 | Independence Public Library | Oct 3, 2007 |
New Fiction @ the Independence Public Library
220 E. Maple
Independence, KS 67301  A brilliant philosopher with a talent for self-destruction, Mason Ambrose has torpedoed a promising academic career and now faces a dead-end future. Before joining the ranks of the unemployed, however, he's approached by a representative of billionaire geneticist Dr. Edwina Sabacthani, who makes him an offer no starving ethicist could refuse. Born and bred on Isla de Sangre, a private island off the Florida coast, Edwina's beautiful and intelligent adolescent daughter, Londa, has recently survived a freak accident that destroyed both her memory and her sense of right and wrong. Londa's soul, in short, is an empty vessel—and it will be Mason's job to fill it.
Exploring his new surroundings, our hero encounters a lush Eden abounding in bizarre animals and strange vegetation engineered by Edwina and her misanthropic collaborator, Dr. Vincent Charnock. And Londa, though totally lacking a conscience, proves a vivacious young woman who quickly captivates her new teacher as he attempts to recalibrate her moral compass with the help of Western civilization's greatest ethical thinkers, living and dead. But there's trouble in this tropical paradise. Mason soon learns that he isn't the only private tutor on Isla de Sangre, nor is Londa the only child in residence whose conscience is a blank slate. How many daughters does Edwina Sabacthani really have, and how did she bring them into being? Undaunted by these mysteries, Mason continues to instruct Londa, hoping that she can lead a normal life when she eventually ventures forth into human society. His apprentice, however, has a different agenda. Her head crammed with lofty ideals, her heart brimming with fearsome benevolence, and her bank account filled to bursting, Londa undertakes to remake our fallen world in her own image—by any and all means necessary. FICTION MOR  Last Last Chance, Fiona Maazel's first novel, is one of the most distinctive debuts of recent years: a rollicking comic tale about (in no particular order) plague, narcotics recovery, and reincarnation. A lethal strain of virus vanishes from a lab in Washington, D.C., unleashing an epidemic—and the world thinks Lucy Clark's dead father is to blame. The plague may be the least of Lucy's problems. There's her mother, Isifrid, a peddler of high-end hatwear who's also a crackhead and pagan theologist. There's her twelve-year-old half sister, Hannah, obsessed with disease and Christian fundamentalism; and Lucy's lover, Stanley, who's hell-bent on finding a womb for his dead wife's frozen eggs. Lastly, there's her grandmother Agneth, who believes in reincarnation (and who turns out to be right). And then there is Lucy herself, whose wise, warped approach to life makes her an ideal guide to love among the ruins. Romping across the country, from Southern California to the Texas desert to rural Pennsylvania and New York City, Lucy tries to surmount her drug addiction and to keep her family intact—and tells us, uproariously, all about it. Last Last Chance is a novel about survival and recovery, opportunity and despair, and, finally, love and faith in an age of anxiety. It introduces Maazel as a new writer of phenomenal gifts.  It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at St. Andrews University and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain an unlikely pair. Abigail, an actress who confidently uses her charms both on- and offstage, believes herself immune to love. Dara, a counselor, is convinced that everyone is inescapably marked by childhood; she throws herself into romantic relationships with frightening intensity. Yet now each seems to have found "true love"—another stroke of luck?—Abigail with her academic boyfriend, Sean, and Dara with a tall, dark violinist named Edward, who literally falls at her feet. But soon after Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment, trouble threatens both relationships, and their friendship. For Abigail it comes in the form of an anonymous letter to Sean claiming that she's been unfaithful; for Dara, a reconciliation with her distant father, Cameron, who left the family when Dara was ten, reawakens complicated feelings. Through four ingeniously interlocking narratives—Sean's, Cameron's, Dara's, and Abigail's—we gradually understand how these characters' lives are shaped by both chance and determination. Whatever the source, there is no mistaking the tragedy that strikes the house on Fortune Street. "Everyone," claims Abigail, "has a book or a writer who's the key to their life." As this statement reverberates through each of the narratives, Margot Livesey skillfully reveals how luck—good and bad—plays a vital role in our lives, and how the search for truth can prove a dangerous undertaking. Written with her characteristic elegance and wit,The House on Fortune Street offers a surprisingly provocative detective story of the heart.  With humor, passionate intensity, and dramatic storytelling, Johanna Lindsey brings to life her beloved aristocratic Malory family of adventurous rogues and spirited ladies, and the glamour and excitement of Regency-era England. When Sir Anthony Malory's daughter is abducted from London's Hyde Park, the ransom note is mistakenly delivered to the home of his brother James Malory. But with James and Georgina in the Caribbean, only their house guest Boyd Anderson, Georgina's youngest brother, a notoriously hot-headed American sea captain, can help Anthony locate the girl and punish the foolhardy villain. Vivacious Katey Tyler fled the dull small town of Gardener, Connecticut when her mother died, seeking adventure and romance on a grand tour of Europe. At an inn one night she hears a pitiful mewling in the room next door and finds a little girl bound and gagged. Sweeping the girl to safety, she agrees to escort the girl back to her family in London. But Katey hardly expects to be apprehended by a big, handsome American man and be blamed for kidnapping the very girl she rescued! Little does Katey realize that in having caught the attention of Boyd Anderson she's about to experience more adventure and passion than the typical young lady encounters on a very grand tour, and in meeting up with the Malorys her life will never be dull again!  With the same wicked humor and delicious charm that have won her millions of devoted fans, Sophie Kinsella, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Shopaholic & Baby, returns with an irresistible new novel and a fresh new heroine who finds herself in a life-changing and utterly hilarious predicament…. When twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she’s in for a big surprise. Her teeth are perfect. Her body is toned. Her handbag is Vuitton. Having survived a car accident—in a Mercedes no less—Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory, three years to be exact, and she’s about to find out just how much things have changed. Somehow Lexi went from a twenty-five-year-old working girl to a corporate big shot with a sleek new loft, a personal assistant, a carb-free diet, and a set of glamorous new friends. And who is this gorgeous husband—who also happens to be a multimillionaire? With her mind still stuck three years in reverse, Lexi greets this brave new world determined to be the person she…well, seems to be. That is, until an adorably disheveled architect drops the biggest bombshell of all. Suddenly Lexi is scrambling to catch her balance. Her new life, it turns out, comes complete with secrets, schemes, and intrigue. How on earth did all this happen? Will she ever remember? And what will happen when she does?  Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be -- well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty -- chiefly, his own. Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, The Learners again shows that Chip Kidd's writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.
FICTION KIDD  Traveling to London with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the brave Black Lion meets his destiny in a woman whose song-and face-might just be sweet enough to melt the anger of the gods.
