NovelWorld

How much trouble and pain does a man have to cause before you warn your loved ones against him? Do people change? Should the past be told? How much does anyone really know about anyone?

Ask 76-year-old Reverend John Ames of Gilead, Iowa, whose heart is failing, who has a few things left to say to his six-year-old son in a long letter of loving advice and a chronicle of three generations – the truth about his grandfather, who took up arms against slavery, his pacifist father, and his troublesome godson, the young sinner he can’t forgive, who may be his redemption.

Warmly human, rich in wisdom and compassion, elegantly-written, filled with provocative insights, this book quietly builds to an emotional wallop of an ending.

GOODBYE TSUGUMI by Banana Yoshimoto

Tsugumi Yamamoto was born frail, expected to die young, and as a consequence has been spoiled rotten. She’s a confirmed pessimist, foul-mouthed, sarcastic, rude, a constant trickster, and there’s nothing she likes better than to torment her optimistic, goody-goody friend, the good-natured but gullible narrator, Maria Shirakawa.

Maria has spent her childhood on the seaside helping Aunt Masako run the Yamamoto Inn and take care of Tsugumi, but the old inn can’t take the competition and is about to be sold. Which is when Tsugumi unexpectedly falls in love with the son of the new hotel’s owner.

Alternately touching and wildly funny, this bittersweet tale of memory and family, friendship and loss, is deceptively simple and touchingly heartfelt.

THE GURU OF LOVE by Samrat Upadhyay

What happens when a teacher falls in love his student? Not what you think.

Ramchandra is a poor math teacher in Kathmandu desperately trying to support his devoted wife and two children. He is falling in love with an unmarried teenage mother studying for her math exams.

Gnawed by money worries, tormented by his in-laws, teased and questioned by other teachers, troubled by his country as Nepal teeters on the edge of civil war, Ramchandra is headed straight for disaster. And then the unexpected intervenes.

Brace yourself for one of the most surprising solutions to adultery ever encountered in fiction. You’ll never forget the incredible wisdom of the guru of love. Whoever that may be.

HANNAH COULTER by Wendell Berry

This is the other half of America, generation after generation of self-sacrificing farmers, biting back their emotions to be tough enough to till the land.

In Wendell Berry’s latest chronicle about this small Kentucky farming town, Hannah Coulter looks back as an old woman on her life, on her daughter, her two husbands and her two sons. It’s a slice of reality, the joys and sorrows and surprises that come like seasons in the harsh, simple life of a self-educated rural woman doing her best to survive.

Fearing education, oblivious to race and politics and the rest of the world, Hannah shares what life has taught her in language that is simple, graceful and wise. She’s a woman who has seen life come and go. She’ll tell you what matters.

HELLO TO ALL THAT by John Falk

John Falk passes as Mister Normal, a fun-loving American college guy with a great sense of humor. He’s living a lie, trapped on the outside of life, unable to connect with other people, growing up in the grips of undiagnosed clinical depression. Now, as long as his Zoloft holds out, desperate, bungling, well-intentioned Falk is risking his life in Bosnia trying to find that career-making story.

He’ll meet Omar, an eighteen-year-old art student destined to become cannon fodder in two weeks, and his sister, Dina, who refuses to escape from Sarajevo without her boyfriend. He’ll get the ultimate interview, all right, with Vlado the anti-sniper, a good man changed by war into a ruthless killer of other snipers.

How do you help others escape when you can’t help yourself?

HOW TO BE GOOD by Nick Hornby

Katie Carr, M.D., is a good person in most ways, a good doctor at a North London clinic, a good liberal concerned about the right things. Her husband of twenty years, David, is a bitter, ironic man who writes a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway.” Katie can’t take the fights anymore. She’s taken a lover. She wants a divorce.

And then Goodness enters the picture. And a faith healer with warm hands. And homeless kids with sticky fingers.

A laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking novel from the popular Brit sensation (author of High Fidelity) that realistically, hilariously, examines the ways we live our lives and what being good means.

I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Every drag queen has a gimmick. Aqua has glass titties that are filled with water. Inside are swimming goldfish.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell is an advertising art director in New York City by day, a notorious drag queen by night, a good boy with a bit of a drinking problem. He meets Jack, a male escort who specializes in punishment, a bad boy with a bit of a crack problem. They fall insanely in love.

Brave, vulnerable, laugh-out-loud funny, this well-written memoir is a plunge into a world of sex, drugs and pretending. It’s as real and American as a Norman Rockwell painting, and is held together with genuine heartfelt emotion.

I’M NOT SCARED by Niccolo Ammaniti

A lean, relentless writing style propels you immediately into a story that is very scary, indeed, as the nine-year-old narrator, Michele, makes a horrifying discovery during the hottest summer of the century, in a deserted farmyard just outside the tiny, five-house village called Acqua Traverse. Papa has come home at last, but there’s a disturbing old man with him. Michele’s terrible secret is enough to destroy the lives of all around him, especially his own family, but he has made a promise he has to keep.

