on in favor of

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FICTION intelligence, pride and truthfulness.

The tales that follow are set along the timeline that stretches between these first two stories, from the near-future capitalist decline to the ensuing societal meltdown, offering up a bleak trajectory for humanity in which pride and profit slowly usurp care. The title story sees the narrator fighting off a zombified consumerist horde in the early hours of Black Friday.

Trampling deaths and bite wounds are as normalized as the narrator’s disregard for the little remaining humanity of those infected with the “Friday Black.”

Each of Adjei-Brenya’s characters deals with the numbness that comes after the shock of death wears off—and the pain that arises when that shock doesn’t fade. This is a difficult read and a twisting meditation on a world where love’s gone missing.

—T O M E I S E N B R A U N

VITA NOSTRA

By Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

Harper Voyager $26.99, 416 pages ISBN 9780062694591 Audio, eBook available FANTASY

Vita Nostra starts out simply enough, with teenager Sasha Samokhina colliding with a strange man who exudes an unexplainable influence over her. Drawing her under his spell, the girl’s unbidden mentor persuades her to enroll in the Institute of Special Technologies, much to her confusion and her mother’s consternation. Once there, the lesson plan is—to put it mildly—fairly opaque, and academic failure is met with unpleasant consequences for the students’ families.

The novel belongs to an expanding Ukrainian genre known as fantastyka, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror and folkloric traditions. Much of this genre has not yet been translated into English. This particular exemplar could claim both Piers Anthony’s Macroscope (1969) and Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) as antecedents from the sci-fi realm, but also Jose Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Instantanés (1962) from the lit-fic sphere. Kudos are due to translator Julia Meitov Hersey, whose task cannot have been a simple one, given Vita Nostra’s complexity and sophistication.

I realize that this is a bit of a tease, but if you are at all intrigued by the phrase, “Time is a grammatical concept,” you will find yourself swept into this book’s estimable vortex from page one.

—T H A N E T I E R N E Y

There’s really no way to approach Vita Nostra but elliptically, so strap in. By way of orientation, imagine that Hogwarts has opened a satellite campus inside Harry Haller’s Magic Theater from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and assigned Kafka, Dostoevsky and Rod Serling to oversee the curriculum. This circumstance is likely to incite one of three reactions from readers: befuddlement, terror or magnetic attraction. When you crack the spine of the latest novel from acclaimed Ukrainian authors Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, you’ll get a full measure of all three, and just as with the famed five stages of grief, you may experience any or all of them out of order, and more than once.

TRINITY

By Louisa Hall

Ecco $26.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062851963 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Author Louisa Hall’s third novel employs an ingenious and creative tactic to paint an image of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” In theater, actors comb through scripts to answer the question, “What are the other characters saying about me?” It is through this Stanislavskian,

indirect characterization that Hall’s Oppenheimer is revealed.

A scientist who became (some would say) a mass murderer, he was a conflicted man with a varied public image who never seemed to decide how he actually felt about it all. In this staggeringly beautiful novel, he is fragmented, shown only through the eyes of people who are all struggling with their own existences.

Hall brings her seven narrators to life through rich and fascinating backstories. Their accounts span from 1943 until 1966—from two years before the Trinity test (the first detonation of a nuclear weapon) until one year before Oppenheimer’s death. We meet Oppenheimer as a potential communist sympathizer, an aloof physicist, an old friend, a mercurial boss and an insect crushed underfoot.

The image Hall paints of him is in watercolor—blurry, overlapping, at odds with itself.

There are more similarities between the narrators than there are differences, despite their various backgrounds and roles in Oppenheimer’s periphery. Each grapples with the cold realization that people are infinitely separate.

Shared memories often differ between those who share them.

People come together for mere moments, and sometimes a flash of bright light allows us to glimpse each other’s bones.

Oppenheimer was a man obsessed with reading and quotations. Years after the Trinity test, in anticipation of an interview, he scrambled to retrieve his copy of the Bhagavad Gita to provide the famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Trinity itself is a name inspired by a John Dunne poem—but two decades after the test, Oppenheimer still could not fully explain his choice.

