Library Journal

Alexie, Sherman. Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. Grove. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780802120397. $25. SHORT STORIES
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Malamud awards—not to mention a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian—Alexie writes sculpted prose that lands like a punch. His stories, especially, are knockouts. So this juicy collection of 15 of his best-known stories (e.g., “The Toughest Indian in the World”) and 15 new stories (which range in topic from donkey basketball leagues to dangerous wind turbines) should be a winner. With a first serial sold to Harper’s and a 13-city tour to Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Nashville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Albuquerque, Phoenix, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Bellingham (WA), and Spokane.

Leon, Donna. The Jewels of Paradise. Atlantic Monthly. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780802120649. $25.95. POP FICTION
No, not another of Leon’s engaging mysteries starring Commissario Guido Brunetti but a stand-alone novel—though it’s still set in Venice. An expert on baroque opera, Caterina Pellegrini has returned home to oversee the opening of two just-discovered trunks containing the effects of a baroque composer who once reigned supreme and is now pretty much history. She’s to check the papers and see if there’s a will (already two descendants are fighting), but the trunks could contain much, much more. Lovely to see Leon spread her wings, and she writes persuasively about music; a related CD recorded by a world-famous singer is said to be in the works.

Morton, Kate. The Secret Keeper. Atria: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9781439152805. $29.99. HISTORICAL FICTION
Sounds like classic Morton: escaping from a noisy summer party, 16-year-old Laurel Nicolson sits dreaming away in her childhood tree house when she spies her mother speaking to a man she doesn’t now. Later, she witnesses a terrible crime. But not until 50 years have passed, when she’s attending her mother’s 90th birthday party, she can ask the pertinent questions—which leads to a story involving three strangers in wartime London. Morton’s best-selling work is always classy and nuanced; I loved The Distant Hours. Great for reading groups.

Mozingo, Joe. The Fiddler on Pantico Run. Free Pr: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781451627480. $24.99. MEMOIR
Blue-eyed, fair-skinned Mozingo didn’t know the origin of his family name until a colleague told him that it came from the Congo. Doing some digging (not a hard job for a Pulitzer Prize finalist at the Los Angeles Times), Mozingo discovered that Edward Mozingo, probably a prince from the Kingdom of Kon, landed in Jamestown in 1644 as a slave. He eventually won his freedom, then set up a tobacco farm on a Virginia road called Pantico Run and married a white woman, thus launching one of the country’s first mixed-race families. Mozingo continues through the family’s split as some members sought to pass for white, the presence of relatives on both sides during the Civil War, and his grandfather’s move to Hollywood to pursue his own dreams. If this works out right, it will capture the complexities of American history.

If you have never heard of Count Axel von Fersen, you are perhaps in the majority. While everyone can picture the tragic Marie Antoinette, who lost her head to the guillotine in the midst of the French Revolution, only the more thoroughgoing students of history know much about her lover—an influential Swedish nobleman in his own right. Now the redoubtable Francine du Plessix Gray, author of studies like At Home with the Marquis de Sade and the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Them: A Memoir of My Parents, has brought the count fully to life. Yet her method is not biography but fiction.

In The Queen’s Lover, out from Penguin Press this June, Gray offers a rich and exacting portrait of Fersen and his world. Reading it is like stepping through one of Versailles’s famed looking glasses into the roistering turmoil of late 1700s France and seeing it afresh, freed from the endless shellacking of time and myth. Given her command of the history, why did Gray choose to tell her story in fiction—an area, one hastens to add, in which she also excels?

“It wasn’t a set decision,” explained Gray in an interview at her publisher’s office in lower Manhattan, as she clarified the emblematic experience of having the writing speaks to the writer. “I began with the scene where [Fersen and Marie Antoinette] first meet, and instead of saying he, I said I.” The count mostly tells his own story, but occasionally we hear the voice of his sister, Sophie, who speaks up boldly to describe and defend him. The tenderness between them—indeed, this is as much a story of sibling affection as of Fersen’s great love for the queen—might not have been conveyed so convincingly in a sheer historical account.

Fiction also has the advantage of allowing the writer to move beyond bare fact and create a more immediate and sensuous environment. Of her favorite chapter, which portrays a Versailles littered with food scraps and beset by unwashed courtiers who relieve themselves in the corners, Gray observed that readers can “smell and feel, as well as see, how Versailles reeked! You can’t do that in nonfiction. You could quote a letter, but the voice itself carries so much more sensory weight.” Coming from clean and tidy Sweden, the count is so overcome by the awful stench on his first visit to the palace that he requires smelling salts, which readers might want to resort to as well.

In her account, Gray vivifies not only France but Fersen’s homeland, which should please the historically astute while giving new and interesting information to those less familiar with Sweden’s illustrious past. “Sweden is off the map in our historical study,” remarked Gray, “but at the time it was the major naval power in Europe”—a fact highlighted by Fersen’s relentless diplomatic missions and easy access to the elevated French court. Intriguing, too, is Gray’s portrait of the little-known Swedish king Gustavus III. Said the author of this fascinating character, “He was a gay intellectual who really founded modern Swedish culture.”

Other great characters abound in this novel, not least of which are Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI. They are typically seen as shallow, frivolous sorts, pitied for a fate that the unkind often think they deserved. But Gray offers solidly grounded revisionism. Her Marie Antoinette is no simpering flirt but a sensitive young woman trying her best to reckon with the forces arrayed against her. And Louis is not only pious—the night before his execution, he was ready to meet his maker, downing a feast and then sleeping soundly—but “a great intellectual,” as Gray observes. “He knew Milton by heart.”

Of course, the most persuasive character is Fersen himself, a man of grave demeanor and firm convictions devoted to queen, class, and country. Yet he’s nuanced, too. Though a determined aristocrat, refusing to adjust as republican fervor swept his homeland after the Revolution, Fersen fought for American independence. (What Swede at the time didn’t hate the British?) And though firmly committed to Marie Antoinette, even unto her memory after her death, he’s called a notorious seducer by his own sister. “He was a man with a big libido, and he admitted it,” observed Gray. “But he did not go to prostitutes; he liked only classy ladies. He felt a bit guilty, but, after all, it was hard to get to the queen.”

Committed lover, confessed seducer, and unyielding aristocrat: what does Count Axel von Fersen have to say to us today? “That integrity and loyalty are the most important things in life,” averred Gray. “He doesn’t cater to the crowd; he wants to be himself.” Just as history has lessons for us, so does historical fiction. And few novelists could so effectively show us how to hold firm in roiling times (like our own) as Gray.

Dean, Rebecca. The Shadow Queen: A Novel of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. Crown. Aug. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780767930574. pap. $15. HISTORICAL FICTION
Author of historical fiction like The Palace Circle, Dean offers a fictionalized life of Wallis Simpson, the poor American girl taken in by rich relatives who set her sights on British society and then the soon-to-be king. In the process, she digs into the rumors swirling around Simpson, e.g., that she was a lesbian or a KGB agent. Lots of interest in Simpson right now (is it the royal wedding furor?); this May, noted historian Juliet Nicholson, granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West, is publishing a novel called Abdication that also features the duchess.

Evison, Jonathan. The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Algonquin. Aug. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781616200398. $24.95. POP FICTION
No word yet on the plot of this latest from the author of the award-winning All About Lulu and its well-regarded follow-up, West of Here, but as this essay of the same title suggests, it will deal with caregiving quandaries in a sharp-tongued and forthright way.

Kang, Jay Caspian. The Dead Do Not Improve. Hogarth: Crown. Aug. 2012. 272p. ISBN 9780307953889. $25; eISBN 9780307953902. Download: Random Audio. LITERARY THRILLER
This debut, another book from the recently launched Hogarth Press, which has been doing some very good stuff indeed, features recent MFA grad Philip Kim. His own in-your-face work can’t compare with the trouble he sees when his next-door neighbor is murdered and he finds himself in a suddenly scary San Francisco loaded with aggressive surfers, angry creative writing students, silent cops, and folks who patronize trendy quinoa cafes. Deputy editor of Bill Simmons’s online pop-culture magazine, Grantland.com, Kang is building his reputation; TheAwl.com calls this “2012’s novel to anticipate.” So you should, at least for smart, in-the-know readers.

Moran, Michelle. The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon’s Court. Crown. Aug. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780307953032. $25; eISBN 9780307953056. Downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORICAL FICTION
With last year’s Madame Tussaud, the author of saga favorites like The Heretic Queen seems to have left behind Egypt for revolutionary France and beyond. This book is not a sequel to Moran’s popular portrait of the celebrated wax sculptor but a re-creation of Napoleon’s famously bawdy court, focusing on three women: Napoleon’s stepdaughter, Hortense Beauharnais; his sister Pauline, who bedded everyone, including, quite likely, her brother; and his wife, Marie-Louise, eager to be quit of her capricious husband. Moran draws extensively on the liberal documentation all three women left behind; lots of publicity and Moran’s previous success will make this popular.

Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. Crown. Aug. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780307884879. $24. HISTORICAL FICTION
Formerly British Poet Laureate, editor of the Poetry Review, and editorial director of Chatto & Windus, as well as a cofounder of the Poetry Archive and biographer of John Keats and Philip Larkin, Motion brings a lot of literary firepower to this sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved Treasure Island.  It’s now 1802, and with the help of his son, a grown-up Jim Hawkins is tending his inn (called—surprise!—the Hispaniola) when the waiflike Natty arrives with a request from her father, Long John Silver. And they’re all off again to Treasure Island. Ahoy, mates; if you think you’ll like this, also consider John Drake’s 2009 Flint and Silver: Treasure Island: The Prequel and Sara Levine’s recent Treasure Island!!!, a novel about reading Stevenson’s novel.

Ratner, Vaddey. In the Shadow of the Banyan. S. & S. Aug. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781451657708. $25. LITERARY FICTION
Starvation. Forced labor. The loss of family members. And the past extinguished. Ratner’s tale of what happens to seven-year-old Raami when the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia is based on personal experience; she remembers it vividly, though she herself was only five at the time, eventually arriving in America as a refugee in 1981. A huge in-house favorite.

Thalasinos, Andrea. An Echo Through the Snow. Forge: Tor. Aug. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9780765330369. $23.99. POP FICTION
As in so many canine tales, this book features a rescued dog to the rescue. Rosalie MacKenzie grew up on the rez and finds her life at a dead end until she comes across a neglected Siberian Husky named Smokey. Soon they’re the newest team on the competitive dogsled racing circuit, with somberly gorgeous Wisconsin as background. Flashbacks tell the story of the Chukchi of Siberia, who lost not only their homes to Stalin’s Red Army but often their beloved Huskies as well, considered guardians of their culture. Sociologist Thalasinos has rescued two Huskies (so far); this book is already slated as the publisher’s galley giveaway at BEA.

Thomas, Michael. The Broken King: A Memoir. Grove. Jun. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780802120144. $25. MEMOIR
Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, Man Gone Down, also named one of the Ten Best Books of 2008 by the New York Times, Thomas here considers his own life in the context of American history, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement. He takes his title from a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “If you came at night like a broken king.” Those “broken” in his family range from his grandfather, who trained as a pharmacist but could never find work, to his own wayward brother. A book to anticipate; with a ten-city tour to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Toronto and a reading group guide.

Thomason, Dustin. 12.21. Dial: Random. Aug. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780385341400. $27; eISBN 9780679644286. THRILLER
All things considered, it’s good that this novel, which draws on the ancient Maya belief that the world will come to an end on December 21, 2012, is publishing several months before then. At its heart is Dr. Gabriel Stanton, attending an anonymous patient afflicted with a rare disease depriving victims of their sleep, who possesses a centuries-old codex that explains why the Maya civilization collapsed. That collapse, a young Guatemalan American scholar soon realizes, is tied to the disease, and soon she and the good doctor are in a race against time to keep the whole world from hitting the skids. With Ian Caldwell, Thomason wrote the mega-best-selling thriller The Rule of Four, which, along with the popularity of doomsday beliefs, should create lots of demand.

Badman, Keith. Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years. St. Martin’s. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780312607142. $25.99; eISBN 9781250012388. BIOGRAPHY
Having disposed of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Stones, Badman goes after another celebrity icon. Among his putative revelations: the identity of Marilyn Monroe’s biological father, what really happened with JFK, and her exploitation by mobsters at a hotel owned by Frank Sinatra. Another on the Monroe bandwagon.