This book, a sensational bestseller in Italy, is so intense you’ll need to take breaks just to catch your breath. Talk about a tour de force. You’ll be racing right up to the last haunting words.

ISTANBUL by Orhan Pamuk

From the Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize comes a memoir masterpiece about growing up

More than just a tribute to this fascinating city, Istanbul is a memory-drenched return to Orhan Pamuk’s childhood, to the Pamuk Apartments, big enough to house all his relatives, where he was born and still lives to this day.

His memoir is a banquet of rich, evocative language with flashes of astonishing honesty, a good-humored, Proust-like plunge through the tricks and triggers of memory. The text is enhanced by almost 200 superbly reproduced photographs, delightful and haunting attempts to capture the elusive charm of huzun, the national melancholy.

Join Pamuk as he rediscovers the terrors and secret pleasures of childhood, from ship-counting on the Bosporus to a Sunday morning spin with his father discussing the meaning of life to the anguish of first love. Torn between east and west, in the history of his beloved city Pamuk finds the history of himself.

KIFFE KIFFE TOMORROW by Faiza Guene

Doria is a thirteen-year-old from Morocco living just outside Paris in Paradise – Paradise Projects, that is.

Talk about pure delight – you’ll wish this book were five times as long.

Doria is a tough, blunt thirteen-year-old fighting to survive in the Paradise housing projects outside Paris – and to grow up at the same time. Her single-parent Mom is a cleaning lady at Formula One Motel, where the maids are about to go on strike. Helped by shrinks and social workers, kissed and then snubbed by an irritating boy, all Doria wants is to feel needed, useful and loved.

Her no-holds-barred take on life as an impoverished outsider in France marks the astonishing debut of a sixteen-year-old Algerian immigrant, Faiza Guene, in this hilariously deadpan, touchingly vulnerable novel.

Take a chance on this one.

THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini

Here’s the book that quietly became a household word.

“There is a way to be good again,” says the mysterious message.

Amir would give anything to change what happened when he was a twelve-year-old boy in Kabul, on the day of his greatest victory. His betrayal of his best friend follows him to America and haunts him for twenty-six years, until only a harrowing journey back into the very heart of darkness can save him.

This is the kind of book that changes you – honest writing, superb plotting, an emotional rollercoaster. Afghanistan comes alive in this heartbreaking tale of guilt and redemption – under the monarchy, under the Russians, under the Taliban – as Amir confronts the demons of his past, and learns at last who he really is.

Highest recommendation.

THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones

Henry Townsend is a 31-year-old black man. He owns 33 slaves.

In this unforgettable first novel and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Edward P. Jones brings to life the citizens and slaves of Manchester County, Virginia, 1855. Looping circles of storytelling move forward and backward in time as Jones chronicles the lives of dozens of black and white characters, all vibrantly alive, entangled in the complex institution of one human being owning another.

These flesh-and-blood people become the foundations of folklore with their loves and hates and betrayals in a novel that is a revelation of human interconnectedness. This is not just the African-American experience. It’s the human experience.

LET IT BE MORNING by Sayed Kashua

Two tanks are blocking the only road. No one will be leaving the little Arab village. And no one knows why.

The young reporter had to get away from the city, from the hate graffiti, the checkpoints, the searches. He’s come back to his old village, bringing his wife and baby daughter. Maybe here, with his family, they’ll find peace.

Maybe not. Author Kashua, who writes for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, has written a quietly brilliant novel about everyday people suddenly trapped by outside forces without electricity, without water, without escape.

Enter an unexplained state of emergency, which may or may not be real, where funeral processions turn into demonstrations, helicopters hover overhead, and nights erupt in shelling. Unforgettable.

LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel

This Booker Prize-winning novel is never what you think, perpetually changing, a fountain of literary invention, satirical, intelligent, suspenseful, surprising, playful, shocking, and hilarious. What more could you want?

“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” says a stranger sitting down at the author’s table, and with that begins this profound exploration of our place in the animal kingdom as well as a challenging new spin on the survivor tale.

What happens when a zookeeper’s sixteen-year-old vegetarian son shares a tiny lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a 450-pound Bengal tiger? You are about to meet a superbly delightful human being, Piscine Molitor Patel. Not to mention losing your heart, if not your arm, to Richard Parker.

LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt

When nine-year-old Robin is found hung from the tupelo tree, the Dufresnes family never recovers from the tragedy. Now, a decade later, no one wants to talk about it. No one except Robin’s bright, defiant twelve-year-old sister Harriet, who is determined to solve the mystery of her brother’s death, faithfully followed by her adoring younger sidekick, Hely Hull, who will recklessly do anything to please her.

As the town of Alexandria, Mississippi, opens up its secrets, the two children become entangled with a Christian revivalist with a truck full of snakes and a ruthless methamphetamine gang who may have been responsible for Robin’s death. In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Member of the Wedding, Tartt’s new book is Southern Gothic with heart, and a good dose of nail-biting suspense.

