Library Journal

Bolaño, Roberto. Woes of the True Policeman. Farrar. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780374266745. $25. LITERARY FICTION
Herralde, Rómulo Gallegos, and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bolaño isn’t just a literary phenomenon, brought to the attention of U.S. readers after his untimely death in 2003. He’s a popular phenomenon as well, his mammoth 2666 having sold over 70,000 copies in hardcover, 36,000 in a boxed set, and 40,000 in paperback. So there will be interest in this final, unfinished novel, which Bolaño began in the 1980s and worked on until his death. The novel stars Chilean professor Amalfitano, widowed and with a teenaged daughter, who is forced from Barcelona by scandal and lands in Santa Teresa, Mexico, a border town plagued by the murder of many women. Here he meets folks like Spanish Civil War veteran Sorcha and magician/writer Arcimboldi, whose works (like Bolaño’s) reveal life’s earthquake-like instability. Keen Bolaño readers will recognize key characters and plot points from 2666 and will be intrigued; expect lots of attention.

Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 272p. ISBN 9780316182379. $26.99. lrg. prnt. CD: Hachette Audio. ESSAYS
So the Pulitzer people didn’t think he deserved a prize. Wallace is still the great, original, uncompromised voice of the last few decades of American literature, at once brilliant and maddening. This collection of 15 essays never available in book format includes early work not easily accessed, along with classics like “Federer Both Flesh and Not.” After Infinite Jest, we’ll always think of Wallace as a key fiction writer, but his essays shine, and the collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again jointly count over 300,000 copies in print.

Kimmel, James, Jr. The Trial of Fallen Angels. Amy Einhorn: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780399159695. $25.95. THRILLER
Brek Cuttler walks into a store with her daughter—and suddenly finds herself on a deserted train platform, with only arrivals indicated on the timetable board. What’s more, she’s drenched in blood. Brek soon learns that she has died and, as a crack lawyer, has been assigned to the special team that prosecutes and defends the souls of the dead on Judgment Day. Her very first case teaches her some awful secrets about her life, her death, and what she can expect for all eternity. Word has it that this debut by a lawyer specializing in the intersection of law and spirituality is unlike anything you have ever read. With foreign rights sold to eight countries and a reading group guide.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. Harper: HarperCollins. Nov. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780062124265. $28.99; eISBN 9780062124289. lrg. prnt. CD: Harper Audio. LITERARY FICTION
Always beloved, Kingsolver shot into the heavens with her last novel, The Lacuna, a booming best seller that also won the Orange Prize. Said to be her most accessible work (but aren’t they all?), this new novel features Dellarobia Turnbow, who dreamed of going beyond Feathertown, TN, but married young and is now stuck raising kids on a hardscrabble farm. On the way to a rendezvous—her first break with life as it is—Dellarobia comes upon a forested glen filled with silent red fire. Fundamentalists, climate scientists, politicians, and the media mob—all come to weigh in fervently on the cause and meaning of this phenomenon, as Dellarobia and her neighbors fend off the invasion. Exciting; with a one-day laydown on November 11, a 500,000-copy first printing, a reading group guide, and an eight-city tour to Asheville (NC), Boston, Nashville, New York, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Tucson, and Washington, DC.

McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. Nan A. Talese: Doubleday. Nov. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780385536820. $26.95; eISBN 9780385536837. LITERARY THRILLER
Since this is coming from the acute and masterly author of Atonement, don’t expect a standard thriller but a study of love, betrayal, and the compromising forces of history. In 1972, beautiful Serena Frome is finishing her maths degree at Cambridge when she is tapped by M15 for Operation Sweet Tooth, which aims to fund artists and writers whose political views M15 would like to nurture. For her first assignment, she’s supposed to charm upcoming writer Tom Healey but instead falls in love with him and prepares to tell him the truth when her cover is blown. The thrills here will come not simply from watching the M15 house of cards fall but from figuring out who caused the ruckus—and why.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 656p. ISBN 9780394515700. $35. HISTORY
A historian with clout (his shelves groan with a Bancroft Prize, a National Book Award, and two Pulitzer Prizes), Bailyn shows that the settlement of British North America was not one of humanity’s more glorious moments. As folks poured in from Britain, the Continent, and Africa, bringing with them the culture and class structure of their particular regions, violence often resulted—not simply between indigenous peoples and settlers or settlers and those they enslaved but between various groups of settlers themselves. An eye-opener that might disturb a few readers; I’m jumping on this one.

