Book News and New Book Reviews
Just a sampling of our new materials (right side)!
by Iris Johansen (Get the Book)
When someone tries to poison Jane MacGuire's beloved dog, Toby, no one suspects a plot to distract Jane from the tragedy about to befall her mother, forensic sculptor Eve Duncan. Yet that's just what happens as Jane and Toby fly to the mysterious Summer Island, where an old friend of Eve's breeds and rehabilitates dogs with heightened powers of empathy and longevity. With Toby in good hands, Jane plans to fly home to Georgia to see Eve and her father, Joe Quinn, until a sniper's bullet leaves her in mortal danger. Distraction firmly set in place, Jim Doane can finally complete his diabolic plan to kidnap Eve and force her to reconstruct the skull of his son Kevin, a sadistic child killer once involved with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Launching yet another spin-off trilogy featuring her intrepid heroine Duncan, with installments planned for July and October of this year, Johansen weaves a complicated plot laden with repeat performers from her best-selling past thrillers. Prior knowledge of earlier works is required for full appreciation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a 300,000-copy print run and a seven-figure, yearlong major marketing blitz, the launch of the first book in Johansen's new trilogy will pull in fans. --Booklist
by Michael Pollan (Get the Book)
Pollan's newest treatise on how food reaches the world's tables delves into the history of how humankind turns raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food. To bring some sense of order to this vast subject, he resurrects classical categories of fire, water, air, and earth. Pollan visits pit masters to learn what constitutes authentic barbecue. An Italian-trained Iranian American teaches him the subtleties of proper cooking in pots, how to coax maximum flavor from humble vegetables, herbs, meats, and water. Baking trains Pollan to watch, listen, and feel the action of living yeasts in doughs. The harnessing of fungi and molds to ferment sauerkraut and beer and produce cheeses illuminates the fine and ever-shifting boundaries between tastiness and rot and how the human palate can be trained. Four recipes accompany the text, and an extensive bibliography offers much deeper exploration. Pollan's peerless reputation as one of America's most compelling expositors of food and human sustainability will boost demand. --Booklist
by Kristin Hannah (Get the Book)
Hannah's Firefly Lane (2008), which centered on best-friends-forever Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey, is arguably her most popular work. Her follow-up gives readers an idea of what life is like for Tully and Kate's daughter Marah in the wake of Kate's death from cancer. It's not a pretty picture. Tully, who walked away from her successful talk show after Kate got sick, finds that her career isn't waiting for her when she is ready to come back. Overwhelmed by grief and shunned by Johnny, Kate's grieving husband who wants Tully to stay away from him and Kate's children, Tully turns to prescription drugs and alcohol. Teenage Marah, once popular and brash, retreats into herself. Then hope comes from the most unlikely of sources: Tully's wayward mother, finally sober and now, on the cusp of 70, possibly ready to be the mother Tully has always craved. Readers will be reaching for tissues as they watch the characters they grew to love in Firefly Lane struggle to make peace with Kate's death and find happiness and love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: So popular is Firefly Lane that Hannah's highly anticipated sequel will be launched with a 500,000 print run, a national author tour, and an enormous promotional campaign. --Booklist
by Amy Stewart (Get the Book)
Stewart's (Wicked Bugs; Wicked Plants) new book explores the botanical beginnings of our favorite drinks. Like her previous books, it is so rich in details, little-known facts, and actual science, that readers won't even notice they are reading an encyclopedia. Each plant description includes history, propagation, and usage details. Stewart includes sidebars with recipes, field guides, planting instructions, a description of the role of bugs in getting from seed to plant to table, and in-depth historical details. She includes archaeological finds such as the presence of barley beer on clay pot fragments dated to 3400 B.C.E. and the legal details that changed the course of birch beer, which started as a mildly alcoholic beer, morphed into a soft drink during Prohibition, and recently began to be produced as a liqueur. -Verdict With more than 50 drink recipes, and growing tips, this highly entertaining book will please both cocktail enthusiasts and backyard gardeners. The inclusion of rich history throughout will delight armchair historians and the naturally curious.
