A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Michael Dorris has crafted a fierce saga of three generations of Indian women, beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of kinship. Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women: fifteen-year-old part-black Rayona; her American Indian mother, Christine, consumed by tenderness and resentment toward those she loves; and the fierce and mysterious Ida, mother and grandmother whose haunting secrets, betrayals, and dreams echo through the years, braiding together the strands of the shared past. -- Publisher's description.


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This is Where I Leave You

The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman clan has congregated in years. There is, however, one conspicuous absence: Judd's wife, Jen, whose affair with his radio- shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the demise of his father and his marriage, Judd joins his dysfunctional family as they reluctantly sit shiva-and spend seven days and nights under the same roof. The week quickly spins out of control as longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed and old passions are reawakened. Then Jen delivers the clincher: she's pregnant.

This Is Where I Leave You is Jonathan Tropper's most accomplished work to date, and a riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind-whether we like it or not.-- from the Publisher

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Personal History of Rachel Dupree

Enamored of Isaac DuPree (the son of her employer) and desperate for a life beyond that of boardinghouse cook in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district, Rachel accepts a deal proffered by Isaac: join him in settling 160 acres of land offered by the Homestead Act in the wilds of South Dakota. She heads off to the aptly named Badlands in a bargained marriage of at least one year. Fourteen years later, she looks back over her life, the dreams and longing of a young woman versus the harsh reality of a wife and mother living in an unforgiving territory. After months of drought, the land, the animals, and her children are parched and on the brink. She herself is on the brink, pregnant again and coping with Isaac’s obsession with the land, the cruel demands on their five young children, and the isolation of being one of the few black families in the territory. A shimmering novel of the sacrifice, hardship, and determination of a black family in the early-twentieth-century settlement of the West. --Vanessa Bush, Booklist


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A Good Day's Work (Iowa Connection)

Despite beautiful landscapes and bountiful harvests, farming is hard work and always has been. The Great Depression in rural America, which began in the 1920s and lasted until World War II, made it still harder. At a time when tractors were replacing horses and the family farm was giving way to the large, single-crop enterprise, the struggle to survive and modernize in a period of economic scarcity was especially sharp. 

In A Good Day's Work, Dwight Hoover, who grew up on an Iowa farm in this era, recalls the events of day-to-day life on a single farm, offering detailed descriptions of daily work in each of the year's four seasons. A Good Day's Work is a fascinating if grim reminder of what it was like to be a child with adult responsibilities. Mr. Hoover's unusual memoir recalls the rough edges as well as the happy moments of rural life. It is an honest re-creation of a world that was vanishing. -- Publisher's description

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Secret Daughter: A Mixed Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away

June Cross was born in 1954 to Norma Booth, a glamorous, aspiring white actress, and James "Stump" Cross, a well-known black comedian. Sent by her mother to be raised by black friends when she was four years old and could no longer "pass" as white, June was plunged into the pain and confusion of a family divided by race.  Secret Daughter tells her story of survival. It traces June's astonishing discoveries about her mother and about her own fierce determination to thrive.  This is an inspiring testimony to the endurance of love between mother and daughter, and between a child and her adoptive parents.  It is also a moving story of the power of community. -- From the Cover 

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Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

When lightning strikes, lives are changed.

BECCA

On a sunny day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight-year-old Becca Burke was struck by lightning. No one believed her—not her philandering father or her drunk, love-sick mother—not even when her watch kept losing time and a spooky halo of light appeared overhead in photographs. Becca was struck again when she was sixteen. She survived, but over time she would learn that outsmarting lightning was the least of her concerns.

BUCKLEY

In rural Arkansas, Buckley R. Pitank’s world seemed plagued by disaster. Ashamed but protective of his obese mother, fearful of his scathing grandmother, and always running from bullies (including his pseudo-evangelical stepfather), he needed a miracle to set him free. At thirteen years old, Buckley witnessed a lightning strike that would change everything.

Now an art student in New York City, Becca Burke is a gifted but tortured painter who strives to recapture the intensity of her lightning-strike memories on canvas. On the night of her first gallery opening, a stranger appears and is captivated by her art. Who is this odd young man with whom she shares a mysterious connection?

When Buckley and Becca finally meet, neither is prepared for the charge of emotions—or for the perilous event that will bring them even closer to one another, and to the families they’ve been running from for as long as they can remember.

Crackling with atmosphere and eccentric characters, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors explores the magic of nature and the power of redemption in a novel as beautiful and unpredictable as lightning itself. -- From the Hardcover edition.


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Breaking Clean

In this extraordinary literary debut third-generation homesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on the prairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as the landscape.