Russo, Richard. Elsewhere: A Memoir. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780307959539. $25.95; eISBN 9780307959546. CD/Downloadable: Random House Audio. MEMOIR
One can certainly imagine the pleasures of reading a memoir by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, who’s ever attentive to the details of time and place, character and struggle. Russo recounts his upbringing in 1950s Gloversville, NY, a tannery town (as its name suggests) much like the locales that make his fiction so memorable. But what should make this work truly arresting is his account of his mother, who wanted something better for herself and her son, even as the folks around them sank into poverty and despair with the closing of the tannery.

Banville, John. Ancient Light. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780307957054. $25.95; eISBN 9780307960832. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. LITERARY
At the end of a stuttering career, suddenly revived by a role-of-a-lifetime movie turn, actor Alexander Cleave looks back at his first and probably only love, a charged and ultimately catastrophic passion at age 15 for his best friend’s mother. Then there’s his daughter, whose own uncertain turn of mind he cannot understand. Always an honored writer, Banville has gained a bigger audience here since winning the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, so this probing study of memory’s shiftiness will be anticipated. With a reading guide and a six-city tour to Boston, New York, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Cronin, Justin. The Passage Trilogy: Bk. 2: The Twelve. Ballantine. Oct. 2012. 560p. ISBN 9780345504982. $28; eISBN 9780345534897. CD: Random Audio. LITERARY THRILLER
After racking up honors like the PEN/Hemingway Award for his literary fiction, Cronin wrote a dystopian thriller called The Passage—and sold 600,000 copies while claiming awed reviews and best book nods, including from LJ. Here we see three strangers bonding over the chaos created by the U.S. government experiment gone awry that kicked off the first book, and, 100 years hence, we again meet Amy, Peter, Alicia, and the others as they track the 12 virals that started all the trouble. Alas, their quest is based on some assumptions that no longer hold. With a 15- to 20-city tour and a huge multimedia campaign.

Harris, Joanne. Peaches for Father Francis. Viking. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780670026364. $26.95. CD: Penguin Audio. POP FICTION
With Harris’s beloved chocolatière, Vianne Rocher, we return to the lovely French village of Lansquenet, where Vianne first opened up shop in Harris’s multi-million-best-selling Chocolat. Now the town is changed, with veiled women walking the streets and a minaret rising across the river, and—big surprise!—fierce, resistant Father Francis needs Vianne’s help. Charm and important social context; a recent New York Times editorial reports that France has Europe’s largest Islamic minority, which has caused headline-making tensions recently. The editorial goes on to explain that inclusive Marseille has no such troubles. Perhaps little Lansquenet will emulate its big brother.  

Pamuk, Orhan. Silent House. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307700285. $26.95; eISBN 9780307958556. LITERARY
Before he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Pamuk wrote this, his second novel—only now available in English. In the summer before the 1980 military coup, the widow Fatima anticipates her grandchildren’s annual visit to her home in Cennethisar, now a fancy resort near Istanbul but once a fishing village where Fatima’s physician husband settled to serve the poor. She reminisces with ever-loyal servant Recep, a dwarf who happens to be her husband’s illegitimate son, even as Recep’s dedicatedly nationalist cousin draws the entire family dangerously close to the looming political crisis. With a reading group guide; a good way to understand the Turkey of today.

Bizot, François. Facing the Torturer. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780307273505. $25; eISBN 9780307960870. HISTORY
Director of studies at Paris’s École Pratique des Hautes études and chair of Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne, Bizot was a young scholar studying pottery and Buddhist ritual in Cambodia when he was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge for three months in 1973, an experience he recounted searingly in The Gate. (Bizot was the only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment.) His captor was the infamous Duch, ultimately responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 people. Duch was arrested for his crimes in 1999, and Bizot bore witness at his trial—an unimaginable act of courage that he revisits here with this book. Note that it’s classified as history—Bizot clearly turns the spotlight from himself to a horrifically dark time in human history.

