Libraries
Library Marketing Staff Picks
Our favorite new and forthcoming books!
Jennifer Parmelee Childs Recommends:
The Passage begins in the time before. The government is using a weaponized virus to transform convicts into killing machines. But when the experiment goes awry, it means the end of the civilized world. 100 years later, a small group of survivors are struggling to hang on amidst the encroaching darkness. As their hope is waning, a mute girl appears out of the wasteland offering them a last chance. A chance that takes them on an odyssey that could mean salvation or could mean death. This epic, post-apocalyptic story is a twisty, fast-paced read that will keep you up reading long into the night. Cronin creates a believable, heartbreaking world in which humanity’s only hope is a young girl. The best thing is, the plot rocks AND the writing is amazing (Cronin won the PEN/Hemingway for Mary and O’Neill). It may be 720 pages, but you will love every one of them.
978-0-345-50496-8
| $27.00 | Ballantine | HC | June 2010
978-0-385-66951-1 | $32.95C | Doubleday Canada | HC | June 2010
Erica McDonald Recommends:
A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff
Vintage clothing is not only about style and grace for Phoebe Swift. These pieces contain fragments of the past and boundless stories of pleasure and heartbreak. She has just opened a vintage dress shop in a small town outside of London while she still copes with the recent loss of her best friend. Amid cupcake ‘50s prom dresses and the allure of designer threads, Wolff has spun a romantic tale of hidden secrets held within gorgeous fabrics and ornaments of style. Battling with ghosts from the past and the possibilities offered by two suitors further complicates Phoebe’s emotional turmoil. As she befriends an elderly French woman who wishes to sell her elegant dresses and suits, Phoebe is swept up in this woman’s poignant tale of a particular little blue coat from her childhood in Avignon during the 1940s, which she cannot bear to part with despite the heartbreaking memories it evokes. I was drawn to this novel for its contemporary British tone and turn of phrase bringing to mind the novels of Penny Vincenzi. As I learned from the novel, vintage clothing is multifaceted and rich in both its texture and the emotion it can evoke in women. I would say the same is true of this delightfully beautiful novel of love and loss, happiness and forgiveness.
978-0-553-80783-7 | $25.00 | Bantam | HC | June 2010
Marcia Purcell Recommends:
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel by Aimee Bender
I love this book. For her ninth birthday Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift/curse: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She is horrified because her loving, cheerful, mother's cake tastes of despair and desperation. For the rest of her life food will be a peril to Rose and she will come to exist largely by eating food that is entirely made by machines such as Twinkies and Doritos. The Reader is taken into a fairy tale for grown-ups in which you discover that no one is exactly what they seem and that even with her “gift" Rose is unable to really see some of the people closest to her. (Her brother most particularly.) And she discovers that she is not the first in her family to have a peculiar talent. This book, like the cake that brings awareness, has many layers. It is funny and yet heartbreaking, transparent and yet confounding. Aimee Bender is a wonderful writer—this is an entrancing read.
978-0-385-50112-5 | $25.95/$30.00C | Doubleday | HC | June 2010
Marie Kent Recommends:
Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel
Life of Pi author Yann Martel’s new novel is about a novelist,
Henry, and a taxidermist who write a play about a donkey and a howler
monkey. The play, which the reader quickly learns is a metaphorical
take on the Holocaust, takes place on a shirt. Just stay with me on
this… In Beatrice & Virgil, Martel blurs the lines of human
and animal, addresses issues of morality and humanity, and does it all
in one of the most original novels I have ever read. While it is easy
to read this novel as another Holocaust story, to me it was more about
the process of writing. As Henry and the taxidermist discuss the play,
that process is peeled back, exposing the ways in which storytelling
and metaphor are used to explore the hideous nature of humanity. But
I digress… This book is a unique endeavor that will have you thinking
and processing long after the last page is read.
978-1-4000-6926-2
| $24.00 | Spiegel & Grau | HC | April 2010
978-0-307-39877-2 | $29.95C | Knopf Canada | HC | April 2010
David Eicke Recommends:
This is a rare, rare thing. A book about love…for men! And an incredibly good one, at that. First-time novelist Adam Ross figured it out: just frame it as a police procedural and men will pick it up. We won’t even realize we’re reading about love and marriage until we’re halfway through. For me, it was mostly because the writing was so astoundingly deft for a first-time author. I kept waiting for the prose to come down in energy—to lose its verve and settle down into a comfy channel as most books do, but it never did. Every sentence in this book is wired with a real charge, right from its start: “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” Ross, if he keeps this up, is a potential heir to Updike’s stylistic throne; his words are gross, audacious, and ethereal in the same impossible way.
978-0-307-27070-2 | $25.95/NCR | Knopf | HC | June
Staff Picks Archive:
