Readers > New Books > Fiction, September 2009
Fiction, September 2009
General Fiction |Mysteries |Horror/Science Fiction/Fantasy
General Fiction
- Atwood, Margaret
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The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners — a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life — has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.
- Aub, Max
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Aub's evocative, modernist novel chronicles the prelude to the Spanish Civil War.
- Brown, Dan
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Da Vinci Code symbologist, Robert Langdon, returns in Dan Brown's highly anticipated new thriller.
- Cave, Nick
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Cave offers a story about the final days of Bunny Munro, a salesman in search of a soul. By turns dark and humane, this work lays bare the imprints that fathers leave on their sons.
- Chin, Marilyn
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In an uproarious debut that lays bare the complicated generational relationships of Chinese-American women, Chin references classical Chinese tales and ghost stories that are sensual, lurid, hilarious, shocking and surreal.
- Diamant, Anita
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In a heart-wrenching new novel, Diamant tells the story of four women, refugees from Nazi Europe, who find friendship, love and salvation in a postwar British camp in Palestine.
- Doctorow, E. L.
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The master of historical fiction takes readers from the early part of the 20th century through to the 1980s as seen through the warped lens of the infamous Collyer brothers, whose strange and intriguing story encapsulates much of the era's turmoil, accomplishment and great change.
- Doxiadis, Apostolos
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This innovative graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- Hartwell, Richard
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This is the heart-warming story of Billy Bob (Bubba) Coker, a redneck who reached rock bottom, until a freak head injury results in the appearance of his own personal Buddha.
- Holt, Terence
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Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town and threatens the human race, an Egyptologist’s obsessive quest for a tomb that holds the secrets of immortality, or the anguish of a son who keeps his father’s beating heart in a jar, Holt conjures up mysterious worlds in which life joins death in a danse macabre of brilliantly inventive language, wicked wit and spectacular imagination.
- Huneven, Michelle
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When a young professor wakes up in jail after an alcoholic black out, she learns that two people are dead, run over in her driveway. Patsy does time in prison then begins a new life — until she finds out that someone else killed those people.
- Kennedy, Erica
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Peopled with vivid, hilarious characters, Feminista is fast-moving novel with themes of independence, image and the complicated relationship between the sexes.
- Kleid, Neil
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Indie creator Neil Kleid digs deep into the roots of family betrayal in this graphic exploration of a Orthodox rabbi con man whose ruse is revealed upon his death.
- Lethem, Jonathan
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The author of The Fortress of Solitude returns with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires and lies.
- Lindley, Maureen
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Based on the true story of a rebellious woman who earned a controversial place in history, The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel is a vibrant reimagining of a thrilling life — a rich historical epic of palace intrigue, sexual manipulation and international espionage.
- Lodato, Victor
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"I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life." So begins Mathilda Savitch, a compelling page-turner and the debut of an extraordinary novelistic talent.
- Mauro, Nancy
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A savagely smart, darkly comic literary debut, New World Monkeys exposes the false idols of marital tranquility, small-town idyll and corporate loyalty.
- Meyer, Deon
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"Out of post-apartheid South Africa comes a thriller good enough to nip at the heels of le Carre — wonderful setting, rich and colourful cast." Kirkus
- Momus
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Channeling the spirits of Chaucer, Rabelais, Flann O'Brien and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Vatican secretary who compiled the first known book of jokes in 1451, The Book of Jokes is a happy raspberry in the face of life as we know and tell it.
- Savage, Sam
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From letters and diary entries to grocery lists, this novel comprises a collection of everything Andrew Whittaker commits to paper over the course of four critical months. This tragicomic portrait of a literary life chronicles an aspiring novelist who is — quite literally — authoring his own downfall.
- Schwartz, Stephen Jay
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An LAPD homicide detective thinks three macabre murders are linked, the common thread having to do with his attendance at sex-addiction meetings. But if he reveals the link, he will have to come clean about his own secrets.
- Sikoryak, R
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Hilarious parodies of classic literature reimagined with classic comics. In "Blond Eve", Dagwood and Blondie are ejected from the Garden of Eden into their archetypal suburban home; Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is reimagined as a foppish Little Nemo; and Camus’s Stranger becomes a brooding, chain-smoking Golden Age Superman. Other source material includes Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, bubblegum wrappers, superhero comics, kid cartoons and more.
- Skeslien Charles, Janet
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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian meets Desperate Housewives in this exploration of the booming business of Russian e-mail-order brides, an industry where love and marriage collide with sex and commerce.
- Stott, Rebecca
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In her debut, Ghostwalk, Stott unfolded an extraordinary and true mystery, involving Isaac Newton and set in 17th century Cambridge. The Coral Thief offers another intriguing mystery, centering on pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, and set in 1815 France.
- Vonnegut, Norb
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In a world that moves as fast as finance does, top producers have to think three steps ahead and make snap decisions. Vonnegut has crafted a sharp, dark thriller that will make readers think — and then double-check their investments.
- Welsh, Irvine
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Reheated Cabbage gathers stories — first published in small magazines and out-of-print anthologies — showcasing the trademark skills of the author of Trainspotting: vaulting imagination, brilliant vernacular ear and the ability to create some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.
Mysteries
- Bruen, Ken
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Born into a rough Brooklyn neighborhood, outsiders in their own families, Nick and Todd forge a lifelong bond that persists in the face of crushing loss, blood and betrayal. Low-level wiseguys with little ambition and even less of a future, the friends become major players in the potential destruction of an international crime syndicate that stretches from the cargo area at Kennedy Airport to the streets of New York, Belfast and Boston to the alleyways of Mexican border towns.
- Ellroy, James
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An FBI agent with a direct line to J. Edgar Hoover, a radical left-wing informant and a woman with countless aliases are a few of the vibrant and slick-talking characters in this newest work of political noir in the American Underworld trilogy.
