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New Fiction List

___   The Air Between Us
By Deborah Johnson
Racial segregation in a small 1950s Mississippi community is brought into question in the aftermath of an apparent hunting accident, an event that also tests the views of two prominent physicians.  A first novel.

___   Atomic Lobster
By Tim Dorsey
Embarking on a new adventure off the coast of the Sunshine State, psychopath Serge A. Storms and his drug-addled sidekick find themselves surrounded by atypical retirees and drug dealers while working to outmaneuver federal agents and a fugitive murderer.

___   Beginner’s Greek
By James Collins
Falling hopelessly in love with a woman whose contact information he loses, Peter Russell perpetuates a series of events involving a woman’s complicated marriage to a man in love with someone else, a man’s debauchery, and an evil boss.

___   Bleeding Kansas
By Sara Paretsky
The pious late-twentieth-century descendants of anti-slavery emigrants worry about maintaining religious superiority over a rival family at the same time they launch an active harassment campaign against a Wiccan newcomer, an effort that is challenged by a young man’s military service, and the birth of a cow with promising tendencies.

___   The Blue Star
By Tony Earley
This sequel to Jim the Boy finds a teenage Jim falling in love with classmate Crissie Steppe, whose boyfriend has joined the Navy on the eve of World War II, and whom Jim vows to win over in the young soldier’s absence, until the sobering realities of war bring all of them a new perspective. (Historical Fiction)

___   Certain Girls
By Jennifer Weiner
Weiner’s sequel to the best-selling Good in Bed takes place thirteen years later, only to find Cannie Shapiro no longer famous.  Now she’s writing science fiction under a pen name, raising her teenage daughter, and dealing with her husband’s request to have a second child – using Cannie’s flashy sister as a surrogate mother!

___   Christ the Lord:  The Road to Cana
By Anne Rice
The second volume in the author’s series of novels chronicling the life of Christ begins prior to his baptism in the Jordan River and concludes with the miracle at Cana, as he leaves his everyday life in Nazareth to confront his destiny, the Devil’s temptations, and the call to be Israel’s liberator from Roman occupation. (Historical Fiction)

___   Conception
By Kalisha Buckhanon
Following in her single mother’s footsteps when she becomes pregnant by an older man who promptly abandons her, fifteen-year-old Shivana believes that all black women fall into the same trap -- until she meets Rasul, a teenager with problems of his own -- with whom she forges a relationship that follows them into adulthood.

___   The Cure for the Modern Life
By Lisa Tucker
Having been in love, now Matthew and Amelia are at war with each other.  He’s a high-powered pharmaceutical executive, and she’s an industry watchdog, dedicated to medical ethics.  Once engaged to be married, now the only thing Matthew and Amelia engage in is a war of words. When a ten-year-old homeless boy pleads for help for his three-year-old sister, Matthew and Amelia finally discover what truly matters in life.

___   Deep Dish
By Mary Kay Andrews
Television chef Gina Foxton is thwarted in her efforts to find a prestigious job on a TV cooking channel by her philandering boyfriend, flaky sister, and meddling mother, not to mention her inexplicable attraction to a rival chef — a redneck with an overbearing personality.

___   Dreamers of the Day
By Mary Doria Russell
In the wake of the Great War and the devastating influenza pandemic of 1919, forty-year-old Ohio schoolteacher Agnes Shanklin decides to use her inheritance to take a trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land, where she meets T. E. Lawrence and Kal Weilbacher, a charming German spy with an intense interest in Lawrence. (Historical Fiction)

___   Duma Key
By Stephen King
Renting a house on an eerily undeveloped stretch of the Florida coast after suffering a crippling accident and ending his marriage, construction millionaire Edgar Freemantle obsessively creates works of art that lead him to discover unsettling elements emanating from his landlady’s enigmatic family history.

___   Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat
By Adam Langer
After the death of his landlord, with whom he had a handshake agreement rather than an actual lease, clarinetist Ike Morphy, his dog Herbie Mann, and the pair of pigeons roosting on his air conditioner, are about to be evicted by the landlord’s son, who sees only the money he can make in Manhattan’s lucrative real-estate market.

___   The Expeditions
By Karl Iagnemma
In 1844, in the frontier town of Detroit, teenage runaway Elisha Stone sends a letter to his invalid mother in New England after he joins a surveying expedition into the unmapped wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  However, his now widowed minister father, whose aloofness Elisha had fled, reads the letter instead and sets out on his own journey to find his son.

___   Firefly Lane
By Kristin Hannah
Inseparable best friends Kate and Tully, two young women who, despite their very different lives, have vowed to be there for each other forever, have been true to their promise for thirty years, until events and choices in their lives tear them apart.