On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle and snakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastating prairie fires. She also grew up with a set of rules and roles prescribed to her sex long before she was born, a chafing set of strictures she eventually had no choice but to flee, taking along three children and leaving behind a confused husband and the only life she’d ever known. Gritty, lyrical, unsentimental and wise, Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the West and powerful enough to break them down.-- from the Publisher

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Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home (Iowa connection)

Weary from the journalistic treadmill of "going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests" and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again. Bauer's book is neither a wistful nostalgia about returning to a simpler time and place nor a patronizing look at those who never leave the town in which they were born. What emerges is an unsentimental yet loving account of life in the Midwest. Not just a portrait of Prairie City, Iowa, but of everyone's small town, everywhere. -- Publisher's description

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The Other

From the author of the best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars, a dazzling novel about youth and idealism, adulthood and its compromises, and two powerfully different visions of what it means to live a good life.

John William Barry has inherited the pedigree—and wealth—of two of Seattle’s elite families; Neil Countryman is blue-collar Irish. Nevertheless, when the two boys meet in 1972 at age sixteen, they’re brought together by what they have in common: a fierce intensity and a love of the outdoors that takes them, together and often, into Washington’s remote backcountry, where they must rely on their wits—and each other—to survive.

Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted schoolteacher and family man. But John William makes a radically different choice, dropping out of college and moving deep into the woods, convinced that it is the only way to live without hypocrisy. When John William enlists Neil to help him disappear completely, Neil finds himself drawn into a web of secrets and often agonizing responsibility, deceit, and tragedy—one that will finally break open with a wholly unexpected, life-altering revelation.

Riveting, deeply humane, The Other is David Guterson’s most brilliant and provocative novel to date.  -- from the Publisher


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Highland Fling

After a fight with her boyfriend, a business trip to Scotland is the perfect diversion for Jenny Porter, who works as a virtual assistant for a financial executive. Dispatched to assess a failing textile mill, Jenny instead finds herself determined to save it at any cost after befriending its charming employees. That cost might just be her sanity as she stretches her resources, patience, and compassion to the outer limits.

As she gets to know the colorful Dalmain clan, Jenny just can't say no when asked to help run a mobile food stand, save the family business, put an overbearing matriarch in her place, rekindle an old romance, or throw a dinner party for sixteen on short notice. Then there's the problem of being attracted to the dashing yet abrasive Ross Grant, who has a way of showing up just when things seem almost sane and manageable.

The majestic Scottish highlands, covered in purple heather and dotted with sheep and llamas, provide a dramatic backdrop while Jenny tries to pull everything together in time to save the mill and figure out her increasingly complicated personal life, in this delightful, romantic romp.-- From the Publisher


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The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

"The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his."

Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world. -- from the Publisher

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13 Steps Down

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's landlady, Gwedolen Chawcer is equally reclusive - living her life through her library of books. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.-- from the Publisher


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Monster Island

It's one month after a global disaster. The most "developed" nations of the world have fallen to the shambling zombie masses. Only a few pockets of humanity survive — in places rife with high-powered weaponry, such as Somalia. In New York City, the dead walk the streets, driven by an insatiable hunger for all things living. One amongst them is different; though he shares their appetites he has retained his human intelligence. Alone among the mindless zombies, Gary Fleck is an eyewitness to the end of the world — and perhaps the evil genius behind it all. From the other side of the planet, a small but heavily-armed group of schoolgirls-turned-soldiers has come in search of desperately needed medicine. Dekalb, a former United Nations weapons inspector, leads them as their local guide. Ayaan, a crack shot at the age of sixteen, will stop at nothing to complete her mission. They think they are prepared for anything. On Monster Island they will find that there is something worse even than being undead, as Gary learns the true price of survival.-- Publisher's description


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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness."

"My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation. - from the Publisher

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Villisca: True Account of the Unsolved Murder that Stunned the Nation

In 1912 what was arguably the most violent crime, the darkest mystery, in Midwest history took place. Law enforcement officers encountered a scene of unimagined violence: eight victims, six of them children, bludgeoned to death with an ax while they slept. Everywhere there were clues. But inexperienced investigators failed, and private detectives took over. When Detective James Newton Wilkerson charged that a respected state senator had been motivated to the unthinkable by the promiscuity of his daughter-in-law, the community was drawn into a bitter and accelerating struggle between powerful men. And then a deranged and perverted minister confessed. . . -- Publisher description

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The Year that Follows

The story of a woman’s search for her brother’s lost son, orphaned in the wake of his sudden death, drives Scott Lasser’s riveting new novel--a work of staggering economy and momentum about a woman’s quest and a family’s longing for wholeness and completion.