Hall has not captured Oppenheimer’s character, as to do so would be to lose his very essence.

Instead, she brilliantly creates a fertile spot in her reader’s imagination, allowing us to draw conclusions based on our own realities.

Trinity is a masterpiece.

—LESLIE HINSON

NONFICTION T PI OP CK

IN THE HURRICANE’S EYE

By Nathaniel Philbrick

MAD, BAD, DANGEROUS TO KNOW

Old father, old artificer

HISTORY

REVIEW BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Ireland is a small country, and it seemed even smaller a hundred-some years ago when giants of literature roamed the narrow Dublin streets, routinely crossing paths and sharing friends, social connections and antagonists. As novelist and critic Colm Tóibín walks the neighborhood south of the River Liffey, where he has lived since his student days, he draws connecting lines between shared locations haunted not only by three of the greatest writers his nation has produced—Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce—but by their fathers as well. William Wilde, John Butler Yeats and John Stanislaus Joyce were three very different men, yet they shared more than the streets around Merrion Square. Each sired a literary genius and possessed formidable, and in some cases unfulfilled, talents. And these

By Colm Tóibín fathers all came to influence their sons’ work in varying ways.

Scribner, $26, 272 pages Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know offers richly drawn portraits of these ISBN 9781476785172, audio, eBook available fathers and sons, illuminating the influence rippling between generBIOGRAPHY ations. While Oscar Wilde may have inherited his sharp wit from his mother, William Wilde was a doctor, influential amateur archaeologist and writer whose hubris-laced court case involving alleged sexual indiscretions offered an eerie premonition of what would befall his son. John B. Yeats was a talented painter cursed with an inability to finish a canvas. His escape to New York to live out his life (funded by his son) did not preclude his voice permeating some of his son’s seminal poetry. Joyce’s father, a drunkard and raconteur, infiltrates Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses at every turn, as Joyce probes their complicated relationship, “evoking its shivering ambiguities, combining the need to be generous with the need to be true.”

As charming as it is illuminating, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know provides a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius.

NEVER HOME ALONE

By Rob Dunn

Basic $30, 336 pages ISBN 9781541645769 eBook available SCIENCE

Cockroaches repel us, we run from spiders in our bathrooms, we kill crickets in our basements and moths in our closets, while our dogs and cats track in dirt full of bacteria. Much to our dismay, our homes are filled with uninvited guests. In Never Home Alone, ecologist Rob Dunn examines the biodiversity we live with every day in our basements, bedrooms and kitchens.

In this intriguing and captivating scientific detective story, Dunn examines our mania for keeping our houses clean and sparkling in a futile effort to keep out bacteria, fungi and insects. The problem with these efforts, he points out, is that we too often inadvertently kill off the benign—or even helpful—with the harmful. Dunn eloquently observes that many species we find in our homes have value to us—for example, spiders keep pests such as mosquitoes and flies under control, and certain species of wasps live on the larvae of German cockroaches.

If we study these species closely, we may be able to harness these “good” bacteria for commercial or medical purposes, such as making antibiotics.

Dunn peers closely at many of the aspects of our daily lives, like

Viking $30, 384 pages ISBN 9780525426769 Audio, eBook available

showering, which introduce us to both good and bad bacteria. As he points out, “the showerhead is one the of the simplest ecosystems in your house.” It contains in its biofilm—the gunk we find in the showerhead whenever we clean it (if we clean it!)—mycobacterial strains, some of which can make us sick and some of which are harmless. Scientists continue to work to identify the hundreds of mycobacteria in such biofilms and how they affect us.

Never Home Alone posits that if we look around us as Dunn does, we can begin to see the glorious biodiversity of our indoor worlds and wonder at its complexity and capacity.

—HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR.

Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with Rob Dunn.

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

General Washington, still quartered in New York in 1781, realized that the revolutionaries’ success depended on the difficult task of coordinating with the French navy and persuading them to heed his strategies. But French intransigence wasn’t the totality of Washington’s worries. His troops were resentful at going unpaid, and the colonies were notoriously parsimonious in funding the larger war effort. Then there were the abiding distractions of the general’s inflamed gums, rotting teeth and failing eyesight.

