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Fiction
new in hardcover,
2004 (click book covers for complete blurb)
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The Preservationist
David Maine. St. Martin's Press: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN:
0312328478. 240 pages. David
Maine gives an old wet story a new spicy twist, in this novel that re-imagines
the epic adventures of Noah and the Ark. With help from his wife, sons, and remarkably resourceful daughters-in-law, Noah builds his boat and stuffs it full of all things that walk, crawl, swim, and fly upon the earth. |
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An Almost Perfect Moment
Binnie
Kirshenbaum. HarperCollins: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 0060520868. 288 pages. Set in Brooklyn "on the cusp of the great age of Disco," Kirshenbaum's story features a pair of unusual star-crossed lovers: sixteen-year-old Valentine Kessler and her socially-challenged math teacher John Wosileski.
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Cheat and Charmer
Elizabeth
Frank. Random House: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 1400060915. 560 pages. “Twenty-five years in the making, a first
novel that has already been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Last
Tycoon, Cheat and Charmer is
certain to be one of the most admired literary debates of the season.” We're happy to say that we concur. |
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Jonathan Strange and Mr.
Norrell
Susanna
Clarke. Bloomsbury: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 1582344167. 800 pages. At a whopping 782 pages, this novel might seem scary, but fear not, because those pages go whipping by. The year is 1806 and things look grim, both for the English
people as a whole and for the ragged bunch of Englishmen who persist in calling
themselves magicians. |
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Dancing with Einstein
Kate
Wenner. Simon & Schuster: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 0743251644. 223 pages. A
wonderful story of a young woman who cheats on her shrink with another
therapist. But polygamatherapist Marea
Hoffman isn’t stopping there. When
fate drops a third, then a fourth psychologist into her lap, she decides to
go for all the help she can. |
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Girls in Trouble
Caroline
Leavitt. St. Martin's Press: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 0312271220. 368 pages. Yes,
folks, we’re talking about girls in the very oldest kind of trouble. Sara is sixteen and pregnant, but manages
to talk herself into the idea that she isn’t.
For the immediate future, all she’s worried about is the disappearance
of her once-devoted boyfriend. |
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Fiction
new in paperback,
2003-2004
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The Colour
Rose
Tremain. Picador: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312423101. 400 pages. If Rose
Tremain’s The Colour doesn’t become
a bestseller and a book group classic, it will be a crying shame. This historical
novel of the gold rush in 19-century New Zealand has it all—a
terrific cast of multi-faceted characters, a heart-racing pulse of plot, an
exotically unfamiliar setting, and, of course, “the colour.” |
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Drop City
T.C. Boyle. Penguin: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0142003808. 512 pages. In Drop City, Boyle is back
at what he does best, exploring the crash of cultures that takes place when
two very different groups of people try to make a home in the same smallish
place. |
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The Known
World
Edward P. Jones. HarperCollins: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0060557559. 416
pages. Inspired by his own research into a relatively overlooked phenomena in
America’s pre-Civil War historical past,
Edward P. Jones has unleashed a powerful but poignant punch to the gut of our
collective ideas about the dirty little misfortune of a once-very-popular
industry. |
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What
Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal) Zoe
Heller. Picador: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312421990. 272 pages. In present-day England, schoolteacher Barbara Covett is
leading a sanctimonious and thus not-surprisingly-solitary life (her last
close friend has deserted her under mysterious circumstances). But then she bonds with new art teacher
Sheba Hart. |
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The
Bride of Catastrophe
Heidi Jon Schmidt. Picador: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 031242342X. 432 pages. Heroine-at-a-loss
Beatrice Wolfe grows up in a decidedly dysfunctional family scratching out a
living on a small farm in Connecticut - whose main agricultural concern
seems to be an unsuccessful ping-pong factory. |
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The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri. Houghton Mifflin: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0618485228. 304
pages. In The
Namesake, Lahiri continues to explore and enrich the themes that made her
short story collection an international favorite:
“the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of
assimilation, and most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.” |
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No
Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill
Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again (a Symphonic Novel). Edgardo
Vega Yunqué. Picador: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312424027. 816 pages. No
matter how much you may fear asking your local librarian or book seller to
find this book for you—quick, name that title in one breath!—you don’t want
to be responsible for Bill Bailey never coming home again, now do you? |
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Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Lorrie Moore. Vintage: 2004 (paperback reprint). ISBN: 1400033829. 160 pages. As near as we can get to
explaining the sheer magic of Moore’s writing, it has something and
everything to do with the way she combines such lovely lyrical phrases with
such glib, merciless humor. The heroine of The Frog Hospital is one lucky
soul, a grown woman who is looking back with bittersweet nostalgia for the
wildness of her youth. |
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The
Night Country
Stewart O'Nan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312424078.
240 pages. Three of the novel’s major
characters are ghosts, the restless spirits of three teens who died in a
fatal encounter between a speeding car and a motionless tree. These weary, wise-cracking ghosts spend the
majority of their time with the three living people who survived the
crash. |
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Some
Lighter Fare
fiction and non-fiction
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I
Love You Like a Tomato
Marie Giordano. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2004 (paperback). ISBN:
0312424078. 240 pages. ChiChi Maggiordino has made the treacherous
journey from Italy to America with her mother, grandmother, and very sick
little brother Marco. As ChiChi
grows up in 1950s America, she begins fervent quest to find her place in a foreign
culture. |
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Food
and Loathing
Betsy Lerner. Simon & Schuster: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 074325550X. 290
pages. Betsy Lerner serves up some truly excellent grub on her life thus far,
a life that, as far back as she can remember, has been measured in food
units, fad diets, secret binges, and size 8 jeans nestling hopefully but
reproachfully in the back of her closet.
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Bringing
Down the House
Ben Mezrich. Simon & Schuster: 2003 (paperback). ISBN: 0743249992. 259
pages. Ben Mezrich’s hero is a real-life card
counter, an M.I.T. undergraduate who discovers that a great head for numbers
can take him out of the dorm room and into the luxurious suites of the high-roller. |
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New in
Sports
biography and fiction
recommended by our in-house insane
sports fan, David Moore
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Caddy
for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story
John Feinstein. Little, Brown: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 0316777889. 320 pages. On one fine
afternoon in June of 2003, Olympia Fields saw an affirmation of the depth of
the human spirit. Press room volunteer Steve Malchow said of that day: “All
my years in the business, I’ve never seen reporters crying. They did it that day and I don’t think one
of them was ashamed to do it.” |
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4th
& Fixed
Reggie Rivers. Sourcebooks: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 1402202199. 368 pages. In this first novel by former Denver
Broncos fullback Reggie Rivers, we have the dubious pleasure of meeting with
Jonathon Kinneson, the not-quite-as-rich-as-he-claims-to-be new owner of the
San Antonio Stallions, a very mediocre NFL team. |
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