 On a blustery April day, the quiet, rather private wife of a doctor discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Moments later, driving along a winding country road and distracted perhaps by her own thoughts, perhaps blinded by sunlight, she fails to see sixty-one-year-old Ruth Mitchell up ahead, riding her bicycle. She hits her, killing her instantly. And drives away. The hit-and-run driver is never found. But the doctor’s wife, horrified by what she has done, begins to unravel. Soon she turns her attention to Ruth’s bereaved husband, a man staggering sleeplessly through each night, as unhinged by grief as the killer is by guilt. Arthur Mitchell does not realize at first that someone has begun watching him through his windows, worrying over his disheveled appearance, his increasingly chaotic home. And when at last she steps through his doorway, secretly at first, then more boldly, he is ready to believe that, for reasons beyond his understanding, his wife has somehow been returned to him…. A story of loss, lies, and wrongdoing, astonishingly complex and ingeniously inventive, The Night Following is also a love story and the extraordinarily moving tale of a killer’s journey from the shadows into the light. It confirms the mastery of a writer who is both tender and unflinching in her examination of human frailty—and of the shattering repercussions of deception.  In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm -- a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not -- charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Barbara Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
FICTION JORD  An epic Chinese tale in the vein of The Last Emperor, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols-the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world-and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf
Published under a pen name, Wolf Totem was a phenomenon in China, breaking all sales records there and earning the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao's little red book. There has been much international excitement too-to date, rights have been sold in thirteen countries. Wolf Totem is set in 1960s China-the time of the Great Leap Forward, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols-a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf. The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival-a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen's own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence. After many years, the peaceis shattered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity to the grasslands. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained with religious dedication for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction-first the wolves, then the Mongol culture, finally the land. As a result of the eradication of the wolves, rats become a plague and wild sheep graze until the meadows turn to dust. Mongolian dust storms glide over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the moon. Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China's overaccelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture. FICTION JAIN  The ancient world and its politics come to life through the eyes of a young Jewish woman, Mary of Nazareth
Miriam–also known as Mary–was born into a Palestine oppressed by Herod the Great; she is accustomed to living with uncertainty and unrest. But when her beloved father is wrongly imprisoned by the Romans, she takes action. She calls upon a well-known rebel by the name of Barabbas, and together they set out to save her father. A daring escape is accomplished and, against staggering odds, Miriam’s father is saved from crucifixion.
Barabbas, flush with the success of the rescue, is intent on leading a full-scale rebellion against Herod and the Romans. Along with Mary and her father, he speaks before Jewish leaders who have gathered from various communities. Miriam feels great frustration as the men endlessly debate morality, the wisdom of rebellion, and the nature of God’s will. Having almost lost her father, and knowing she will be ostracized, she nevertheless speaks out against the use of violence. And to her surprise, one man, Joseph, listens. He offers to take her to Magdala, where she will be allowed to study in the company of intelligent, well-read women. This rare opportunity sets into motion a series of events that will change Miriam’s life–and the history of the Jewish people–forever.
Based on extensive historical and biblical scholarship, Mary of Nazareth is a revealing, utterly captivating portrait of a woman whose story we only thought we knew.
FICTION HALT  From bestselling author Laurie Graham comes the late-life diaries of the Kennedys' fictitious nanny: an inside look into the early years of the Kennedy dynasty—with all the juicy bits intact.
When Nora Brennan, fresh to America from Ireland, lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But her job is with the Kennedy family, so how could it not? Nora has charge of all nine Kennedy children, practically from the minute they're born. She sees the boys coached at their father Joe's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by Rose Kennedy ("Herself") to be good Catholic wives. With her sharp eye and her quiet common sense, Nora is the perfect candidate to report on an empire in the making. World War II changes everything. When war breaks out, Nora and the Kennedys are in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit for the war effort. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean, she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe Jr. and Jack, both serving in the US Navy; Rosemary, tragically unable to fit into the Kennedy mold; and Kathleen, known affectionately as "Kick," who throws a spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant. Dear Nora has a deliciously inside view of everything that is happening upstairs, and in thisfictional diary she tells all with the humor and candor that only a nursemaid dare employ. Witty, irreverent, and a rollicking good read, The Importance of Being Kennedy is social satire at its best. FICTION GRA  Army doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso strikes out for the uncivilized borders of Roman Britain in this highly anticipated sequel to Ruth Downie's New York Times bestselling debut.
It is spring in the year 118, and Gaius Petreius Ruso has been stationed in the Roman-occupied province of Britannia for nearly a year. After his long and reluctant investigation of the murders of a handful of local prostitutes, Ruso needs to get away. With that in mind, he has volunteered for a posting with the army in Britannia's deepest recesses—a calmer place for a tired man.