Gemmell, Nikki. With My Body. HarperPerennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780062122636. pap. $14.99; eISBN 9780062122643. POP FICTION
Gemmell follows up her sensationalist best seller, The Bride Stripped Bare, with another fictional exploration of female sexuality. Here, a woman who feels suffocated by marriage and children recalls the one love affair that really did something for her. With a 100,000-copy first printing and a reading group guide—for those, I guess, who don’t blush easily.

Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Random. Jul. 2012. 286p. ISBN 9780812993295. $25. LITERARY FICTION
A leading actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then an award-winning author of plays for the BBC, Joyce is taking on another role: novelist. And a successful one at that, it seems, with rights for this debut sold to more than 25 countries. When cranky retiree Harold Fry gets a letter from an old friend he’s not seen in two decades, revealing that she’s in hospice, he decides to visit her. And he decides that to do so he’ll walk the 600 miles from Kingsbridge to Berwick upon Tweed. Refreshing premise; let’s all watch.

Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death. Knopf. Jun. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307592996. $27.95; eISBN 9780307958501. HISTORY
Okay, grand subtitle, but Lepore—Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer, and author (e.g., New York Burning)—has something focused in mind and will likely pull it off. Here she explores how ideas about life and death have shaped American history and politics. For your thoughtful readers.

Locke, Kate. God Save the Queen.(Immortal Empire, Bk 1.). Orbit: Hachette. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780316196123. $16.99. STEAMPUNK
It’s called the steampunk debut of the year, and it opens in 2012 with an undead Queen Victoria still ruling and the aristocracy made up mostly of vampires and werewolves. Elite Guard Xandra Vardan goes looking for her missing sister and starts doubting everything she once believed. Meanwhile, conspiracy brews. From best-selling YA author Kady Cross (like Kate Locke, a pseudonym); should be big.

Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel. Holt. May 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780805090031. $28. HISTORICAL FICTION
Deservedly a winner of both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Mantel’s best-selling Wolf Hall is audaciously good historical fiction portraying Thomas Cronwell’s rise to power as Henry VIII’s adviser. In this follow-up, Henry is ready to get rid of Anne Boleyn, a job that falls to Cromwell—which means that he must ally himself with his archenemies, the papist aristocracy. We’ll all been waiting for this one.

Mawer, Simon. Trapeze. Other Pr. May 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781590515273. pap. $15.95. HISTORICAL THRILLER
Only 19, native French speaker Marian Sutro is trained as an agent by the Special Operations Executive and parachuted into wartime France. Her mission, to join the WORDSMITH resistance network, has been hijacked by yet another secret organization, which wants her to persuade a research scientist in Paris to join the Allied effort. Mawer’s The Glass Room was both a New York Times best seller and a Man Booker Prize shortlisted title, so this looks promising indeed.

Sharpe, Katherine. Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are. Harper Perennial: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062059734. pap. $14.99. SOCIAL SCIENCE
In 2005, antidepressants surged past blood-pressure medication as the most frequently prescribed drug in America, with an astonishing ten percent of the population using them (and that was then). The former editor and community manager of Seed magazine’s ScienceBlogs.com, Sharpe has the background to understand this phenomenon, but she also has personal experience; she was prescribed Zoloft in college after a panic attack. Here she explores the consequences of antidepressant use by increasingly younger patients, whose self-understanding and coping skills are thus distorted. Important information to consider; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

Solomon, John. DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Thomas Dunne Bks: St. Martin’s. Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781250012630. $25.99; eISBN 9781250013057. CURRENT EVENTS
Director of news and investigative reporting at The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, Solomon aims to get to the heart of the case involving a New York hotel maid’s accusation that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund—a case that saw the media gunning first on the accused and then on the accuser.

Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. The Prisoner of Heaven. Harper: HarperCollins. 416p. Jun. 2012. ISBN 9780062206282. $27.99. lrg. prnt. CD: HarperAudio LITERARY THRILLER
As entertainingly twisted as Gaudi’s architecture, only darker, Zafón’s best-selling fiction (e.g., The Shadow of the Wind) inhabits a distinctive Barcelona. At Christmas in 1957, Daniel Sempere and his wife are enjoying their new son and the prospect of their friend Fermín’s marriage when a stranger arrives at their bookshop, prepared to reveal a dark secret harking back to Franco’s early days. With a 200,000-copy first printing and a seven-city tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC; don’t miss.

