On the Shelves Looking for a good book to dip into this summer, you'll do well to pick up one of the intriguing works below. Happy reading...     Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth Xiaolu Guo August 2008 "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is serious, well-crafted, deeply human." --Orlando Sentinel From the author of the 2007 Orange Prize finalist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers comes a wholly original and thoroughly captivating coming-of-age story that follows a bright, impassioned young woman as she rushes headlong into the maelstrom of a rapidly changing Beijing to chase her dreams. Twenty-one year old Fenfang Wang has traveled one thousand eight hundred miles to seek her fortune in contemporary urban Beijing, and has no desire to return to the drudgery of the sweet potato fields back home. However, Fenfang is ill-prepared for what greets her: a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city under rampant destruction and slap-dash development, and a sexist attitude seemingly more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country's progressive capital. Yet Fenfang is determined to live a modern life. With courage and purpose, she forges ahead, and soon lands a job as a film extra. While playing roles like woman-walking-over-the bridge and waitress-wiping-a-table help her eke out a meager living, Fenfang comes under the spell of two unsuitable young men, keeps her cupboard stocked with UFO noodles, and after mastering the fever and tumult of the city, ultimately finds her true independence in the one place she never expected. At once wry and moving, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth gives us a clear-eyed glimpse into the precarious and fragile state of China's new identity and asserts Xiaolu Guo as her generation's voice of modern China. Find out more about the book here.   The Implacable Order of Things José Luís Peixoto July 2008 "José Luís Peixoto is one of the most surprising revelations in recent Portuguese literature." --José Saramago Set in an unnamed Portuguese village against a background of severe rural poverty, The Implacable Order of Things is told from the various points of view of two generations of men and women, hardened by hunger and toil and driven by a fate beyond them to fulfill their roles in the never-ending cycle of retribution and death. José, a quiet sheepherder, sees his happiness crumble when the "Devil" tells him he is being cuckolded. Old Gabriel offers wise counsel while a different kind of love story develops: Moisés and Elias, twins attached at the tips of their little fingers and unable to live without each other, find their tender communion shattered when Moisés falls in love with the local cook. And, of course, there is the Devil himself. Love may be a luxury, but there are moments of the greatest tenderness among even the most unlikely lovers. Written with subtle prose and powerful imagery, The Implacable Order of Things is a novel of haunting beauty, and introduces American readers to the astounding, poetic voice of José Luís Peixoto. Find out more about the book here.   When We Were Romans Matthew Kneale July 2008 "Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, young Lawrence brings readers into his world, powerfully connecting us to the drama of his childhood." --Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family. He carefully watches over his willful little sister Jemima, and his mother, Hannah. When Hannah becomes convinced that their estranged father is stalking them, the family flees London and heads for Rome, where Hannah lived happily as a young woman. For Lawrence, fascinated by stories of popes and emperors, Rome is an adventure. Though they are short of money, and move from home to home, staying with his mother's old friends, little by little their new life seems to be taking shape. But the trouble that brought them to Italy will not quite leave them in peace. Narrated in Lawrence's perfectly rendered voice, When We Were Romans powerfully evokes the emotions and confusions of childhood--the triumphs, the jealousies, the fears, and the love. Even as everything he understands is turned upside down, Lawrence remains determined to keep his family together, viewing the world from a perspective that is at once endearingly innocent and preternaturally wise. Find out more about the book here.   American Priestess Jane Fletcher Geniesse June 2008 "Jane Geniesee has proved there is definitely a second act. Her American Priestess follows naturally like another jewel from Passionate Nomad. Her story of Anna Spafford's multi-layered journey from Chicago to Jerusalem and beyond is stunning--impressively researched and beautifully told." --Jim Lehrer For generations in Jerusalem, a fabled mansion has been the retreat for foreign correspondents, diplomats, pilgrims and spies--but until now, few have known the true story of the house that became the American Colony Hotel or its bizarre history of tragedy, religious extremism, emotional blackmail, and peculiar sexual practices. During the boom years following the Civil War, in the country's heartland capital, Chicago, a prominent lawyer Horatio Spafford and his blue-eyed wife Anna rode the mighty wave of Protestant evangelicalism deluging the nation. When suddenly tragedy struck, the charismatic Spaffords, grieving, attracted followers eager to believe their prophecy that the Second Coming was at hand and in 1881 sailed with them to Jerusalem to see the Messiah alight on the Mount of Olives. No sooner had they settled into the Holy City than the U. S. Consul and the established Christian missionaries declared them heretics and whispered of sexual deviance. Yet Muslims and Jews admired their unflagging care of the sick and the needy, and Jews were intrigued with their advocacy of a Jewish Return to Zion. When Horatio died, Anna assumed leadership, shocking even her adherents by abolishing marriage and established a dictatorship that was not always benevolent. Ever dogged by controversy, she and her credulous followers lived through and closely participated in the titanic upheavals that eventually formed the modern Middle East. Written with flair and insight, American Priestess provides a fascinating exploration of the seductive power of evangelicalism and raises questions about the manipulation of religion to serve personal goals. A powerful narrative, the story sweeps through the dramatic collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the British Mandate, and finally the founding of Israel where Anna's house in East Jerusalem, now the American Colony Hotel, stands as an exemplar of beauty and comfort, despite its turbulent history. Find out more about the book here.   Notes on a Life Eleanor Coppola May 2008 "Like everything Coppola writes, these are richly told stories of family and film and solitude, spanning years of creation and joy. She is a narrator you trust to pay the most wonderful attention to what is real and human in life, through the highly intelligent and kind eyes of a mother, an artist, a wife." --Anne Lamott Eleanor Coppola shares her extraordinary life as an artist, filmmaker, wife, and mother in a book that captures the glamour and grit of Hollywood and reveals the private tragedies and joys that tested and strengthened her over the past twenty years. Her first book, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now was hailed as "one of the most revealing of all first hand looks at the movies" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner). And now the author brings the same honesty, insight, and wit to this absorbing account of the next chapters in her life. In this new work we travel back and forth with her from the swirling center of the film world to the intimate heart of her family. She offers a fascinating look at the vision that drives her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and describes her daughter Sofia's rise to fame with the film Lost in Translation. Even as she visits faraway movie sets and attends parties, she is pulled back to pursue her own art, but is always focused on keeping her family safe. The death of their son Gio in a boating accident in 1986 and her struggle to cope with her grief and anger leads to a moving exploration of her deepest feelings as a woman and a mother. Written with a quiet strength, Eleanor Coppola's powerful portrait of the conflicting demands of family, love and art is at once very personal and universally resonant. Find out more about the book here.   The Ginseng Hunter Jeff Talarigo April 2008 "Jeff Talarigo has a remarkable talent: from some of the most horrific experiences a human being might face, he somehow crafts beautiful, haunting works of fiction." --Christian Science Monitor Set at the turn of the 21st-century along the Tumen River, which separates northeast China and North Korea, The Ginseng Hunter follows the daily life of a Chinese man who spends his days in the mountains looking for ginseng. He is little aware of the larger world until he sees bodies floating in the river and hears rumors of thievery and murder. On one of his monthly trips to Yanji, he meets a North Korean prostitute, and through her vivid tales, the tragedy across the river unfolds. And he comes to realize that the fates of the young woman and four others rest in his hands. Taking readers intimately into the little-understood lives of North Koreans, The Ginseng Hunter is a mesmerizing portrait of life along a fragile border, and an examination into the personal costs that North Koreans bear living under the repressive regime of Kim Jong Il. Find out more about the book here.   Newton Peter Ackroyd April 2008 "Newton is both impeccably researched and a wonderful read. An afternoon in the backyard hammock with 'the grand autocrat of science.'" --Los Angeles Times When Isaac Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets and published Principia, a milestone in the history of science, which set forth his famous laws of motion and universal gravitation. Newton's long-time research on calculus, finally made public in 1704, triggered a heated controversy as European scientists accused him of plagiarizing the work of the German scientist Gottfried Leibniz. In this third volume in the acclaimed Ackroyd's Brief Lives series, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd provides an engaging portrait of Newton, illuminating what we think we know about him and describing his seminal contributions to science and mathematics. A man of wide and eclectic interests, Newton blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his determination to interpret a modern universe as a mathematical universe. By brining vividly to life a somewhat puritanical man whose desire to experiment and explore bordered on the obsessive, Peter Ackroyd demonstrates the unique brilliance of Newton's perceptions, which changed our understanding of the world. Find out more about the book here.   