FICTION
Released: July 17, 2012
"Grim indeed, yet eloquent and utterly compelling."
Independently intelligible sequel to the dark fantasy
Bitter Seeds (2010), something like a cross between the devious, character-driven spy fiction of early John le Carré and the mad science fantasy of the X-Men.
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FICTION
Released: July 17, 2012
"A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending. "
Sometimes things just don't work out, no matter how hard we wish they would. But there's irony, so we have that going for us. Right?
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FICTION
Released: July 31, 2012
"Often lyrical, sometimes a bit ponderous: a painful, personal record of Cambodia's holocaust."
Ratner's avowedly autobiographical first novel describes her family's travails during the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 7, 2012
"A compulsively readable novel about brothers on opposite sides of life."
Friday Night Lights meets
In Cold Blood in this powerful tale of distant brothers whose torment over the murder of their sister when they were teens is compounded by the murder of another targeted teenage girl--a killing one of the brothers is determined to avenge even if that means committing murder himself.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 7, 2012
"World War II Germany may be familiar ground, but Gillham's novel—vividly cinematic yet subtle and full of moral ambiguity, not to mention riveting characters—is as impossible to put down as it is to forget."
In his debut about 1943 Berlin, Gillham uses elements common to the many previous movies and books about World War II—from vicious Nazis to black marketeers to Jewish children hiding in attics to beautiful blond German women hiding their sexuality inside drab coats—yet manages to make the story fresh.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 7, 2012
"A flawlessly assembled thriller."
In the strange, devastating aftermath of Gray Wednesday, when the Earth's poles suddenly switched, the world is in even greater chaos, climatic distress and financial ruin than it is now.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 7, 2012
"Unrelenting in its anger, pain and sorrow, but hard to put down."
The three women personifying the complicated relationship between France and Senegal in French-born NDiaye's tripartite novel, winner of France's Prix Concourt in 2009, need all the strength they can muster as they struggle to survive.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 14, 2012
"Although their fates are known, Gregory creates suspense by raising intriguing questions about whether her characters will transcend their historical reputations."
The latest of Gregory's Cousins' War series debunks--mostly--the disparaging myths surrounding Richard III and his marriage to Anne Neville.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 14, 2012
"For those who have an affinity for metaphysical fiction written with a surgeon's precision, this collection will spur readers to seek out everything else by its author."
Beneath the surface placidity of Swiss life, undercurrents of spiritual turmoil and existential despair charge this powerful collection of provocative stories.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 14, 2012
"Like Mary Cassatt, Lippman studies families with a different eye than her male contemporaries, showing the heartbreaking complexity of life with those you love."
Lippman (
The Most Dangerous Thing, 2011, etc.), who specializes in tales of feckless parents and their luckless kids, puts a madam at the center of her latest dysfunctional family.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 21, 2012
"George's all-too-familiar story is so richly observed, subtly characterized, precisely written--her syncopated paragraphs are a special delight--and successful in its avoidance of genre clichés that you'd swear you were reading the first police procedural ever written."
George's Pittsburgh cops (
Hideout, 2011, etc.) investigate a robbery-murder that's a lot less routine and more sordid than it looks.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 21, 2012
"Superb work from an abundantly gifted young writer."
Set in early-20th-century Washington state, Coplin's majestic debut follows a makeshift family through two tragic decades.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 21, 2012
"A fine thriller that succeeds on every level. How often do you read about a hero who just wants to die in peace?"
FICTION
Released: Aug. 24, 2012
"Nobel Peace Prize winner Wiesel continues to remind us of the brilliant possibilities of the philosophical and political novel. "
Wiesel takes us on a journey through dream, memory and especially storytelling in his latest novel, which concerns Shaltiel Feigenberg, who in 1975, is captured and imprisoned for 80 hours in a basement by two captors.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 4, 2012
"Grace and empathy infuse this melancholy landscape of complex loyalties enfolded by brutal history, creating a novel of peculiar, mysterious, tragic beauty."
The unexpected relationship between a war-scarred woman and an exiled gardener leads to a journey through remorse to a kind of peace.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 4, 2012
"Stern weaves an intricate and clever web of stories steeped in both sacred and mundane Jewish culture."
"Mischief" is indeed the operative term here, for Stern's characters are subtle, slyly humorous and at times poignant.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 11, 2012
"Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader. "
FICTION
Released: Sept. 11, 2012
"The evocation of "Useless, by James Joyce" attests to the humor and ambition of the novel, as if this were a Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track."
An end-of-an-era epic celebrating the bygone glories of vinyl records, comic-book heroes and blaxploitation flicks in a world gone digital.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 11, 2012
"Not as ambitious as Díaz's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and morally challenging."
From the author of
Drown (1996), more tales of Dominican life in the cold, unwelcoming United States.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 11, 2012
"A great cure for the blues, especially for anyone who might feel bad about growing older."