Brands, H.W. The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. 736p. ISBN 9780385532419. $35; eISBN 9780385532426. CD: Random Audio. BIOGRAPHY
A New York Times best-selling historian/biographer who’s given us firm portraits of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others, Brands here takes on Civil War general and two-term president Ulysses Grant. Grant’s reputation suffered after the war, partly because of Southern resentment, and Brands is out to given us a fairer, better picture. He shows us a first-rate general and a President who was both popular and compassionate, working hard to protect the rights of freedmen; Brands calls him last presidential defender of black civil rights for nearly a century. I’m betting on this one.

Dobbs, Michael. Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—from World War to Cold War. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780307271655. $28.95; eISBN 9780307960894. Downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
In February 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta, the alliance that had helped rout Hitler was already showing strains, and the start of the Cold War lay only months away. Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter who covered the fall of communism and authored the best-selling One Minute to Midnight, about nuclear brinkmanship, should have the perspective to cover this story. Lots of in-house enthusiasm.

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.

Kitamura, Katie. Gone to the Forest. Free Pr: S. & S. Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781451656640. pap. $15. LITERARY
Since his mother died, Tom and his father have dwelled together uneasily on their farm in an unnamed colonial country close to violence. Then a young woman named Carine enters their lives, forming a triangle and causing tensions to flare openly even as a volcanic eruption tips the country into revolution. A New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award finalist, Kitamura here follows up her highly regarded first novel, The Longshot, with something that sounds both smart and gripping for a wide range of readers. Note the reading group guide and the ebook/App promotion.

Stedman, ML. The Light Between Oceans. Scribner. Aug. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781451681734. $25. HISTORICAL
After World War I, Tom Sherbourne takes a job as lighthouse keeper on isolated Janus Rock, off the coast of Australia, where the supply boat comes only four times a year. His spunky wife, Isabel, suffers two miscarriages and a still birth in three years, so it’s no surprise that when a boat washes up carrying a dead man and a live baby, Isabel persuades Tom not to report the incident and takes the baby as hers. That causes trouble, of course, when they eventually return to the mainland. Big in-house excitement for his first novel, which will be backed by NPR coverage and a reading group guide. Tops on my reading list. 

Grunwald, Michael. The New New Deal.  S. & S. Aug. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781451642322. $27. CURRENT EVENTS
Listen up, voters: though Democrats don’t get it and Republicans hate it, Obama’s stimulus bill truly has been transformative, a broader-reaching program than even the New Deal. It not only short-circuited a looming depression and saved millions of jobs but is helping restructure America’s energy program, bringing healthcare into the Digital age, and changing everything from unemployment insurance to the government’s approach to homelessness. So argues Time senior correspondent Grunwald, winner of a George Polk Award, in a book that will surely prompt lots of discussion. 

Marton, Kati. Paris: A Love Story. S. & S. Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781451691542. $24. MEMOIR
Paris is important to many of us, but it’s really important to journalist/author Marton (Enemies of the People). There she studied as a college student in the explosive year of 1968; researched her family’s escape to France from communist Hungary; served as ABC bureau chief in a career breakthrough; met her first husband, Peter Jennings; and then met her second husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, finally returning to Paris to mourn his death. A distinctive view of the City of Light.

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.

Ampuero, Roberto. The Neruda Case. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9781594487439. $26.95. MYSTERY
Chilean-born Ampuero’s series starring private eye Cayetano Brulé are best sellers worldwide, but though the author has been teaching at the University of Iowa since 2000 (having spent time in Cuba, East Germany, West Germany, and Sweden), this is his first publication in English. Upon meeting Neruda at a party in pre-Pinochet Chile, Brulé is asked to solve a mystery troubling the great poet and finds himself traveling far afield (to Cuba, East Berlin…) for that purpose. Not just for mystery fans—or readers of Latin American literature.