Playing with the Grown-ups Sophie Dahl April 2008 "Quirky and thoughtful, just what one would expect from the pen of a granddaughter of Roald Dahl.... But read far enough, and the pages darken...to a clear-eyed compassion for the world's limitless store of tragic human comedy." --Bookpage For Kitty, growing up at Hay House amongst bluebell woods and doting relations is heaven. But for her mother, the restless Marina, a bohemian beauty who paints and weeps with alacrity, this comfortable domesticity cannot provide the novelty and excitement she craves. Marina is utterly beguiling, but more often than not Kitty can only gaze on her antics with awe and toe-curling trepidation. When Swami-ji, Marina's Guru, sees Marina's future in New York, the family relocates, leaving Kitty exiled in a colorless boarding school. Reprieve comes in the form of the Guru's summons to the ashram; but then, just as Kitty is approaching enlightenment, she and Marina are off again, leaving for an England that is now fast and unfamiliar. This time no god, man, or martini can staunch Marina's hunger for a happiness that proves all too elusive. And Kitty, turning fifteen, must choose whether to play dangerous games with the grown-ups or begin to put herself first. Playing with the Grown-ups is an enchanting novel about growing up in a loving, chaotic household; it is also hilarious, heartbreaking, and scandalous. The offbeat and often comic adventures of the free-spirited heroines--Marina and Kitty alike--will remind readers of Breakfast at Tiffany's. With her magnificent talent for storytelling and creating unconventional characters, Sophie Dahl ably carries on the literary legacy of her grandfather, the beloved children's book author, Roald Dahl. Find out more about the book here.   The Post-War Dream Mitch Cullin March 2008 "Cullin is an unusually sophisticated theorist of human nature." --The New York Times Book Review Hollis and Debra have settled into their golden years in a gated community outside of Tucson. Although they are devoted to each other, events that took place decades earlier have left Hollis with a deep-seated trauma--and with a secret he has never been able to share with his wife. When Debra is diagnosed with cancer, she makes her husband a simple request--"Tell me about us"--that forces Hollis to revisit his past. In 1950, Hollis fought in the Korean War alongside the bigoted but charismatic Bill McCreedy. McCreedy seems to have it all, although he is a mercurial soldier whose ungovernable behavior is often at odds with what Hollis believes to be right. Now, years later, Hollis is haunted by memories of McCreedy and his own wartime actions that he had tried to suppress. These recollections eventually lead him from the body-strewn battlefields of Korea to the remote farmhouse in Texas where McCreedy had grown up--and for the first time he finds himself examining his and Debra's life to understand how chance had played a hand in bringing them together. Mitch Cullin, one of today's most celebrated young novelists, captures some of the most difficult themes in literature: fate, love, and death. The Post-War Dream is literary fiction of the highest order. Find out more about the book here.   Resistance Owen Sheers February 2008 "Owen Sheers's Resistance is an astonishing and compelling study of human nature against the backdrop of an occupied village. Sheers plumbs the depths of love, cowardice, bravery, and the devastating effects of blind patriotism, and in doing so exposes the best and worst of humanity in unexpected and haunting ways." --Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants 1944. The Germans have breached the British coastal defenses and are making their way to London. Sarah Lewis, a 26-year-old farmer's wife in the Welsh Olchon Valley, wakes to find her husband has disappeared, as have the husbands of all the other women in the valley. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait. Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their trip a mystery. When a severe snowstorm forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. But as the pressure of the war presses in on them, their fragile state of harmony becomes increasingly threatened. Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and beauty, Resistance is a first novel of considerable grace and power. Find out more about the book here. The Commoner John Burnham Schwartz January 2008 "Fans of Memoirs of a Geisha...will savor [The Commoner].... The delicate, hairline fractures in Haruko's story are all the more heartbreaking for being so restrained." --New York Daily News John Burnham Schwartz, acclaimed author of the brilliant Reservation Road, now gives us an imaginative tour de force inspired by the dramatic real-life stories of the reigning empress and crown princess of Japan. The novel's narrator is Haruko, Empress of Japan. In 1959, at the age of twenty-four, she marries the Crown Prince, becoming the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, most hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspcion by the Empress and her minions, controlled at every turn, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. Yet she recovers and perseveres, holding tight to the self that the imperial bureaucrats would see crushed. When thirty years later--now Empress herself--she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman to accept the marriage proposal of Haruko's son, the Crown Prince, the consequences are tragic and dramatic. Meticulously researched and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarified and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other. With the unerring skill of a master storyteller, John Burnham Schwartz has written his finest novel yet. Find out more about the book here.   The Devil's Footprints John Burnside January 2008 "Stunning: majestically written, with a piercing intelligence and razor-sharp sense of the human predicament. The Devil's Footprints is a remarkable marriage of thought to form.... [A]n intricate story, imbued with an intense moral relativity." --The New York Sun Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. When Moira Birnie, convinced that her abusive husband is the devil, kills herself and her two young sons but spares her fourteen-year-old daughter Hazel, Michael uneasily recalls his past connection to Moira. In the wake of the tragedy, Michael becomes obsessed with Hazel, who convinces Michael to take her away from the village. Their journey takes the reader backward and forward in time, gradually uncovering the secrets of the past. Set against the untamed Scottish landscape, The Devil's Footprints explores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption. It is a novel of mysterious beauty, written with the clarity and power of a folktale. "The best novels, while entertaining, offer the promise of teaching something crucial, ineffable about life and how to live it. We read them to survive. The Devil's Footprints partakes of that quality.... Burnside is a luminous writer and a muscular thinker." --Los Angeles Times Find out more about the book here.   The Fall of Troy Peter Ackroyd November 2007 Heinrich Obermann, a celebrated German archaeologist, has uncovered the ancient ruins of Troy on a Turkish hillside. He believes that his discovery will prove that the heroes of The Iliad actually existed. Sophia, Obermann's young Greek wife, works at the site carefully preserving the ancient treasures she uncovers. But Sophia soon comes to see another side of her husband. He is mysteriously vague about his past and the wife he claims died years before. When she finds a cache of artifacts Obermann has hidden away, her suspicions about him rise, feelings that escalate when a visiting archaeologist who questions Obermann's methods dies from a mysterious fever. In The Fall of Troy, Peter Ackroyd again demonstrates his ability to evoke time and place, and to transform history into compelling fiction. It is a brilliantly told story of heroes and scoundrels, human aspirations and follies, and the temptation to shape the truth to fit a passionately held belief. Find out more about the book here.   Trespass Valerie Martin September 2007 "Martin's writing--so prised and clean limbed--is a marvel." --Toni Morrison Chloe Dales's life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband is working at home on a book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed--by the aggression of her government's foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio, and finally by Toby's new girlfriend, Salome Drago. Raised in the Croatian expatriate community of New Orleans, Salome is a toxic mix of the old world and the new: intelligent, superstitious, sly, seductive, and confident. But Salome's past is a mine of dangerous secrets, and the violence that destroyed her homeland is far from over. Rich with menace, Trespass unfolds in a world where darkness intrudes into bright places, a world with betrayal at its heart. In shimmering prose Valerie Martin raises the question: Who shall inherit America? Find out more about the book here.   The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany Graeme Gibson October 2005 "[Gibson]'s book is a stunner. The wealth of imagery and the range of intelligence are grand, the kinds of relationships with birds he sets out nearly bewildering. It's what I'll take to bed tonight to incite my dreams." --Barry Lopez In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson has crafted an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and birds. With the passion of a birdwatcher and hoarder of words, Gibson has spent fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity for birds has taken over the centuries. Gorgeously illustrated, woven from centuries of human response to the delights of the feathered tribes, The Bedside Book of Birds is for anyone who is aware of birds, and for everyone who is intrigued by the artistic forms that humanity has created to represent its soul. Find out more about the book here.