Drawing on letters, journals and sea logs, Philbrick manages to impart the immediacy of breaking news to his descriptions of marches, skirmishes and battles.

From describing crucial shifts in the wind during naval conflicts to detailing the unimaginable horror of war wounds, he places the reader in the midst of the fray.

The successful three-week siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781 effectively won the war for Washington and humbled his tenacious adversary Lord Cornwallis.

The most tragic figures, however, were the slaves who joined the British in a bid to ensure their own liberation. As the siege tightened, Cornwallis decided that “despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, dwindling provisions required that he jettison them from the fortress” and into

41

reviews the hands of their former masters.

In the Hurricane’s Eye is illustrated with an array of useful maps and a section that reveals what happened to the principal American, French and British players after the war.

—EDWARD MORRIS

LATE-LIFE LOVE

By Susan Gubar

Norton $25.95, 272 pages ISBN 9780393609578 eBook available MEMOIR

What do literature and film tell us about living and loving in later life? What is it like to experience life in its latter stages? These are the questions Susan Gubar began to answer during a year in which she and her second husband decided they must leave their beloved home of many years and downsize to an apartment.

Late-Life Love is a unique blend of memoir and literary commentary, with Gubar at the helm as an accomplished, bravely honest and mesmerizing guide. A retired professor at the University of Indiana, she is the co-author of the groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. She’s also shared her own cancer struggle in Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer.

The love of Gubar’s life is retired English professor Donald Gray, with whom she shares a “headover-heals” romance with literature. She deems her “heals” typo apt, as they have both faced a variety of serious physical challenges: Don, 17 years her senior, fell and required knee surgery as she wrote this book, while she remains weakened by cancer. She’s jubilant to have survived well beyond her projected “expiration date” given at the time of diagnosis, thanks to an experimental drug.

Theirs is a cerebral household catering to a cavalcade of friends,

42

NONFICTION children and grandchildren; readers will delight in being welcomed into the fold. Amid joys and concerns (a sick grandchild, an estranged friend), the author shares the many fears and second thoughts she and her husband have while trying to navigate their monumental transition.

Throughout, Gubar seamlessly weaves in lengthy discussions of a wide range of literature addressing late-life concerns, including works

by Shakespeare, John Donne, Donald Hall, Colette, Gabriel García Márquez and Marilynne Robinson. Reading these analyses is like having a season ticket to a series of fascinating literary discussions.

Gubar offers both realism and hope, concluding: “Late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but it bubbles and rises.”

—ALICE CARY

RETABLOS

By Octavio Solis

City Lights $15.95, 176 pages ISBN 9780872867864 eBook available MEMOIR

As explained by Octavio Solis, a distinguished Latino author who has written over 20 plays, a retablo is a small votive painting commonly associated with Latin American cultures. It’s usually painted on cheap, reused metal, and it tells the story of a near-disaster that was survived only by the grace of God. By commemorating the event, the retablo can transform that story of salvation into a myth. But memory is slippery, and retelling a story, even on a buckled sheet of metal, results in embellishments and refinements.

Facts become murky as names are forgotten and events misremembered. Yet despite its imprecision, the retablo expresses a profound truth not only about its maker but also the world he or she lives in. As a result, the retablo itself becomes a part of the myth as well.

The 50 episodes in Solis’ mem-

oir are like retablos because they are the true, if imprecise, myths that explain his life and his world.

Set in the gritty border town of El Paso, where Solis spent his youth during the 1960s and ’70s, the stories of Retablos are as harsh and dry as the sunbaked land along the Rio Grande that he so vividly evokes.

Unlike the There is figures in struggle traditional retablos, the here, but characters there is also populating redemption.

Solis’ memoir are far from saintly. Instead, he peoples his retablos with the bullies, immigration police, drug users and prostitutes of his hometown, as well as with the family that was at once a solace and a frustration. Solis is dogged by violence and poverty, and his family suffers greatly from the strain of living a life in which disaster can strike without notice or mercy. There is struggle here, but there is also redemption and reconciliation, joy and love.