by Sebastian Faulks (Get the Book)
Geoffrey Talbot, a skilled British cricket player with a gift for languages, has taught at a boys' prep school for just one year before World War II breaks out and he signs up. Billy is seven years old in 1859 when his poverty-stricken parents choose him from among their five children to be sent to a British workhouse. In 2029, nine-year-old Elena Duranti is isolated from her peers by her brilliant mind and all-consuming curiosity; when her father brings home the orphan Bruno, the two soon bond as inseparable siblings. Jeanne is an uneducated, incurious, deeply religious peasant in 19th-century France who has been in service to the same family for as long as she can remember. And finally, in 1971, Brit Jack narrates the story of Anya, a troubled young hippie with a singing voice that stuns her listeners, captures hearts, and derails lives. VERDICT Faulks's (Birdsong) literary artistry is on gorgeous display as he brings to life five wildly disparate protagonists in stories linked by the strength of their characters, all challenged by the horrors of war, of abandonment, of the struggle between trust and faith, and of romance gone shockingly wrong. --Library Journal
by Marina Chapman (Get the Book)
Torn from her family at the tender age of four and abandoned in the Colombian jungle, Chapman must fight to survive. This remarkable memoir, coauthored by Barrett-Lee, is based on years of Chapman's conversations about her brutal childhood with her daughter. Her first few, horrifying days in the jungle are presented in vivid detail, as is the troop of capuchin monkeys with which she found refuge and a sense of community over the years. When she casts her lot with hunters who sell her into slavery, her unfamiliarity with basic human concepts is heartbreaking in its entirety. Fortunately, her monkey upbringing has surprising intersections with the talents of a street kid. A well-paced, cliffhanger approach to telling the story makes for a riveting narrative. Chapman's struggles, no matter how outrageous, are made relatable through the deft descriptions of her thoughts and feelings. A constant theme throughout is her strong desire to be someone. Thrilling, upsetting, and powerful, this memoir is a coming-of-age tale like no other. --Booklist
by Elizabeth Berg (Get the Book)
Any woman who has ever longed to shake off her life and embark on a road trip with female companions will love Tapestry of Fortunes. Cecilia Ross, a motivational speaker who teaches others to live their truth, is unable to follow her own advice. When she receives a postcard out of the blue from the one man she never got over, she realizes it's time to turn her regrets around. She seeks guidance from the fortune-telling devices that she stores in a box in the bedroom closet. Acting on their messages, Cece puts her house on the market, moves in with three women who are equally restless, and takes off with this newfound pack of friends, each on a mission to find the people and opportunities they missed. This book has all the ingredients for a highly satisfying read: a backroads journey, a testament to the power of female friendships, and the possibility of second chances. Berg strips her writing down to what is essential and takes an unflinching look at lifelong regrets. The characters are so completely realized, even the bit players will settle in your heart. High-Demand Backstory: The latest from the best-selling Berg, the author of more than 20 novels, will receive the full array of marketing support from the publisher. --Booklist
by Sonya Sotomayer (Get the Book)
When Sotomayor joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009, she made history as the first Hispanic on the high court. She'd also achieved the highest dream of a Puerto Rican girl growing up in a Bronx housing project longing to someday become a judge. In this amazingly candid memoir, Sotomayor recalls a tumultuous childhood: alcoholic father, emotionally distant mother, aggravating little brother, and a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins, all overseen by her loving, domineering paternal grandmother. When she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at eight years of age, she knew she had to learn to give herself the insulin shots. That determination saw her through Catholic high school, Princeton, and Yale Law School, at each step struggling to reconcile the poverty of her childhood with the privileges she was beginning to enjoy. No rabble-rouser, she nonetheless was active in student groups supporting minorities. At Yale, she learned how to think about jurisprudence, but readers looking for clues to her judicial thinking will be disappointed as she deliberately demurs. She recounts complicated feelings toward her parents and her failed marriage as she advanced to the DA's office, private practice, the district court, and, triumphantly, the Supreme Court. Sotomayor offers an intimate and honest look at her extraordinary life and the support and blessings that propelled her forward. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A media blitz will attend the release of this already newsworthy memoir by the Supreme Court's first Hispanic justice. --Booklist
by Kate Atkinson (Get the Book)
In a radical departure from her Jackson Brodie mystery series, Atkinson delivers a wildly inventive novel about Ursula Todd, born in 1910 and doomed to die and be reborn over and over again. She drowns, falls off a roof, and is beaten to death by an abusive husband but is always reborn back into the same loving family, sometimes with the knowledge that allows her to escape past poor decisions, sometimes not. As Atkinson subtly delineates all the pathways a life or a country might take, she also delivers a harrowing set piece on the Blitz as Ursula, working as a warden on a rescue team, encounters horrifying tableaux encompassing mangled bodies and whole families covered in ash, preserved just like the victims of Pompeii. Alternately mournful and celebratory, deeply empathic and scathingly funny, Atkinson shows what it is like to face the horrors of war and yet still find the determination to go on, with her wholly British characters often reducing the Third Reich to a fuss. From her deeply human characters to her comical dialogue to her meticulous plotting, Atkinson is working at the very top of her game. An audacious, thought-provoking novel from one of our most talented writers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's publisher is pulling out all the stops in marketing her latest, which will no doubt draw in many new readers in addition to her Jackson Brodie fans. --Booklist
