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Forthcoming Books: October 2014
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Here are some of the best-reviewed books coming up in October. You can request them before they are published, and the library will contact you when they are available.
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Some Luck
by Jane Smiley
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.
Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears. ation
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Desert God : A Novel of Ancient Egypt
by Wilbur A. Smith
Game of Thrones meets Ancient Egypt in this magnificent, action-packed epic. On the gleaming banks of the Nile, the brilliant Taita--slave and advisor to the Pharaoh--finds himself at the center of a vortex of passion, intrigue, and danger. His quest to destroy the Hyksos army and form an alliance with Crete takes him on an epic journey up the Nile, through Arabia and the magical city of Babylon, and across the open seas. With the future of Egypt itself on his shoulders, Taita enters a world where the line between loyalty and betrayal shifts like the desert sands, evil enemies await in the shadows, and death lingers on the edges of darkness.
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Saint Brigid's Bones : A Celtic Adventure
by Philip Freeman
In an evocative Celtic novel set in a time when druids roamed the land, lively young sister Deirdre embarks on a mission to find the stolen bones of her convent's patron saint
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Bathing the Lion
by Jonathan Carroll
Five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream, and, upon waking, realize that they were all at one time “mechanics,” a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos--and now, for the first time, they, the Mechanics, have been called back to duty.
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Full measure : a novel
by T. Jefferson Parker
An Afghanistan War veteran puts his dreams on hold to save his family farm before confronting a terrible choice in the aftermath of his crime-connected brother's disappearance. By the Edgar Award-winning author of The Fallen
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The lesser dead
by Christopher Buehlman
"The secret is, vampires are real and I am one. The secret is, I'm stealing from you what is most truly yours and I'm not sorry... New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody--he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city's sidewalks. The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It's almost too easy. Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him--or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were. And neither are the rest of us"
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The goddess of small victories
by Yannick Grannec
Tasked with retrieving the records of 20th-century hermetic mathematician Kurt Gödel from his embittered widow, Princeton University librarian Anna Roth gradually learns the widow's painful experiences during and after World War II in the shadow of her genius husband. A first novel. 50,000 first printing.
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Prince Lestat : The Vampire Chronicles
by Anne Rice
A tale spanning periods from the ancient to the modern world reunites fans with beloved characters, from Louis de Pointe Lac and the eternally young Armand to David Talbot and Marius, who hear a mysterious voice urging ancients to destroy increasing populations of maverick vampires. 300,000 first printing. Tour.
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Sister golden hair
by Darcey Steinke
"When Jesse's family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she's 12 years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and femininity, the gap between childhood and the adult world. Her father, a former pastor, cycles through spiritual disciplines as quickly as he cycles through jobs. Her mother is dissatisfied, glumly fetishizing the Kennedys and anyone else that symbolizes status and wealth. The residents of the Bent Tree housing development may not hold what Jesse is looking for, but they're all she's got. Her neighbor speaks of her married lover; her classmate playacts being a Bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; the boy she's interested in fantasizes about moving to Hollywood and befriending David Soul. In the midst of it all, Jesse finds space to set up her room with her secret treasures: busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, a Venus flytrap, her Cher 45s, and The Big Book of Burial Rites, which she reads obsessively. But outside awaits all the misleading sexual mores, muddled social customs, and confused spirituality. Girlhood has never been more fraught than in Jesse's telling, its expectations threatening to turn at any point into delicious risk, or real danger"
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Deadline
by John Sandford
In the aftermath of a school board's secret decision to have a local reporter murdered, Virgil Flowers' investigation of a sinister dognapping is interrupted by a suspicious death. By the best-selling author of Storm Front. 600,000 first printing
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A sudden light : a novel
by Garth Stein
A 14-year-old boy's efforts to save his parents' troubled marriage and uphold his dementia-afflicted grandfather's final wishes are shaped by a ghost who cannot rest until past debts are paid. By the best-selling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain. 300,000 first printing.
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Lila
by Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.
Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church—the only available shelter from the rain—and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security.
Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award Finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.
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Nora Webster : a novel
by Colm Tóibín
"From one of contemporary literature's bestselling, critically acclaimed and beloved authors, a magnificent new novel set in Ireland, about a fiercely compelling young widow and mother of four, navigating grief and fear, struggling for hope. Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín's superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning empathy and kindness, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven--herself. Nora Webster is a masterpiece in character study by a writer at the zenith of his career, "beautiful and daring" (The New York Times Book Review) and able to "sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations" (USA TODAY). In Nora Webster, Tóibín has created a character as iconic, engaging and memorable as Madame Bovary or Hedda Gabler"
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A brief history of seven killings : a novel
by Marlon James
"From the acclaimed writer of The Book of Night Women comes a masterful novel framed as a fictional oral history that explores the events and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the political turmoil on Jamaica in the late 1970s"
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Gretel and the Dark
by Eliza Granville
A dark, distinctive and addictively compelling novel set in fin-de-siècle Vienna and Nazi Germany—with a dizzying final twist.
Vienna, 1899. Josef Breuer—celebrated psychoanalyst—is about to encounter his strangest case yet. Found by the lunatic asylum, thin, head shaved, she claims to have no name, no feelings—to be, in fact, not even human. Intrigued, Breuer determines to fathom the roots of her disturbance.
Years later, in Germany, we meet Krysta. Krysta’s Papa is busy working in the infirmary with the ‘animal people,’ so little Krysta plays alone, lost in the stories of Hansel and Gretel, the Pied Piper, and more. And when everything changes and the world around her becomes as frightening as any fairy tale, Krysta finds her imagination holds powers beyond what she could have ever guessed
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