Andersen, Kurt. Trust Me. Random. Jul. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9781400067206. $27; eISBN 9781588366863. LITERARY
Cofounder of Spy, former editor in chief of New York magazine, and cocreator and host of the award-winning Public Radio program Studio 360, Andersen knows his way around the zeitgeist; just take a look at his two novels, Turn of the Century (which drew comparisons to Bonfire of the Vanities) and the New York Times best-selling Heyday. Here he returns with another cultural study, this one featuring an eminent sixtyish judge who withdraws from consideration for a Supreme Court seat because of events in her youth. Revelations about those events will tell us as much about the country as they do about Hollander. With a six-city tour (Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Omaha, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), an NPR campaign, a custom Facebook page, early pitches to Goodreads and LibraryThing, book club outreach, and even a thriller platform (that says something); this will be big.

Carter, Stephen L. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. Knopf. Jul. 2012. 528p. ISBN 9780307272638. $26.95. CD: Random House Audio. HISTORICAL FICTION
There’s trouble for President Abraham Lincoln in this imaginatively conceived alternate history. After he survives Booth’s assassination attempt, he’s accused of violating the Constitution in his conduct of the war and faces impeachment. His defense team includes a young black woman, just graduated from Oberlin, who’s enjoying the opportunity to flummox purse-lipped Washington society until one of Lincoln’s lead lawyers is murdered. History, mystery, and profound political questions from the author of the million-plus-copy best seller The Emperor of Ocean Park—who of course is also an esteemed professor at Yale Law School. With a five-city tour to Boston, elsewhere in New England, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, plus a reading group guide.

French, Tana, Broken Harbor. Viking. Jul. 2012. 464p. ISBN 9780670023653. $27.95. THRILLER
Remember Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, top cop from multi-award-winner French’s Faithful Places? He’s back, puzzling over the murder of Patrick Spain and his two children, found at one of those half-built luxury developments riddling now-broke Ireland; Patrick’s wife Jenny languishes in intensive care. Weirdly, the baby cams are all turned to holes bludgeoned in the house’s walls, and Jenny recalls an intruder who got past every lock. Worse, the case upends Scorcher’s sister, Dina, recalling a trauma from their childhood. With Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night, among the publisher’s biggest fiction of the year; get multiples.

Harkness, Deborah. Shadow of Night. Viking. Jul. 2012. 592p. ISBN 9780670023486. $28.95; CD: Penguin Audio. PARANORMAL
A Discovery of Witches, Harkness’s phenomenal debut novel, was hatched when she asked herself what a vampire hanging about for all those centuries would do as a job. Vampire Matthew Clairmont is a geneticist who’s joined forces (in more ways than one) with scholar and witch-in-rebellion Diana Bishop. Here, to quell a battle of supernatural forces stemming from an enchanted manuscript that seems to have vanished, they’ve time-traveled back to Elizabethan London. Diana gets tutored in magic, Matthew confronts his past, and the School of Night (you know, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh…) makes an appearance. With a 14-city tour; grab it.

Wilson, G. Willow. Alif the Unseen. Grove. Jul. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780802120205. $25; eISBN 9780802194626. LITERARY
Author of award-winning graphic novels and comics series, plus the memoir The Butterfly Mosque, about her conversion to Islam, Wilson offers a debut novel featuring an Arab-Indian hacker in an unspecified Middle East country. Alif, dedicated to protecting dissidents and others under surveillance, is forced underground when the woman he loves dumps him for a prince who turns out to be the dreaded “Hand of God”—head of the state’s electronic security forces. While in hiding, Alif discovers a secret book belonging to a jinn that could change the very concept of information technology. One of the publisher’s big books of the season, this intriguing-sounding blend of cyberfantasy and the Arabian Nights will be backed by a ten-city tour to Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Boulder, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

Kunstler, James Howard. Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. Atlantic Monthly. Jul. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780802120304. $25; eISBN 9780802194381. CURRENT EVENTS
Back in 2005, Kunstler’s The Long Emergency highlighted the imminence of an oil-dry future as it moved through 150,000 copies and sold to nine territories. Since then, Kunstler has been asked to speak at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences and annually welcomes 700,000 unique visitors to his website. Here he looks at the drawbacks of various alternate technologies, arguing that, pie-in-the-sky optimists to the contrary, technology doesn’t have easy solutions to the energy crisis. A big book for the publisher that’s poised to make waves.