Baker, J.I. The Empty Glass. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780399158193. $24.95. THRILLER
Baker, executive editor of Condé Nast Traveler, offers a first novel about a woman who’s starred in a lot of fiction lately: Marilyn Monroe. Maybe it’s the 50th anniversary of her death, coming in August 2012—or maybe she just seems so relevant as both symbol and victim of an outsize celebrity culture. Here, Los Angeles County Deputy Coroner Ben Fitzgerald arrives at the scene of Monroe’s death and finds her diary, which reveals a doomed affair with “The General”; soon he scents a cover-up in the making.

Brookmyre, Christopher. Where the Bodies Are Buried. Atlantic Monthly. Jul. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780802120250. $25; eISBN 9780802194442. THRILLER
A major crime novelist from Scotland, where the really tough guys write, Brookmyre crafts the story of two different cases that eventually collide. As Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod investigates the murder of a small-time heroin dealer (shame on him for sleeping with a drug kingpin’s girlfriend), one-time actress Jasmine Sharp must step up her efforts to learn the ropes at her “Uncle” Jim’s private investigation business when Jim himself disappears. This one’s gritty.

Chen, Pauline A. The Red Chamber. Knopf. Jul. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780307701572. $26.95; CD: Random House Audio. HISTORICAL
In her first adult novel, Chen, who has a doctoral degree in Asian studies from Princeton, imaginatively reworks the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, set in 18th-century Beijing. At its heart are three women: orphaned Daiyu, who joins her cousins, scheming Xifeng and proper Baochai, in the grand imperial city. Big reading-group pitch and an accent on accessibility.

Claudel, Philippe. The Investigation. Doubleday. Jul. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780385535342. $25. LITERARY
Claudel, who here follows up award winners like Brodeck and By a Slow River (translated into 30 languages) is one French author American readers really seem to like. Here, the Investigator encounters some truly absurd—dare one say Kafkaesque?—situations as he tries to determine what is behind a string of suicides at a huge complex called Enterprise in an unnamed Town. Do keep this one in mind.

Coulter, Catherine. Backfire. Putnam. Jul. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780399157325. $26.95. THRILLER
Here’s Coulter in FBI thriller mode, as tough federal prosecutor Mickey O’Rourke suddenly turns to jelly at the trial of putative serial killers Clive and Cindy Cahill, then gets shot in the back. FBI agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich receive the news at the same time that Savich gets a note saying “You deserve this for what you did.” Go, thriller fans.

Gapper, John. A Fatal Debt. Ballantine. Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780345527899. $26; eISBN 9780345527912. THRILLER
Psychiatrist Ben Cowper reluctantly agrees to treat a disgraced Wall Street biggie at home instead of at the hospital, then rushes to pick up the pieces when someone ends up dead. Gapper is a fiction newcomer but no neophyte; as chief business columnist of the Financial Times, he’s already a high-profile writer with a big blog/Twitter following. Another in the big upsweep of financial thrillers, inspired by these parlous times.

Gardiner, Meg. Ransom River. Dutton. Jul. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780525952855. $25.95. THRILLER
Her career and her love life having dead-ended, Rory Mackenzie reluctantly returns to her hometown of Ransom River, CA. Now a juror on a big-time murder case, she starts recalling disturbing childhood memories about another case, still unsolved—and that could be her undoing. Attention, fans: Gardiner is refreshing herself (and us?) by departing from her Evan Delaney series.

Grazer, Gigi Levangie. The After Wife. Ballantine. Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780345523990. $25; eISBN 9780345524010. CD: Random House Audio. POP FICTION
How does newly widowed Hannah discover that she can talk the dead? She’s standing in the backyard, sobbing over the death of her husband and asking “Why?” when the avocado tree laconically responds, “Why not?” Grazer is responsible for the screenplay Stepmom, plus a bunch of novels, including The Starter Wife, inspiration for the miniseries and then the regular series on the USA Network, which gives you a good feel for her work.