These written retablos reconstruct Solis’ youth, with its dangers, juxtapositions and alltoo-few victories. It is a distinctly Latino experience in a distinctly Latino world. But this story is universal—we all grow up, and we all need to reconcile who we are with who we were. Like the images he emulates, Solis’ stories transcend the limits of borders and time.

—DEBORAH MASON

AMERICAN DIALOGUE

By Joseph J. Ellis

Knopf $27.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780385353427 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

What would our Founding Fathers think about the most divisive issues of our time? So many things have changed since the United States was formed. Joseph J. Ellis—one of the foremost

scholars of early American history, a bestselling author and recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—explores this question in his richly rewarding American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Ellis utilizes the documentary record the founders left behind to help readers better understand the world the Founding Fathers lived in. He includes sections on Thomas Jefferson and race, John Adams and economic inequality, James Madison and the law, George Washington on foreign policy and a section on leadership. The Founding Fathers often disagreed; their greatest legacy is for those who have followed to be able to argue differences, rather than provide definite answers.

All of our present problems have histories, but “none of them is as incomprehensible, when viewed myopically or ahistorically, as our racial dilemma.” Early in his political career, Jefferson advocated measures to end slavery, but he was unable to imagine a biracial society; he insisted on the inferiority of blacks even as he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Adams believed that all men are created equal—but also that inequality was the natural condition for human beings. Of all of the prominent founders, Adams was the only one who anticipated the country’s embedded economic inequality.

The founding of the nation, particularly the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was a messy political process that, of necessity, involved various compromises. Jefferson wrote in 1816: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence. . . . They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human. . . . But I also know that law and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” These words are relevant today for those who believe in a “living Constitution.”

This immensely stimulating, indepth look at the past and America’s challenges in the present should be read by anyone interested in American history.

—ROGER BISHOP

teen

VIRGINIA BOECKER INTERVIEW BY HILLI LEVIN

Lies, murder and star-crossed love

A

beach vacation is supposed to be a relaxing, work-free endeavor, but for author Virginia Boecker, it was the source of inspiration for her newest young adult novel, An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason.

Boecker’s previous novels, The Witch Hunter and The King Slayer, are paranormal fantasies that draw inspiration from historical English witch trials. This time around, it all started with her rather unusual choice in beach reads: “I was reading The Watchers [by Stephen Alford]. It’s about Francis Walsingham, who was the secretary of state to Elizabeth I, and he’s considered the founder of modern spycraft,” Boecker excitedly tells me during our phone call. For the history junkie with a deep love for England’s grandiose and tumultuous political landscape, this history was pure gold, and she was quickly caught up in “the coding of all the letters, the spy networks [Walsingham] used, the people he would recruit to be in these networks . . . writers like Anthony Munday and Christopher Marlowe that he trained in cartography.”

Then it clicked, and her novel started to take form. “I was sitting on the beach, book in one hand, notebook in the other hand with a

AN ASSASSIN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND TREASON

By Virginia Boecker

Little, Brown, $17.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780316327343, eBook available Ages 14 and up

HISTORICAL FICTION

highlighter and pen, writing down all these notes. There are spies, there’s theater, there’s Marlowe . . . all this religious conflict, Queen Elizabeth—and I love all these things, so I’m thinking, how can I mash all these things together and turn them into a story that’s my own?”

Boecker successfully does just that in her thrilling story An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason, which follows two London teenagers during the fall and winter of 1601, when Queen Elizabeth’s vicious struggle to maintain Protestant control over Britain—and to keep her Catholic enemies in France and Spain at bay—was at its peak.

“That period of time is so crazy,” Boecker says. “All these things happen, and it almost reads like a real-life ‘Game of Thrones.’

You don’t really need ‘Game of Thrones,’ you could just go back in your actual history books and these crazy, crazy things happened. I think that’s what draws me to historical fiction.”

Toby is a cunning orphan who harbors a dream of becoming a famous playwright like the late Marlowe, his former mentor and the object of his unrequited love.

Instead, he’s now Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted spy. He’s adept at seamlessly blending in with rough crowds and taking on identities to sniff out traitors and send them to the Tower of London. His heart isn’t really in his job as an agent of the Crown, but he soon intercepts a coded message that outlines a Catholic-led plot to unseat the queen. He is subsequently tasked with luring the conspirators out of the shadows.

His inventive solution is to set a trap: He will collaborate with the one and only William Shakespeare on a lightly treasonous play—to be privately performed for the

queen, naturally—and wait for an actor with alternative motives to show up.

Cue Lady Katherine, a secret Catholic from Cornwall who wants to get serious revenge on the queen—even though the mission would be suicide. Freshly orphaned herself, she’s been on the run, posing as a stable boy named Kit, and when her co-conspirators hear rumors of a play centered on the religious Twelfth Night feast, she knows she must secure a role to sink her dagger into the queen.

“I needed the right Shakespeare play, and I knew that I wanted a cross-dressing play. He’s written a number of those—The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It [and] Twelfth Night are probably the best known. Those three in particular are the plays where a girl dressed as a boy is central to the complication and the resolution of the plot. I was also looking for something that had Catholic undertones. . . . There’s this whole idea that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. Twelfth Night has those Catholic undertones, so that sealed it for me, and of course, you have Viola in disguise as a boy for her protection, the [same] way Katherine ends up. That just worked for me.”

Kit wows Toby and Shakespeare with a polished audition—one that’s a little too good for a self-proclaimed poor stable boy.

Thus, Toby gains another actor and suspect, but the more he tails the hard-to-read, whip-smart, hilarious and alluring Kit, the

more things get complicated for the closeted bisexual teen. And of course, the more time Kit spends around the sharp, blue-eyed Toby, the more her plans to keep her head down and her true identity a secret go by the wayside. And the closer the pair becomes, the more Kit’s resolve begins to waver.

“Katherine is this character who is bent on revenge. She wants to avenge her father’s death, which she believes is the fault of the queen. It’s the thing that brings her to London, it’s the thing that puts her in disguise, trains her to kill [and] gets her on stage before the queen to do it,” Boecker says.

“But . . . you can’t get revenge on someone for doing to them the same thing they did to you. There’s that saying: ‘Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.’ That’s a really powerful message.”

Readers will be eager for Katherine and Toby to admit their true identities—but can they also admit their true feelings for one another before the play’s opening night, and before the trap closes?

As Boecker’s writing process for Assassin’s Guide started on a beach in Mexico, it only seems fitting that’s she’s aiming to end it there as well. “You know, I think I’m going to Cabo with some girlfriends.

That’s my pub day celebration!”

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PICKS

reviews

OF THE

MONTH

YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

Cutthroat. Ruthless. Unpredictable. That’s modern politics, but it’s also modern high school. In Gordon Jack’s satirical novel, Your Own Worst Enemy, three candidates fight dirty to be Lincoln High’s next student-body president.

Stacey Wynn was supposed to have this in the bag. She’s running unopposed, and after all, who has done more for this California high school than she? She champions all the clubs, attends all the spirit rallies, and she hands out free cupcakes—off school grounds and in accordance with the state’s strict nutritional policy, of course.

With her best friend and campaign advisor, Brian, by her side, Stacey thinks that all she needs to do is rehearse her acceptance speech— until Julia Romero, a new student and French-Canadian immigrant, shows up and throws her hat into the ring. The race gets even more complicated when Chinese-American Tony Guo, a stoner and slacker,

By Gordon Jack is manipulated by a Steve Bannon-esque freshman into running on a HarperTeen, $17.99, 448 pages populist platform.

ISBN 9780062399427, eBook available What should have been a quiet election turns into a circus of misinAges 14 and up formation, fake news and low-down tactics. Will the best candidate for SATIRE the job win?

Jack succeeds in using the microcosm of high school to explore the complexities of race, privilege and class as it relates to the American political process. And through multiple points of view (the three candidates, Brian and his troubled brother), readers get a sense of the personal stakes involved for everyone in the political arena. While the current political landscape is polarized, Your Own Worst Enemy reminds us that hope lies with the younger generations.