___   Genghis: Lords of the Bow
By Conn Iggulden
A sequel to Genghis:  Birth of an Empire continues the story of the powerful leader as he embarks on a bold new quest to conquer the mighty Chin Empire, leaving a trail of devastation behind as he makes his way to Yenking, capital of the empire, and prepares to lay siege to the city and starve it into submission. (Historical Fiction)

___   The German Bride
By Joanna Hershon
In 1865, a secret affair with the artist hired by her German Jewish father to paint his daughters’ portraits forces Eva into a quick marriage and drives her out of Berlin to seek a new life on the frontier of the American Southwest, but the ghosts of the past follow her across the Atlantic and along the Santa Fe Trail, until she can confront the past and build a new future. (Historical Fiction)

___   Hard Trail to Follow
By Elmer Kelton
In the seventh volume in the popular Texas Ranger series, former Texas Ranger Andy “Badger Boy” Pickard leaves his fiancee’s north central Texas farm to pursue Luther Cordell, the outlaw ringleader he believes responsible for the death of his friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing.

___   His Illegal Self
By Peter Carey
Brought up in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, Che, a precocious seven-year-old boy, yearns for his parents, radical activists wanted by the FBI, until one afternoon, when a woman claiming to be his mother arrives to help him escape, and sends him on a bizarre odyssey that leads him to confront his life, his family, and his identity.

___   Home School
By Charles Webb
Eleven years after Benjamin Braddock rescues Elaine from an unwanted marriage, the couple is living in Westchester with their two sons, whom they are educating at home.  When the local school board objects to their unconventional educational methods, they are forced to enlist the help of Benjamin’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Robinson.  Yes, this is billed as the sequel to The Graduate.

___   Homecoming
By Bernhard Schlink
Losing his father during World War II, Peter Debauer grows up with his mother and few memories of his father, until, as an adult, he embarks on a quest to uncover the truth about his past, following a trail that takes him across Europe, to the United States and back, in search of his missing father, a man who continuously reinvents himself to stay alive.

___   Honor Thyself
By Danielle Steel
Falling victim to an explosion in the heart of Paris, legendary film and stage actress Carole Barber awakens, only to have lost her memories of herself, her career, and her family, and must struggle to put the pieces of her life back together, healing old wounds and recapturing a lost love in the process.

___   A Irish Country Village
By Patrick Taylor
Delighted to be offered a permanent position with crusty Dr. O’Reilly, Dr. Barry Lavery confronts a crisis when his reputation is threatened by the unexpected death of one of his patients, he and O’Reilly launch a campaign to save Ballybucklebo’s four-hundred-year-old pub, and his beloved Patricia tries to win a scholarship to Cambridge. A sequel to An Irish Country Doctor.

___   John
By Niall Williams
An epic tale based on John the Apostle’s final years places the elderly, blind John in exile on the desolate island of Patmos with a small band of increasingly disillusioned followers, until the Roman emperor lifts the ban against Christianity, enabling John’s return to the religiously torn region of Ephesus.
                                                                                                                                      
___   Lady Macbeth
By Susan Fraser King
An evocative fictional account of the life of the eleventh-century Queen Gruadh of Scotland describes how this female descendant of the country’s royal line is married, left pregnant, widowed, and forced to wed her husband’s murderer, and reveals how she fought to preserve her family’s legacy regardless of the cost.

___   The Last Cowgirl
By Jana Richman
Expressing public disdain for her childhood on a Utah ranch and denying the fact that she’s really a cowgirl at heart, Dickie Sinfield becomes a journalist in Salt Lake City where she is forced to make a difficult choice in the wake of a family funeral.

___   My Liar
By Rachel Cline
Working together on a film called “Troubled Doll,” two very different women – Anabeth Jensen, a film editor from northern Minnesota who is most comfortable working by herself, and Laura Kata, a beautiful, sociable, and seductive film director – form an intense friendship in which both women use each other in ways they themselves do not understand.

___   Life Class
By Pat Barker
Capturing the devastation and psychological trauma of the Great War on every level of British society, a new novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Ghost Road focuses on a group of young art students, including Paul Tarrant, a Red Cross volunteer who soon discovers that life, love, and art will never be the same.

___   Mermaids in the Basement
By Michael Lee West
Struggling with the loss of her mother, a bad case of writer’s block, and her boyfriend’s highly publicized affair with a famous actress, Renata DeChavannes travels to her Gulf Coast family home, where she faces ghosts from her past and struggles to become the empowered woman her formidable grandmother believes her to be.

___   My Enemy’s Cradle
By Sara Young
Hiding out from the Nazis with her Dutch relatives, Cyrla, a half-Jewish girl, is confronted by a terrifying choice between certain discovery in her cousin’s home, and – knowing that her cousin Annika is pregnant with the child of a German soldier – taking her place in the Lebensborn, a maternity home for Aryan girls carrying German babies.  A first novel.

___   The Outlaw Demon Wails
By Kim Harrison
Having trafficked in forbidden demon magic in order to save the lives of her friends, witch and runner Rachel Morgan investigates the death of her lover only to uncover a family secret that changes everything she has ever believed, a discovery that is further complicated by a demon’s machinations. (Horror)

___   The Painter from Shanghai
By Jennifer Cody Epstein
A tale inspired by the life of pre-war Shanghai artist Pan Yuliang traces her life in a brothel before she becomes a concubine to a Republican official who ultimately helps her find her way as an artist. (Historical Fiction)

___   The Palace of Illusions
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Panchaali, wife of the five legendary Pandavas brothers, offers her own version of the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharat, as she chronicles the story of her magical birth, the problems of dealing with five husbands who have been cheated out of their birthright, the trials she endures, her friendship with Krishna, and her attraction to her husband’s enemy.