Hill, Gregory. East of Denver. Dutton. Jul. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780525952794. $25.95. POP FICTION
Suddenly caretaker of his senile father and the family farm in eastern Colorado, to which he has just returned, Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams links up with some old high school buddies and hatches a plan to rob the victimizing local bank. Do they really mean to go through with it? Dark comedy with an in-the-news edge; note that debut novelist Hill works for the University of Denver library.

Huston, Nancy. Infrared. Black Cat: Grove Atlantic. Jul. 2012. 272p. ISBN 9780802120274. pap. $14; eISBN 9780802194404. LITERARY
Having survived childhood and two bad marriages, cutting-edge photographer Rena Greenblatt finds herself trapped in Florence with her fading father and impossible stepmother, contemplating both Renaissance masterpieces and memories of dark, sensual moments in her past. Several of Canadian author Huston’s 11 novels are major award winners; Prix Femina winner Fault Lines is a personal favorite.

Joyce, Graham. Some Kind of Fairy Tale. Doubleday. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780385535786. $24.95. FANTASY
A girl named Tara disappears from her small English village, leaving behind a grieving but ultimately resigned family. Then 20 years later she returns—almost completely unchanged. Clearly, the work of a fantasist—Joyce has won both British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards—and comparisons are being made to Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child and S.J. Waton’s When I Go To Sleep. Note, too, that Joyce’s The Silent Land was a Stephen King Summer Pick in EW—and act accordingly.

Kava, Alex. Fireproof: A Maggie O’Dell Novel. Doubleday. Jul. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780385535519. $24.95. THRILLER
Called in to investigate a series of suspicious fires—the last having left someone dead—special agent Maggie O’Dell is being pursued by a reporter who wants to make her part of the story. Meanwhile, she’s getting the uncomfortable feeling that this arsonist is someone close to home. New York Times best-selling author Kava cops a six-city tour (Houston, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, and Minneapolis), plus giveaways on GoodReads and LibraryThing.

Lasser, Scott. Say Nice Things About Detroit. Norton. Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780393082999. $25.95. LITERARY
After his divorce and his son’s death, David Halpert seeks solace in a surprising place; he returns to his hometown, Detroit, which he left 25 years ago after graduating from high school. There he contends not only with the ongoing decay of the racially polarized town but the double shooting of an old high school girlfriend and her black half-brother. Evidence that you should consider purchasing: LJ said of Lasser’s 1999 debut, Battle Creek, “All public libraries will want this,” and of his recent The Year That Follows, “Highly recommended.”

Lawson, Mike. House Blood: A Joe DeMarco Thriller. Atlantic Monthly. Jul. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780802119940. $24; eISBN 9780802194541. THRILLER
Big pharma CEO Orson Mulray want to test a miracle drug, but human subjects—and autopsy results—are required. Sweeping that little complication under the table, he ropes in starry-eyed philanthropist Lizzie Warwick, but then her lobbyist in Washington, DC, uncovers the true nature of the plan and gets murdered for his troubles. Two years later, congressional fixer Joe DeMarco picks up the case, and things get really complicated. House Rules (2008) was a No. 1 Kindle best seller, and House Divided (2011) was an LJ best thriller of the year, so House Blood is well positioned.

Lee, Don. The Collective. Norton. Jul. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780393083217. $25.95.  LITERARY
In 1988, aspiring writer Eric Cho bonds with aspiring pianist Jessica Tsai and another writing hopeful, the gargantuanly talented Joshua Yoon, at Macalester College. Later, in Cambridge, MA, they form the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective, working their way through questions of love, art, idealism, and racism. Former Ploughshares editor Lee, who won the Sue Kaufman Prize for his first collection, Yellow, and both an Edgar and an American Book Award for Country of Origin, is a cracking good writer.

Mathews, Francine. Jack 1939. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781594487194. $26.95. THRILLER
President Roosevelt wants to send someone to Europe to figure out what Hitler really intends and to prevent German funds meant to ensure Roosevelt’s loss in the 1940 election from reaching America. His choice? John F. Kennedy, the son of America’s ambassador to Britain, who’s traveling the Continent to collect data for his senior thesis. Rumor has it that this is a fun, fast-paced, sexy thriller, and as Mathews was an intelligence analyst for the CIA in the 1990s the atmosphere should be authentic.