—Kirkus Reviews

PULP

By Robin Talley

Harlequin Teen $18.99, 416 pages ISBN 9781335012906 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up LGBTQ FICTION

—School Library Journal, starred review

44 18_401_BookPage_TEEN_November.indd 1

Political satire for Gen Z R E V I E W B Y K I M B E R LY G I A R R A T A N O

“A poignant reminder that love is not always enough.”

“Sweeping, engrossing drama full of important moments.”

TEEN

T PI OP CK

YA CAN’T MISS

High school senior Abby’s home life in Washington, D.C., is a mess best left untouched, and her love life? Ugh. She’s still reeling from her breakup with her ex-girlfriend, Linh, and trying to figure out how they can go back to being friends. Little things like her college applications have been forgotten altogether. When she must improvise her senior creative writing project on the fly, she randomly lands on 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. As she starts

9/12/18 4:23 PM

researching in order to write her own modern novel in the same style, she becomes obsessed with one pseudonymous author (known as Marian Love) and decides to find her real identity.

Abby’s story in the present dovetails with another tale set in 1955, when closeted teen Janet Jones finds one of those same novels. In the 1950s, those pulpy novels are required to have tragic endings or a spontaneous renunciation of same-sex love, and it seems as though Janet’s own story is headed that way. The best friend she’s in love with isn’t prepared to lose everything, and running away seems like the only option.

Author Robin Talley (Lies We Tell Ourselves) contrasts Abby’s life in present-day D.C., where she’s comfortably out to her friends and busy protesting Trump-era

policies, with Janet’s in 1955, when even a rumor of homosexuality is grounds for investigation under the pretext of exposing Communists. This comparison makes Pulp both a mystery and a history lesson, and it’s quite moving. Talley’s afterword highlights some of the real history—complete with lists of real lesbian pulp fiction authors and their published titles—that underlies Janet’s fictional story. It’s remarkable how far gay rights and U.S. culture have come, but Talley notes that you can still be fired or evicted for being gay in 28 states today.

Pulp neatly moves between two similar girls’ very different worlds and offers a pointed reminder that history is never that far behind us.

—HEATHER SEGGEL

Visit BookPage.com to read a Behind the Book essay by Robin Talley.

A THRILLING NEW FICTION SERIES FOR YOUNG READERS Inspired by the real-life adventures of National Geographic explorers!

Adventure, danger, and a thrilling global mission await 12-year-old Cruz Coronado at Explorer Academy, where he and 23 other kids from around the globe train to become the next generation of great explorers.

“A fun, exciting, and action-packed ride that kids will love.”

—J.J. Abrams “Absolutely brilliant!”

—T.A. Barron, author of the Merlin Saga “Inspires the next generation of curious kids to go out into our world and discover something unexpected.”

—James Cameron “Sure to awaken readers’ inner adventurer.”

—LeVar Burton “Sure to appeal to kids who love code-cracking and mysteries with cutting-edge technology.”

—Booklist

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

Watch the video, enter the sweepstakes, and discover more at exploreracademy.com © 2018 National Geographic Partners, LLC

“As an educator, I’m always looking for books that can spark the love of reading, and this book can do just that.”

—Elementary teacher “Both my 8-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy LOVED this book. It’s fun and adventure and mystery all rolled into one.”

—Mom, the Beckham Project “This is the best book I have ever read ... I felt like I was exploring with them!”

—Mariam, — age 10 “Action-packed and full of mystery and adventure, this is the kind of book that draws you in from the first page to the last, and leaves you wanting more!”

—Romy, age 12

reviews T PI OP CK

CHILDREN’S

THE SEASON OF STYX MALONE

A new friend brings new worlds REVIEW BY ALICE CARY

Ten-year-old Caleb Franklin longs to be anything but ordinary, which feels impossible in his quiet hometown of Sutton, Indiana. But one night, Caleb and his 11-year-old brother, Bobby Gene, trade their toddler sister, Susie, for a large bag of fireworks.