___   People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks
Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume’s ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins.  By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March.

___   Remember Me?
By Sophie Kinsella
Awakening in the hospital after a car crash, believing that it is 2004 and that she is a twenty-five-year-old, disorganized, single sales associate, Lexi is stunned to find that she has lost three years of her life, that she is the boss of her department, and that she is married to a handsome millionaire.  When a man shows up claiming to be her secret lover, Lexi’s perfect new life begins to go awry.

___   The Reserve
By Russell Banks
Losing her father to a heart attack on the same night she meets a politically liberal artist, scandal-marked heiress Vanessa Cole hides a dark family secret that takes her from the Adirondacks to war-torn Europe and threatens everyone she encounters.

___   Resistance
By Owen Sheers
In 1944, after the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, half of Britain is occupied by enemy forces, and Sarah Lewis, a young farmer’s wife, awakens to find that her husband has disappeared, along with all of the men from her remote Welsh village.  The mystery is further complicated by the arrival of a German patrol on a mysterious mission.  A first novel.

___   Rhett Butler’s People
By Donald McCaig
Paralleling the events of Margaret Mitchell’s beloved Gone with the Wind, this authorized novel chronicles the life and times of dashing hero Rhett Butler and the people who shaped his world – his unyielding father, Langston Butler; sister Rosemary; best friend and one-time slave Tunis Bonneau; former love Belle Watling; and the headstrong, passionate Scarlett O’Hara.

___   The Secret Between Us
By Barbara Delinsky
Picking up her sixteen-year-old daughter Grace after a party, Deborah Monroe accepts responsibility for hitting a man with the car on their way home, even though Grace had been driving, a deception that takes on a life of its own and threatens their family and the bond between mother and daughter.

___   The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
By Lauren Willig
A continuation of the series that began with The Masque of the Black Tulip and The Deception of the Emerald Ring finds Mary accepting a secret assignment from spy Lord Vaughn to infiltrate the Black Tulip’s operation in order to prevent an invasion of England.

___   Seen It All and Done the Rest
By Pearl Cleage
After thirty years in Europe building her reputation as one of her generation’s finest actresses and redefining her role as an African-American diva, Josephine Evans is forced to return to the U.S., where she is challenged to build a new life.  Josephine gets her chance when she takes on an unscrupulous land developer threatening to destroy her Atlanta community.
 
___   The Senator’s Wife
By Sue Miller
Two unconventional women, neighbors in adjacent New England townhouses – Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation; and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator – confront the costs and challenges of love.

___   Sin No More
By Kimberla Lawson Roby
Resolving to turn over a new leaf after cheating on his wife once again, the Reverend Curtis Black is blackmailed by both his former mistress and a substitute pastor, a situation that further tests his marriage and reveals additional painful secrets.

___   Something on the Side
By Carl Weber
In this no-holds-barred novel of friendship, love, sex, and betrayal, the voluptuous members of the Big Girls Book Club come together to discuss their passion for books and men, discovering how hard it is to keep it real when they all have something on the side.
___  The Somnambulist
By Jonathan Barnes
A tale set in Victorian London introduces the characters of stage magician and detective Edward Moon and his silent sidekick, whose fiendish plot to re-create the apocalyptic prophecies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge threaten the British Empire.  A first novel.

___   Song Yet Sung
By James McBride
Set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake Bay region, McBride’s story finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief who vengefully calls slave-catcher Denwood Long out of retirement.

___   The Soul Thief
By Charles Baxter
A graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with the people around him – alluring but elusive Theresa, fickle Jamie, and Jerome Coolberg, an enigmatic and compelling figure who seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel’s past – until a total breakdown forces him to reconstruct his life.

___   The Ten-Year Nap
By Meg Wolitzer
Ten years after leaving high-power jobs to raise their children, four New York friends enter their forties while struggling with the differences between their past ideals and their present realities, a situation that becomes turbulent when one of them meets a successful working mother of three who seems to have it all.

___   The View from the Seventh Layer
By Kevin Brockmeier
A new compilation of short fiction from the author of the novel The Brief History of the Dead features the title story about an asocial young woman who ponders her troubled life and imagines an escape with an apparition she calls the Entity; as well as “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” and “Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth.” 

___   Woman Who Wouldn’t
By Gene Wilder
In 1903, after suffering a breakdown on stage, Jeremy Webb, a violinist with the Cleveland Orchestra, is sent by the company to recover at a health resort in Germany, where he meets the beautiful and reserved Clara Mulpas, a woman suffering from severe consumption and recovering from the aftereffects of a bad marriage. (Historical Fiction)

___   World Made by Hand
By James Howard Kunstler
In the wake of a series of global catastrophes that have destroyed industrial civilization, the inhabitants of Union Grove, a small New York town, do anything they can to get by, as they struggle to deal with a new way of life over the course of an eventful summer, in a novel set several decades in the future.