May 2009
May 2009
The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith – Tom Rob Smith’s first novel, Child 44 was an international publishing sensation. Not just an immediate New York Times bestseller, it was one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Now, Tom Rob Smith returns with a new, hotly anticipated follow-up to his extraordinary debut, set in the turmoil and upheaval of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. (May 18, 2009) 
Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir by Lawrence Block – (May 19, 2009) 
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child – 13th Jack Reacher adventure (May 19, 2009)
The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly – Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career. (May 26, 2009)
The City and the City by China Mieville - Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other–real or imagined. (May 26, 2009)
The Last War by Ana Menendez - Flash, a photojournalist, chases conflicts around the globe with her war correspondent husband, Brando. Now Brando is in Iraq, awaiting her arrival. Yet instead of racing to join him, Flash idles in Istanbul, vaguely aware that her marriage is faltering.A breathtaking novel of love, war, and betrayal. (May 26, 2009)
Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker – After the Singularity, everyone and everything is sentient and telepathic. Aliens notice and invade Earth. (May 26, 2009)
Angel’s Tip by Alafair Burke – Second in the NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher series after Dead Connection. (May 26, 2009)
Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman – (May 26, 2009)
The Beacon by Susan Hill – The farmhouse was called The Beacon and they had been born and reared there, May, Colin, Frank and Berenice, but only May had been left for the last 27 years… May had been the clever daughter and she had escaped the shelter of The Beacon, just once, to go to university. But in London she had been pursued by nameless terrors, the victim of fears and anxieties. Now she was the spinster daughter, the one who stayed, who nursed her father after his accident and looked after her mother in her old age. Frank was the one who got away. He married and moved on. But why does no one ever mention Frank’s name? (May 26, 2009)
Wanting by Richard Flanagan – One of our most inventive and important international literary voices, Richard Flanagan now delivers Wanting, a powerful and moving tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human. (May 2009)Â 
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline. Are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? (May 2009)
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen - It follows twelve-year-old master map maker T.S. Spivet on a cross country adventure. SPIVET has already garnered enormous attention here and abroad, and will be published in an astounding fifteen countries. (May 2009)
Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears – Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and arms dealer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents. Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home. Chronologically, it moves backwards–from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890, and finally to Venice in 1867– and in the process the quest to uncover the truth plays out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race. (May 2009)
Love and Obstacles : Stories by Aleksandar Hemon – (May 2009)
Anybody Any Minute by Julie Mars – Ellen Kenny has a big mouth and a penchant for telling the truth, which is why she’s just been fired from yet another high-profile NYC job. Determined to make the most of this unexpected free time, she heads to Montreal to visit her sister. On the way, she spots a tumbledown upstate farmhouse—one she’s seen in her dreams for years—and impulsively buys it on a hefty credit card advance. (May 2009)
The Pig Comes to Dinner by Joseph Caldwell – (May 2009)
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin – About a young immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn torn between her Irish roots and the man who wins her heart. (May 2009)
The Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone – On her seventh birthday, Annie’s con artist father left her behind at his boyhood home, then he raced out of her life. Years later, Annie, now a top Navy jet pilot, returns home on her 26th birthday. But everything changes when Jack calls to say he is dying, and needs her to fly to St. Louis to bring him the airplane he gave her the day he left. And if she does, he will give her the one thing she always wanted, that he always lied to her about the name of her mother. (May 2009)
The Family Man by Elinor Lipman – An hysterical phone call from his ex-wife and a familiar face in a photograph up end Henry Archer’s well ordered life. They bring him back into contact with the child he adored, a short-term stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage long ago. When Thalia and her complicated social life move into the basement of Henry’s Upper West Side townhouse, she finds a champion in her long-lost father, and he finds new life—and maybe even new love—in the commotion.(May 2009)
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold - A grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, thrilling and darkly comic, that dramatizes the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity. (May 2009)
Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk – Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. (May 2009)
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell - Even though hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows all too well how tough it is to survive in 1931 Berlin, she is devastated when she sees a photograph of her brother’s body posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Ernst, a cross-dressing lounge singer at a seedy nightclub, had many secrets, a never-ending list of lovers, and plenty of opportunities to get into trouble. Hannah delves into the city’s dark underbelly to flush out his murderer, but the late night arrival of a five-year-old orphan on her doorstep complicates matters. Her investigations into Ernst’s murder and Anton’s parentage uncover political intrigue and sex scandals in the top ranks of the rising Nazi party… (May 2009)
The PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 edited by Laura Furman – Featuring stories selected from thousands published in literary magazines, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 is studded with great writers such as Junot Diaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and Paul Theroux, as well as new voices. The winning stories feature locales as diverse as post-war Vietnam, a retirement community in Cape Town, South Africa, an Egyptian desert village, and a permanently darkened New York City; the dizzying range of characters include a Russian mail-order bride in Finland, a rebellious Dominican girl in New Jersey, and a hallucinating British Gulf War veteran. The stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the twenty winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. (May 2009)
Paper Butterfly by Diane Wei Liang – Second installment in the successful Mei Wang detective series — a riveting tale of intrigue, culture clash, and missing persons in modern China. Set in Beijing. (May 2009)
Death of a Pope by Piers Paul Read – a novel of intrigue, church espionage, and an attempt to destroy the longest continuous government in the world-the Papacy. (May 2009)
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris – 9th in the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series. (May 2009)
The Way Home by George Pelecanos – A brilliant new novel about fathers and sons and the dangers of modern life. (May 2009)
Alexandria by Lindsay Davis – The new Falco novel finds Lindsey Davis’s First Century detective Marcus Didius Falco and his partner Helena Justina investigating crime in the famous city of Alexandria. (May 2009)
Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child – William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor-a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta undertake their own private-and decidedly unorthodox-quest for the truth. (May 2009)
Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey - Lushly written with rich and vivid characters, SANTA OLIVIA is Jacqueline Carey’s take on comic book superheroes and the classic werewolf myth. (May 2009)
Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley - In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York’s most glamorous and colorful socialites. As Buckley tells the story of their final year together, he takes readers on a surprisingly entertaining tour through hospitals, funeral homes, and memorial services, capturing the heartbreaking and disorienting feeling of becoming a fifty-five-year-old orphan. Buckley maintains his sense of humor by recalling the words of Oscar Wilde: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” (May 2009)
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