- Fate, Robert
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October 1958. Kristin Van Dijk, a private investigator, is 23 and a proven asset to Otis Millett, her veteran partner at the Millett Agency in Fort Worth, Texas. When Otis estranged wife, Dixie Logan aka The Dallas Firecracker, as she was known on the Texas striptease circuit, is found murdered it begins an investigation that pairs Kristin and Otis with Lt. Carl Lynch, a straight-arrow homicide detective with the Fort Worth PD.
- Hinger, Charlotte
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In historian Lottie Albright’s Western Kansas community, false accusations threaten senatorial candidate Brian Hadley’s political career, secrets whispered to her as editor of the county history books spur a personal search for his aunt’s murderer. Ignoring warnings from her twin sister, Josie, that she is in over her head, Lottie dons a badge to have access to information. She delves into a horrifying "cold case" to prove her merits as a deputy and impresses Sheriff Sam Abbot with her ability to combine historical research methods and police procedure. To help her sister, Josie adds her expertise in untangling the web of families bound by a lethal legacy of prideful secrets. Soon Lottie is stalked by a clever killer threatened by the twins’ ability to connect the dots.
- Izner, Claude
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Fin de siècle Paris: the world of Verlaine and Zola, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec; a time of anarchists, scientists and occultists, when can-can skirts were raised at the Moulin Rouge and fortunes were lost on the Panama Canal. Armand de Valois was one of these latter unfortunates, stricken by yellow fever at the site of his ruin. When his widow Odette disappears into his tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery and never returns, her maid Denise fears the worst. Alone in the great metropolis, Denise knows just one person she can go to for help: Odette’s former lover, Victor Legris. When the frightened girl turns up at his bookshop, Victor feels there must be a simple explanation for Odette’s disappearance.
- Jaffarian, Sue Ann
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Along with a sprinkling of history, this spirited new mystery series features the amateur sleuth team of Emma Whitecastle and the spirit of her pie-baking great-great-great-grandmother, Granny Apples.
- Kiely, Tracy
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A die-hard fan of Jane Austen novels and the traditional English mystery, Tracy Kiely has combined elements of both for this truly delightful and witty debut.
- McCaffrey, Vincent
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A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He’s in his late 30s, single and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past calls to ask him to look at her late husband’s books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results.
- Russell, Sheldon
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"Set in Oklahoma at the close of WWII, Russell's engrossing mystery casts light on a little-known corner of American history. When harmless indigent Spark Dugan winds up dead in the Waynoka rail yards, the local yard dog (i.e., railroad detective), Hook Runyon, decides the man's death was no accident. Runyon soon learns that mild-mannered Dugan may have been involved in a local ring smuggling army goods. As more details come to light, Runyon begins to suspect a big-time operation that involves foul play at a nearby Nazi POW camp—and possibly a local oil tycoon with a penchant for lavish living. " Publishers Weekly
- Ryan, Annelise
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Ryan's new cozy mystery series introduces wisecracking nurse-turned-coroner Mattie Winston and the eccentric inhabitants of her small Wisconsin town.
Horror/Science Fiction/Fantasy
- Andrews, Ilona
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In these hound-eat-hound worlds, anything goes — and everything bites.
- Banks, Iain M.
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The Philosopher is a torturer, and proud of it. AC is a dealer who became a trader who became a hedge-fund manager. Madame d'Ortolan seems to control nearly everything, while Mrs. Mulverhill the younger hopes to frustrate her. Mr. Oh is a reluctant assassin, amongst many other things. What all of these characters have in common is the Concern: an organization committed to protecting the world from outside threats. The world itself, however, is far more complex than we imagine; and the threats far more subtle.
- Barclay, James
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The Raven have fought together for years, six men carving out a living as swords for hire in the war that has torn Balaia apart, loyal only to themselves and their code. But when they agree to escort a Xesteskian mage on a secret mission they are pulled into a world of politics and ancients secrets.
- Dantec, Maurice G.
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On October 4, 2057, most electronic devices on Earth are infected and destroyed by unknown viruses, and billions of people dependent on machine interfaces are killed as a result. Twelve years later, the survivors are sunk in a new Dark Age, a grim afterworld in which the only law is the law of the jungle. In the sprawling ruins of Grande Junction, a thriving urban community centered on an abandoned spaceport, civilization is hanging on by its fingernails. In this last fragile outpost of knowledge and reason, hope and faith, a second wave of lethal viruses is unleashed — viruses that attack human beings directly, stripping away language, thought, humanity itself.
- Goodkind, Terry
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Turning 27 may be terrifying for some, but for Alex, a struggling artist living in the midwestern United States, it is cataclysmic. Inheriting a huge expanse of land should have made him a rich and happy man; but something about this birthday, his name and the beautiful woman whose life he just saved, has suddenly made him — and everyone he loves — into a target for extreme and uncompromising violence.
- Malan, Violette
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Mercenary partners Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane have returned to their Mercenary House to clear themselves of accusations of kidnapping and murder. But before they can resolve these charges, old friends are taken hostage by the Long Ocean Nomads, and they are forced to come to the rescue. And as they set sail, Dhulyn is convinced they are journeying to Parno's death, which she has foreseen in numerous visions of a drowning at sea.
- McAuley, Paul
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Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labor on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems.
- Stirling, S. M.
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Rudi Mackenzie has journeyed far across the land that was once the United States of America, hoping to find the source of the world-altering event that has come to be known as The Change. His final destination is Nantucket, an island overrun with forest, inhabited by a mere 200 people who claim to have been transported there from out of time. Only one stone house remains standing. Within it, Rudi finds a beautifully made sword waiting for him — and once he takes it up, nothing will ever be the same.