Piccirilli, Tom. The Last Kind Words. Bantam. Jun. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780553592481. $26; eISBN 9780553906356. THRILLER
Bram Stoker and International Thriller Awards winner Piccirilli breaks into hardcover with the story of Terrier Rand, who abandons the crime life and his small-time grifter family when brother Collie turns killer and wipes out an entire family and then some. (Yes, Rand family members are all named after dog breeds.) But he returns when Collie claims that he wasn’t responsible for one of those deaths. Lots of buzz and the start of a new series.

Slaughter, Karin. Criminal. Delacorte. Jul. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9780345528506. $27; eISBN 9780345528513. THRILLER
Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent would like finally to make his life more than just work. But no such luck with a crime from 1975 suddenly making trouble today. Slaughter can of course be lauded as a No. 1 international best-selling author and ITW Silver Bullet Award winner and the guiding light behind the Save the Libraries campaign. Buy multiples.

Steel, Danielle. Friends Forever. Delacorte. Jul. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780385343213. $28; eISBN 9780345533562.
This starts out YA—two girls and three boys meet and become fast friends at a fancy private school—then goes into classic Steel territory as the friends split up for college and are eventually divided forever by tragedy. Comparisons are being made to another Steel biggie, Sisters.

Suarez, Daniel. Kill Decision. Dutton. Jul. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780525952619. $26.95. THRILLER
What happens when the decision to kill in battle can suddenly be shifted from human to machine? America is under attack by drones programmed to seek out and execute targets, and Special Ops soldier Odin is trying to stop the carnage with the help of Linda McKinney, a scientist whose research on ant societies has been preempted by the unknown enemy to run the marauding drones. Techno-thriller author Suarez goes beyond the New York Times best-selling Daemon to get at some big issues.

Thayer, Nancy. Summer Breeze. Ballantine. Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780345528711. $26; eISBN 9780345533517. POP FICTION
Thayer abandons Nantucket for the Berkshires, where three young women spend a summer recalibrating their lives. Cottage-sitting Natalie is recovering from the breakup blues, Bella has returned home to care for her mom and the family business, and Morgan wants more out of life than mothering. Popular women’s fiction of the extended-best-sellers list type and a good beach, er, weekend-in-the-country read.

Walters, Minette. Innocent Victims: Two Novellas. Mysterious Pr: Grove Atlantic. Jul. 2012. 160p. ISBN 9780802126122. $23; eISBN 9780802194466. MYSTERY
In “Chickenfeed,” based on a notorious 1924 murder on an East Sussex chicken farm, Walters explores how Norman Thorne met Elsie, the girlfriend he reputedly killed. In “The Tinder Box,” everyone in town unites against the O’Riordan family when Patrick O’Riordan is accused of murder, though neighbor Siobhhan Lavenham proclaims his innocence. Then secrets emerge that make her start to wonder. Walters is a Gold Dagger and Edgar award winner (among other honors), these two works were both No. 1 best sellers in the UK, and you were wondering whether to purchase?

Warren, Dianne. Juliet in August. Amy Einhorn: Putnam. Jul. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780399157998. $25.95. LITERARY
Juliet, Saskatchewan. It’s at the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, but it’s a small town like any other, with folks quietly getting by as they recognize their limitations or learn to love again. Small-town dwellers and those who enjoy reading about them should identify with everyone and everything, except maybe the camel named Antoinette, lost somewhere in the hills. Winner of Canada’s highly regarded Governor General’s Award and hence well worth watching.

Young, Tom. The Renegades. Putnam. Jul. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780399158469. $25.95. THRILLER
Young follows up The Mullah’s Storm and Silent Enemy (not to mention nearly 4000 hours with the Air National Guard in Iraq and elsewhere) with another thriller drawing on Middle East tensions. Afghan Air Force adviser Lt. Col. Michael Parson and his interpreter, Sgt. Maj. Sophia Gold, are on hand when American troops hurry to deliver aid after an earthquake devastates Afghanistan. A Taliban splinter group called the Black Crescent is making the effort truly hell. Interesting to see where Young’s writing will go as our objectives in the region shift.

