Book of the Day!

Shape of Water by Anne Spollen

"I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water."

Magda's mother always said the world was full of strange and beautiful secrets only the two of them could see. But now she's gone and Magda's world is flooded with anxiety and loneliness—and maybe, madness. As an imaginary family of bickering fish begins to torment her, Magda's only outlet is starting beautiful but destructive fires in the marshes near her house. The Shape of Water is a darkly lyrical and surprising tapestry of the mundane and the surreal, in which Magda begins to untangle her family's secrets and search for a stable place in the world.


Review
"Spollen interweaves elemental, evocative images of what is formless and boundless—water, air, grief, death—with what is solid and limited-earth, objects, human love and forgiveness. This enchanting novel starts quietly, draws the reader in and weaves a seductive spell that holds until the last page."--Kirkus (starred review)

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COMING SOON! (November 2008)

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolaño originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in The Part About Amalfitano, a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. The Part About Fate, the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy Fate Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. The Part About the Crimes, the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one. (Nov.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


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Book of the Day!

The book of lies by Brad Meltzer

From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Meltzer (The Book of Fate) deserves credit for an audacious conceit—wedding the biblical fratricide of Abel by his brother Cain with the unsolved 1932 homicide of the father of Jerry Siegel, the creator of iconic comic book hero Superman—but the results are less than convincing. A highly tenuous link between the two murders revolves around the mysterious weapon Cain (the world's greatest villain) used to kill his brother. One of numerous theories is that the weapon was a divine book containing the secrets of immortality. After coming to the aid of a shooting victim, Calvin Harper, a homeless volunteer working in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., soon finds himself hopelessly caught up in a life-and-death quest for the ancient artifact that includes the obligatory secret societies, Nazi conspiracies, enigmatic villains and cryptographic riddles à la The Da Vinci Code. A glut of two-dimensional characters and a plot riddled with coincidences don't help. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Book of the Day!

Gossip of the Starlings by Nina de Gramont

When Catherine Morrow is admitted to the Esther Percy School for Girls, it's on the condition that she reform her ways. But that's before the charismatic and beautiful Skye Butterfield, daughter of the famous Senator Butterfield, chooses Catherine for her best friend. Skye is a young woman hell-bent on a trajectory of self-destruction, and she doesn't care who is taken down with her. No matter the transgression—a stolen credit card, a cocaine binge, an affair with a teacher, an accident that precipitates the end of Catherine's promising riding career—Catherine can neither resist Skye's spell nor stop her downward spiral.

De Gramont's chilling novel is a portrait of an adolescent girl so thoroughly seduced by a peer that she willingly follows her to ruin. Caught in a world that is both appealing and astonishing, these young women are sexual beings with the minds of teenagers: willful, selfish, daring, and cruel—all the while believing they're utterly indestructible.

Review
"De Gramont skillfully sustains a tension that leads to an explosive ending while providing us with characters that go well beyond many recent examples of upper-crust East Coast teenage life. Think Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis with the wisdom of hindsight....A compelling coming-of-age novel....[Gossip of the Starlings] excels in its honest depiction of the interrelationships among teens and with their families and circumstances."—Library Journal (Library Journal)

"Memorable . . . When de Gramont focuses her gaze on her naïve, doomed muses, the book soars. . . . A transfixing confessional about the secret lives of dangerous girls."—Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews)

COMING SOON! (December 2008)

Chasing Smoke by Bill Cameron

Portland homicide detective Skin Kadash just wants to survive cancer treatment so he can get back to work. But when his partner tries to drag him into an unofficial investigation of a series of deaths, he's not interested, he's dead-dog sick and doesn't need the grief until she tells him the victims all suffered from cancer themselves, and all shared one grim thing in common with Skin. His doctor.

The police have closed the books on the deaths, all apparent suicides, yet a mysterious young woman, daughter of the first victim, surfaces and insists that the dead men were all murdered. Before her story can be probed more deeply, she disappears, leaving Kadash with no support from the cops and little to go on except a nagging belief the missing woman knew more than she revealed.

Kadash is left to chase elusive leads among the bitter and broken widows of the dead men. Struggling with his own illness and with a growing rift between himself and his partner, Kadash finds himself entangled in a web of resentment, jealousy, and deceit. Ultimately, he finds that not is he only seeking a missing woman and the truth about the dead men, but also the meaning of his own life in the face of his impending mortality.

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