But the edge of the Roman Empire is a volatile place; the independent tribes of the North dwell near its borders. These hinterlands are the homeland of Ruso's slave, Tilla, who has scores of her own to settle there: Her tribespeople are fomenting a rebellion against Roman control, and her former lover is implicated in the grisly murder of a soldier. Ruso, filling in for the demented local doctor, is appalled to find that Tilla is still spending time with the prime suspect. Worse, he is honor-bound to try to prove the man innocent—and the army wrong—by finding another culprit. Soon both Ruso's and Tilla's lives are in
jeopardy, as is the future of their burgeoning romance.
Terra Incognita shines light on a remote corner of the ancient world, where Ruso's luck is running short—again.
FICTION DOW  Inspired by the author's own family history, Pravda is a haunting chronicle of suspicion and loss, love and loyalty, and the destructive legacy of deceit.
Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Clarke arrives in St. Petersburg from London to find his mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin, Isabella, bury their mother and struggle to make sense of their loss. Unknown to either, their mother had long ago abandoned a son, Arkady, now an utterly amoral Russian predator determined to claim his birthright. Aided by an ex-seminarian and heroin addict whose addiction is destroying him, Arkady tracks down the twins and uncovers the shocking secrets hidden from them their entire lives.
FICTION DOC  IN THE LITERARY TRADITION OF CORMAC MCCARTHY'S AND LARRY MCMURTRY'S HISTORICAL WESTERNS, SHAVETAIL TRACES THE BRUTAL COMING-OF-AGE OF A BOY SOLDIER STATIONED AT A REMOTE U.S. ARMY OUTPOST AND A YOUNG WOMAN'S TERRIFYING PASSAGE ACROSS THE AMERICAN FRONTIER.
Set in 1871 in the unforgiving wasteland of the Arizona Territory, Shavetail is the story of Private Ned Thorne, a seventeen-year-old boy from Connecticut who has lied about his age to join the Army. On the run from a shameful past, Ned is desperate to prove his worth -- to his superiors, to his family, and most of all, to himself. Young and troubled, Ned is as green and stubborn as a "shavetail," the soldiers' term for a dangerous, untrained mule. To endure in this world, Ned must not only follow the orders of the camp's captain, Robert Franklin,but also submit to the cruel manipulations of Obediah Brickner, the camp's mule driver. Both Franklin and Brickner have been damaged by their long military service, both consider themselves able to survive the dangers of the desert -- floods, scorpions, snakes, and Indians -- and both imperil Ned. Yet there are other characters, all richly drawn, who also confront Ned: half-wit soldiers, embattled Indians hidden in cliffs, a devious and philosophical peddler, and the fleshy whores who materialize in the desert as soon as the paymaster has left camp and dance with drunken soldiers around a fire late into the night. After a band of Apaches attack a nearby ranch, killing two men and kidnapping a young woman, Ned's lieutenant -- a man seeking atonement for his own mistakes -- leads Ned and the rest of his patrol on a near-suicidal mission through rugged mountains and into Mexicoin hopes of saving the woman's life. It is unlikely any can survive this folly, and those who do will be changed forever. Meticulously researched and vividly told, Shavetail renders a time when the United States was still an expanding empire, its western edge bloody with the deaths of soldiers, settlers, and Indians. In language both spare and brilliant, Cobb brings readers this lost American landscape, untouched by highways or electricity and without the comforts of civilization. Shavetail also marks the return of a great American literary voice. Cobb's first and only other novel, Crazy Heart, was published in 1987 to great acclaim and was edited by the legendary editor Ted Solotaroff. Cobb is also a former student of Donald Barthelme, who described Crazy Heart as "a bitter, witty psychological profile of genius." Brutal and deft, laced with both violence and desire, Shavetail plunges into the deepest human urges even as it marks the ground where men either survive or perish.  An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing as the initiated convince L.A.'s down and out to join their pack. Paying no heed to moons, full or otherwise, they change from human to canine at will—and they're bent on domination at any cost.
Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kind-hearted, besotted dogcatcher, and the girl he loves, a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack. Anthony has no idea that she's more than she seems, and she wants to keep it that way. But her efforts to protect her secret lead to murderous results. Blending dark humor and epic themes with card-playing dogs, crystal meth labs, surfing, and carne asada tacos, Sharp Teeth captures the pace and feel of a graphic novel while remaining "as ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it's about identity, community, love, death, and all the things we want our books to be about" [Nick Hornby, The Believer]. FICTION BARL  It only takes a moment for your life to be changed forever—as the characters of this darkly comic novel discover early on. The fateful moment for the newlyweds Ross and Iliana comes with the freak automobile accident that leaves Iliana paralyzed, Ross grief-stricken, and both of them struggling to come to terms with a married life nothing like they originally had in mind. As the usually affable Ross struggles with guilt and with finding ways to cope with his newly fractured life, Iliana gets used to her unwelcome existence as a wheelchair-bound wife, to her husband’s growing sense of alienation, and to their awkward new lack of intimacy.
What ultimately happens with Ross and Iliana is as unexpected and surprising as the fateful mishap that sets the events in motion in the first place. Sitting Practice is a clever and insightful study of love’s collision with harsh reality, told by an author with a remarkable instinct for the workings of human nature, a nimble gift for language, and the ability to find humor in the oddest places.
 The New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell presents a suspenseful and brilliantly topical new thriller that looks at the cycle of political violence in the Middle East. In the near future, an unprecedented Arab-Israeli settlement is brokered by a visionary female president of the United States. But this historic moment is shattered when a well-known fundamentalist rabbi is taken hostage by a legendary Palestinian terrorist. As the Israelis close in, the hostage and the hostage taker develop bizarre bonds and form a terrifying alliance. In the tradition of John le Carré and Graham Greene, Littell dissects the culture of violence by searchingthe corrupted consciences of the people ensnared within it.
CRIME VICIOU  Jack Tobin, a Florida trial lawyer, is committed to justice for the innocent. But when he's presented with Henry Wilson's case, he's unsure of the convict's innocence. Wilson has eight weeks to live, and Tobin has to decide if he can and will help him.
Benny Avrile is a small-time thief with his eye on an oil man's big billfold. But Benny is way over his head on this one. The robbery goes bad, and the oil man ends up dead. Just when Benny's fate is all but sealed, an old friend from Jack's past reaches out…
The clock is ticking on Henry Wilson's life, the cops are in hot pursuit of Benny, and back at home, there are dark clouds on the horizon for Jack and his beautiful wife, Pat.
The Law of Second Chances is a masterfully written legal thriller and an exciting successor to the critically acclaimed The Mayor of Lexington Avenue.
CRIME SHEEH  A novel that explores the concept of social justice in a moving search for personal and societal truth.
As Northern Ireland leaves behind a period of bitter violence, part of the continuing peace process focuses on how best to come to terms with the suffering of the past. David Park illustrates how one solution might take shape by inventing a fictional truth commission, modeled on South Africa's TRC. Revolving around the lives of four men who are uncomfortably bound together in this communal search for healing, The Truth Commissioner chronicles the Commission's first hearing, that of Connor Walshe, a fifteen-year-old Irish Catholic boy who disappeared and whose fate has remained a mystery. Three men are called to testify: Francis Gilroy, a newly appointed government minister and former IRA leader; retired policeman James Fenton, who recruited Connor as an informer; and Danny, né Michael Madden, then an eighteen-year old IRA volunteer, who had fled to America, only to be called back to Belfast to testify fifteen years later. Henry Stanfield, of Irish Catholic and English Protestant parentage, presides over the hearing. Selected for his neutrality, Stanfield is forced into the historic web of lies, and the truth, which is shaped by the four men's different pasts, remains as elusive as ever. An important novel from post-Troubles Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner is as gripping as it is insightful and powerfully reveals a shared humanity that transcends the bitter divisions of history.
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