Never fear—their mom soon retrieves little Susie, but the boys manage to keep the fireworks. Their summer really ignites when the brothers meet an older teen in foster care named Styx Malone, who hatches a plan to help the boys repeatedly “trade up” their loot—with the goal of eventually buying a moped—in what he calls a “Great Escalator Trade.”

Award-winning author Kekla Magoon’s The Season of Styx Malone is an old-fashioned summer adventure and coming-of-age story that ever so gently touches on the racial prejudice faced by its three AfriBy Kekla Magoon can-American protagonists.

Wendy Lamb, $16.99, 304 pages Caleb and his brother live in a parent-protected bubble that they’re ISBN 9781524715953, audio, eBook available more than ready to burst, and their mom dismisses Styx as “a handful Ages 8 to 12 of trouble.” But to Caleb, this smooth-talking, deal-making newcomer represents everything he feels he’s missing in his small town.

MIDDLE GRADE But as the three boys’ adventures multiply, they also become more dangerous and questionable. The boys are soon stowing away on trains and stealing a motor from an auto parts warehouse. Still mesmerized by Styx, Caleb begins to wonder about his friend’s motives and deeds, noticing that “Styx made it sound like breaking the rules wasn’t really so bad as long as you didn’t get caught.”

As the boys’ secretive exploits build toward an inevitable climax, readers will enjoy being part of Magoon’s thoughtful novel about the pleasures and constraints of friendship, family, trust and betrayal.

without ever once being preachy.

It’s Carmela’s birthday, which means she’s finally old enough to accompany her brother to the laundromat, much to his ongoing chagrin. Carmela excitedly tags along down Freedom Boulevard, past the bus stop, a repair shop and a store where her father used to linger, hoping for work. When Carmela picks a dandelion growing in a sidewalk crack, she contemplates a variety of wishes, imagining her mother sleeping in one of the fancy hotel rooms that she cleans, or her father “getting his papers fixed so he could finally be home.”

The story’s finest points are sublimely subtle with layers of meaning, as when Carmela’s brother asks her why she’s so annoying, and she shoots back, “It’s a free country.”

Illustrator Robinson marvelously envisions Carmela’s many wishes as papel picado (Mexican folk art), and his vibrant acrylic and collage illustrations pay homage to Ezra Jack Keats.

Carmela Full of Wishes is a big-hearted story about the hope, joy and love that hold struggling families together amid weighty, adult-size obstacles.

—ALICE CARY

HORSE MEETS DOG after his birth. As young Mousie grows up, these stories bring him comfort at all times and placBy Rachael Cole es—in a rocking chair, during an Illustrated by Melissa expedition or when he can’t sleep.

Crowton Reading is an essential part of this Schwartz & Wade mother and son’s bond, and before $17.99, 40 pages long, Mousie picks out his own ISBN 9781524715366 books at the library. eBook available With subtly colored illustrations, Ages 3 to 7 Melissa Crowton captures the essential charm of this story. Mother Mousie, I Will Read to You is as and child are often shown touching or embracing, and Crowton gentle and soothing as a mother’s hand caressing her child’s cheek. does an amazing job of conveying their heartwarming affection for Author Rachael Cole (winner of an Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Honor each other and the stories they for her book City Moon) highlights share.

Mousie, I Will Read to You how the wonderful gift of reading may be passed down through could easily become a classic with across-the-board appeal. Addigenerations.

This touching story begins as tionally, Cole includes a helpful the pregnant Mama Mouse is section on “Tips for Raising Readers” at the story’s end. preparing for her baby’s arrival and setting aside books to read —LORI K. JOYCE

MOUSIE, I WILL READ TO YOU

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CARMELA FULL OF WISHES

By Matt de la Peña Illustrated by Christian Robinson Putnam $17.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780399549045 Audio, eBook available Ages 4 to 8

Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson earned (respectively) a Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor for Last Stop on Market Street, and now they’re at it again with another potential award winner, Carmela Full of Wishes.

On the surface, their latest collaboration is a simple story about a spunky Mexican-American girl and her older brother, but like its predecessor, it packs a powerful literary, visual and social punch

By Elliott Kalan Illustrated by Tim Miller Balzer + Bray $17.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780062791108 Ages 4 to 8 PICTURE BOOK

Horse Meets Dog, the debut picture book from TV writer Elliott Kalan (“Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”) tells the story of two stubborn animals who refuse to acknowledge one another’s identities. Upon first meeting, Horse assumes Dog is a tiny baby horse, and Dog assumes Horse is a very big dog. Their confusion grows until they are (literally) running in circles, unable to see the world from the other’s point of view.

With speech-balloons and Tim

CHILDREN’S

meet JESSICA HISCHE

Miller’s expressive, cartoonish illustrations, over-the-top humor is the name of the game here, and the lively back-and-forth discussions between the two characters make Horse Meets Dog a particularly good choice for storytime. In one instance, Horse tries to feed Dog a bottle of hay and mocks Dog’s tail, telling him his tail should hang down “like a gorgeous hair waterfall.”

Even gift-giving attempts fail: Dog doesn’t understand the heavy saddle Horse gives him, and Horse is utterly baffled by the concept of fetching a ball.

The new friends never come to understand the error in their thinking, and the comic rimshot of an ending—a bird appears to tell them they are “two weird-looking birds”—leaves readers hoping an epiphany will follow.

—J U L I E D A N I E L S O N

COUNTING TO PERFECT

By Suzanne LaFleur Wendy Lamb $16.99, 208 pages ISBN 9781524771799 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Rising seventh-grader Cassie is looking forward to a summer of competitive swimming and hanging by the pool with her best friends—away from her 17-yearold sister, Julia, who’s a new mom to 6-month-old Addie. Ever since Addie arrived, Cassie’s life has been put on the back burner, and she longs for the closeness she and Julia shared before Addie was born. So when Julia confides in Cassie that she and Addie are leaving without telling their parents, Cassie takes the chance to potentially rekindle their relationship and joins them on a road trip with no planned destination.

Suzanne LeFleur’s Counting to Perfect is a gorgeous novel that illustrates the enduring bond of sisterhood. Tackling issues of teen pregnancy and its aftermath, LeFleur’s wise and honest young characters show warmth and com-

passion in a muddled situation.

Both Cassie and Julia are strong despite their flaws, and there is no question that their bond will remain unbroken.

This optimistic story is a great pick for young readers dealing with their own family issues.

© EDYTA SZYSZLO

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

would you describe Q: How

the book?

— E R I N A . H O LT

THE PROPHET CALLS

By Melanie Sumrow Yellow Jacket $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781499807554 eBook available Ages 10 to 14 MIDDLE GRADE

Melanie Sumrow’s debut novel, The Prophet Calls, takes on powerful topics amid the taboo setting of an ultra-religious, cultlike community.

Thirteen-year-old Gentry Forrester lives with her father, three mothers and numerous siblings and half-siblings in the remote foothills of New Mexico, where they patiently wait for the apocalypse, when God will take her and the rest of the Chosen home to the celestial kingdom. Gentry feels lucky to be a part of this holy group, and she does her best to obey the laws of the Prophet and “keep sweet” as he commands. But when the Prophet outlaws music, the one thing that makes the spirited and strong-willed Gentry feel like herself, everything in her carefully constructed life begins to unravel, and soon she’s faced with an impossible choice: leave the community and the only life she’s even known or risk losing herself.

At the heart of this novel is Gentry’s love for her family and for the beautiful music that brings them together. The questions that Gentry faces—questions of identity and belonging, when to bow to authority and when to stand up for what’s in your heart—are universally relatable. Gentry is a protagonist you can’t help but cheer for, and her journey from fear to doubt to empowerment is powerful, affecting and not to be missed.

— HANNAH LAMB

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

was your favorite subject in school? Why? Q: What

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: What

one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: What

Q: What message would you like to send to young readers?

TOMORROW I’LL BE BRAVE Acclaimed typographer Jessica Hische’s first picture book takes readers on a journey full of optimism and sage advice.

For anyone who needs a dose of positivity and encouragement, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave (Penguin Workshop, $17.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781524787011, ages 3 to 7) delivers elegant and bold hand-lettered graphics alongside a story of heartfelt hope. Hische lives and works in San Francisco.

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