Cat is a single mother living in Detroit when her brother is killed in New York, and she sets off in search of his child. Her search is still underway when she gets a call from her father. Sam is eighty, still carrying the weight of a secret he has kept from Cat all her life. He asks Cat to visit him in California, intending to make his peace. Cat’s journey—toward her father, and her brother’s infant son—and Sam’s journey toward his daughter, his lost son, and a new relationship to both his future and his past—are woven into this superbly realized novel about families, and the mysteries and ambiguities that inhere in our most primal relations. The result is a deeply stirring work that explores the complexities of home and heritage, and the bonds which even death is powerless to diminish. -- from the author's site.

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Daniel isn't Talking

A fearless, unsentimental novel about a mother's devotion to her autistic child, by the bestselling author of Dying Young. Simultaneous international publication. Smart, resilient, engaged with the world, Melanie Marsh has already weathered the suicide of her father, the death of her mother, and the loss of her lover, but she has not lost the thrill of adventure or her wry sense of humour.

When she comes to England to study, Melanie meets Stephen, a financial analyst, and is drawn immediately to his strong presence. Marriage and family quickly follow, as well as a certain happiness, until Melanie's worst suspicions are confirmed about their three-year-old son, Daniel. Daniel has autism and the prognosis is grim. Frustrated by the limits of the medical system, Melanie takes Daniel's care into her own hands and devotes all she has to working with him. Her marriage soon begins to falter and Stephen eventually turns to a former lover. It is at about this time that she seeks out Andy O'Connor, an alternative therapist whose controversial approach to autism she's heard something about.

It is Andy's creativity, his patience and caring, that enable her son's progress, and for the first time, hope, in many forms, takes root. Passionate, moving, heartbreakingly real, Marti Leimbach's new novel reveals a mother's desperation and the capacities of love, demonstrating once again Leimbach's gift for storytelling and for portraying characters we come to care deeply about -- From the Hardcover edition

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Funny Cide

In 2003, he became "the people's horse," the unheralded New York- bred gelding who-in a time of war and economic jitters-inspired a nation by knocking off the champions and their multimillionaire owners and sweeping to the brink of the Triple Crown. Trained by a journeyman who had been knocking around racing for more than thirty years, ridden by a hard-luck jockey, and owned by a tiny stable founded by a band of high school buddies from Sackets Harbor, NY (pop: 1,386), who tossed in a few thousand dollars each and decided to follow their dream, Funny Cide became a blue-collar hero with a bit, his story crammed with colorful characters-only one of which happened to be a horse. 



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The Society

At the headquarters of Boston’s Eastern Quality Health, the wealthy and powerful CEO is brutally murdered. She’s not the first to die - nor the last. A vicious serial killer is on the loose and the victims have one thing in common: they are all high-profile executives in the managed care industry.

Dr. Will Grant is an overworked and highly dedicated surgeon. He has experienced firsthand the outrages of a system that cares more about the bottom line than about the life-and-death issues of patients. As a member of the Hippocrates Society, Will seeks to reclaim the profession of medicine from the hundreds of companies profiting wildly by controlling the decisions that affect the delivery of care. But the doctor’s determination has attracted a dangerous zealot who will stop at nothing to make Will his ally. Soon Will is both a suspect and a victim, a pawn in a deadly endgame. Then, in one horrible moment, Will’s professional and personal worlds are destroyed and his very life placed in peril. 

Rookie detective Patty Moriarity is in danger of being removed from her first big case - the managed care killings. To save her career, she has no choice but to risk trusting Will, knowing he may well be the killer she is hunting. Together they have little to go on except the knowledge that the assassin is vengeful, cunning, ruthless - and may not be working alone. That - and a cryptic message that grows longer with each murder: a message Grant and Moriarity must decipher if they don’t want to be the next victims.-- from the publisher

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Heart Shaped Box

Sooner or later, the dead catch up . . . Judas Coyne was a collector. The bizarre, the uncanny, the grotesque. A cookbook for cannibals. A used hangman's noose. A snuff film. Many of these objects were gifts from the black-clad fans who made his metal band a legend and made him rich. But not all. When his personal assistant told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet, Jude knew he had to have it for his private collection, didn't think twice. He should have. Jude has spent a lifetime evading ghosts -- of an abusive father, of the bandmates he betrayed, of Anna, the suicidal girl he loved and abandoned. But this spirit is different. This one means to chase him to the edge of sanity. His new acquisition -- delivered to his doorstep in a black heart-shaped box -- is the restless soul of Anna's vengeful stepdaddy. Craddock McDermott swore he would settle with Jude for ruining his daughter's life. Soon, everywhere Jude turns, Craddock is there: behind the bedroom door; in Jude's restored vintage Mustang; outside his window; on his widescreen TV. Waiting -- with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand. If ever there was a case of caveat emptor, this is it . . . -- from the Publisher

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