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The most famous Latin American author, who introduced the world to magical realism with One Hundred Years of Solitude, now discards fantasy to tell his own true story, every bit as fantastic, of the son of a failing pharmacist who refuses to honor his parents’ dream of becoming a professional.

In an assured, mature style, the Nobel Prize-winner sweeps the reader along with endless storytelling invention and a colorful gallery of characters, maiden aunts and radical students (not to mention ten brothers and sisters), notorious ancestors and literary giants.

There’s a new marvel on every page of this autobiography by a relentlessly upbeat, good-natured man in love with life, a timid hero of our time.

LUNCH AT THE PICCADILLY by Clyde Edgerton

Don’t let the sweet little ladies on the cover fool you. You’re about to meet some great old girls – Aunt Lil with her two worn-out wigs, Carla with the foul mouth, and Beatrice who personally knows Walter Cronkite.

And then there’s L. Ray Flowers, a former Baptist preacher with a bad leg and a way with music who’s decided to launch his own religious revolution and take the adoring old ladies at Rosehaven with him.

Author Edgerton is a pro with heart, and knows how to capture the comedy in old age without ever mocking or being saccharine. You can’t marginalize these old folks. They’re real. They’re us.

THE MATTER OF DESIRE by Edmundo Paz Soldan

Leaving behind a steamy, reckless affair with a student, assistant professor Pedro Zabalaga flees back to his hometown in Bolivia to confront the unsolved mystery of his father’s assassination fifteen years ago. He will discover more than he wants to know.

In a world choked with pop technology, through streets blocked with bombs and protesters, through a maze of secrets and rumors, clues and lies as complex as Uncle David’s crossword puzzles, Pedro will search for the man who betrayed his heroic leftist father. He will find his way into the lair of Jaime Villa, infamous drug trafficker and charismatic folk hero, who may have ordered his father’s death.

Author Paz Soldan will have you begging to know the truth. Be prepared for whiplash – this plot has hairpin turns right up to its jaw-dropper ending.

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES by Garcia Marquez

The 90-year-old music reviewer of Barranquilla is about to have the most unpredictable, upsetting experience of his life.

He thinks he’s going into the red light district for one last old man’s fling with nothing less than a virgin. But you’re in the hands of one of the greatest writers of our century, and nothing happens exactly as planned. Nobel Prize-winning Garcia Marquez breaks a ten-year absence from fiction to pen this magnificent little daredevil high-wire act, simple and brief and gorgeous and life-affirming.

Laced with surprises and chuckles and earthy wisdom, studded with unforgettable moments, it’s an elegant comic love story about an old stick-n-the-mud who discovers you’re never too old to accidentally fall in love.

MY DETACHMENT by Tracy Kidder

He’s 23 years old and still bites his fingernails. He’s joined ROTC to become a second lieutenant. He’s told he will not be going to Vietnam. On his first day in Vietnam, Second Lieutenant Tracy Kidder will nearly fall out the open door of an airborne chopper because half his seatbelt is missing.

He’s a raw ROTC officer with a jungle-smart detachment of uncontrollable men, just as his whole generation is swept into student protest against the war.

This touching, thrilling memoir is triggered when a friend mails back to the author the last extant copy of the tragic war novel Kidder wrote when he returned from Vietnam. Confronted by his own youthful, selfishly-glorified tale, he sets out to tell the true story of the bewildered, self-conscious, well-intentioned young man he once was, caught up in the tragedy of a war he knew was wrong.

NICHOLAS by Goscinny and Sempe

For over sixty years this series has been a beloved classic in Europe. Now at last the first volume is translated, and we can see why it’s lasted.

Meet Nicholas, a delightful little guy who makes the best of his scrapes, loves his parents, doesn’t get the best grades, and whose idea of a good time is a friendly fight with his friends. Here’s a Harry Potter for realists, growing up without a speck of magic powers in a world of marbles and bikes where at least he’s not the bottom of the class (that’s Matthew). Written with down-to-earth honesty, here’s a hilariously skewed vision of the adult world as reflected in a classroom of rambunctious little tykes. What a hoot.

NO GOD IN SIGHT by Altaf Tyrewala

Bombay has over 12 million people. Let 78 of them tell you their story in the year’s fastest-moving little novel.

Here’s a whirlwind plot that unfolds in a sequence of interrelated “mini-bites” into the lives of dozens of inhabitants in modern Mumbai.

As each character tells a personal story, the plot gallops along at breakneck pace, from the wealthy to the wretched, from the crowded marketplace to the shanty town built on the roof of a 17-story Muslim skyscraper.

Beneath the candid confessions, as fathers and wives and neighbors tell you their secrets, ripples a plot that links them all together in author Tyrewala’s vision of interrelated humanity in his complex, contradictory, beloved Bombay.