Ford, Richard. Canada. Ecco: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780061692048  $26.99; eISBN 9780062096807. lrg. prnt. LITERARY
Fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons feels pretty much abandoned; not only are his parents jailed for robbing a bank but his twin sister is humiliated enough to have run away. He’s rescued by a family friend, who sends him across the border from Montana to Canada, where he’s taken in by a charismatic fellow American who turns out to have a dark and dangerous side. In the short run, however, Dell takes advantage of Saskatchewan’s wide open spaces to remake himself. Switching publishers, the ever beautifully apt Ford gets a 200,000-copy first printing and a grand tour that includes Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Oxford/Jackson (MS), Portland (ME), Portland (OR), Raleigh/Durham, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Joinson, Suzanne. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar. Bloomsbury USA, dist. by Macmillan. Jun. 2012. 9781608198115. $26. LITERARY
Kashgar: an ancient city along the Silk Road, now in western China, and the destiny of missionaries Evangeline (Eva) and sister Lizzie in 1923. Lizzie is imbued, while Eva simply wants to get away from home and has cleverly contracted to write about her experiences. Meanwhile, in contemporary London, a young woman named Frieda contends with a Yemeni refuge she’s found sleeping outside her door and news that she’s inherited the contents of a flat whose occupant she doesn’t know. So far, this looks charming and dusky and imbued with a wonderful sense of history and place. Aside from first novelist, Joinson has two amazing-sounding jobs: she works in the literature department of the British Council, specializing in the Middle East, North Africa, and China, and she is writer in residence at the UK’s Shoreham Airport. That alone makes this book sound promising, but let us not forget that Bloomsbury is the publisher that brought you this year’s National Book Award winner, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. 

Pratchett, Terry & Stephen Baxter. The Long Earth. Harper: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780062067753. $25.99; eISBN 9780062067760. SF
Big news: Discworld master Pratchett is here creating a new world for the first time in three decades, a series of parallel earths called the Long Earth. World-class misanthrope Larry Lynsey has relocated to the Long Earth’s farthest reaches; he’s the only person around for ten planets. Unfortunately, he’s got visitors—two lost souls who took a wrong turn a few stars back—and Larry is going to have to get rid of them. Pratchett keeps going strong—last October’s Snuff debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best sellers list, his highest spot there ever—and there’s a 75,000-copy first printing. Essential wherever sf is read.

Brinkley, Douglas. Cronkite. Harper: HarperCollins. Jun. 2012. 752p. ISBN 9780061374265. $34.99; eISBN 9780062196637. lrg. prnt. BIOGRAPHY
We all think we know Walter Cronkite, consummate journalist and “the most trusted man in America,” as he was often called. But, having dug into the just opened Cronkite Archive at the University of Texas at Austin and interviewed over 200 people, from Morley Safer to Katie Couric, Brinkley should tell us much more. This one’s big; with a one-day laydown on 5/29, a 250,000-copy first printing, and a seven-city tour to Austin, Boston, Dallas, Houston, New York, Philadelphia ,and Washington, DC.

Maraniss, David. Barack Obama: The Story. S. & S. Jun. 2012. 608p. ISBN 9781439160404. $32.50. BIOGRAPHY
So we’ve read a lot about President Obama lately—David Remnick’s The Bridge came out just last year. But Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize–winning associate editor of the Washington Post and author of books on subjects ranging from Bill Clinton to the 1960 Rome Olympics, is a force to be reckoned with. Maraniss examines not simply what Obama has accomplished but the forces that have shaped him, going back generations. Lots of interviews, including with the President himself. Expect a big boom.

du Plessix Gray, Francine. The Queen’s Lover. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Jun. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781594203374. $25.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. LITERARY
This queen is Marie Antoinette, and her lover is Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen, though they don’t initially become intimate when they meet at a masked ball in 1774 and the 19-year-old Marie Antoinette is but a dauphine, married to the man who would become Louis XVI. Fersen becomes close to the entire royal family, learning their secrets, then, after enlisting in the cause of the American Revolution, returns to France’s own bloody upheaval. The rigorous and penetrating du Plessix Gray should do for Louis XVI’s France would Hillary Mantel did for Henry VIII in Wolf  Hall, that is, make real art, distinctively her own, of an already fascinating time, place, and cast of characters.

Lanchester, John. Capital: A Novel. Norton. Jun. 2012. 544p. ISBN 9780393082074. $26.95. LITERARY
It’s 2008, and even as the economy shudders and falls, something sinister is happening on Pepys Road, London. The residents are an interesting mix—a banker and his greedy wife, an older woman terminally ill with cancer and her graffiti-artist son, Pakistani shop owners, refugees, a soccer star, and more—and they’re all getting postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” What that is, no one knows, but the ominousness fits perfectly with the anxiety of society at large, even as the novel chronicles the small, personal dramas of each household. Lanchester’s award-winning novels (e.g., The Debt of Pleasure) show him to have a sharp eye for social detail, and this novel should serve well to capture our aching times.

Steele, Jon. The Watchers. Blue Rider: Penguin Group (USA). Jun. 2012. 560p. ISBN 9780399158742. $26.95. THRILLER
Corpses bearing the marks of torture are showing up around Lausanne Cathedral, where an innocent named Marc Rochat serves as le guet—the man who rings out the hour from the church’s belfry. Katherine Taylor, a high-priced American call girl, lives just across the square. Soon they encounter a British private eye named Jay Harper who’s been sent to investigate the murders—by whom he cannot remember, though he does seem to remember the Latin he never knew that he knew. In this atmospheric but (at first glance) sharply written story—called a mystical noir-thriller by the publisher, written in the spirit of recent works by Danielle Trussoni and Anne Rice—stone angels adorn the cathedral, but real angels, tumbled from heaven, may be the cause of the trouble. A first novel (and first in a series) from Steele, for years a master cameraman for Independent Television News and author of War Junkie, an underground classic; really smart work for serious thriller readers.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Dream of the Celt. Farrar. Jun. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780374143466. $28. LITERARY FICTION
A book from Nobel prize winner Vargas Llosa is always a treat, and this one is also something of a surprise. His subject is Irish nationalist Robert Casement, who in 1916 was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had fought to improve the lives of oppressed people worldwide, from the Belgian Congo to the Amazon, but when he began highlighting injustices closer to home his fate was sealed. Casement’s legacy is not well known, and Vargas Llosa resurrects him—but in fictional form, allowing for a deeper exploration of motive and emotion. Obviously for all literary readers.

Collins, Gail. As Texas Goes…: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda. Norton. Jun. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780871404077. $25.95. POLITICS
“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas anymore.” That truth is delivered by the ever-perceptive Collins, New York Times columnist and best-selling author (When Everything Changed), who always thought of the country as two liberal coasts flanking a Republican heartland (she herself is from Ohio). Lately, she has come to understand that the country’s entire political agenda has been set by Texas, where a conservative ideology supporting deregulation, lowered environmental protections, tax cuts, and a states’ rights approach has been championed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and now Rick Perry. To understand what’s going on with the nation, we need to look at Texas—exactly what the acerbically smart Collins does. All set to raise both cheers and hackles; get it. 

McLane, Maureen N. My Poets. Farrar. Jun. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780374217495. $25. MEMOIR/LITERATURE
The author of two collections (2010’s World Enough was an LJ Best Poetry Book), McLane writes musically astute lines that deliver a sharp and gratifying sense of story, character, or place; her poems are wonderful to dwell in. So it’s a delight to learn that she’s offering this book, not a study of poetry but of how certain poets have shaped her writing, her thinking, her very life. She thus presents her own story and literary exegesis as two sides of the same bright coin, and we meet her as we meet Chaucer, Shelley, Louise Glück, and more. I’m expecting a lot of this book.