The bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club goes genre-busting in this engrossing and thought-provoking set of short stories that mix history, sci-fi, and fantasy elements with a strong literary voice. Whether examining the machinations of a Northern California cult, in "Always," or a vague but obviously horrific violent act in the eerie title story, the PEN/Faulkner finalist displays a gift for thrusting familiar characters into bizarre, off-kilter scenarios. Fowler never strays from the anchor of human emotion that makes her characters so believable, even when chronicling the history of epidemics, ancient archeological digs, single family submersibles, or fallen angels. She even displays a keen understanding of the historical world around Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in two wonderfully realized historical pieces. Her writing is sharp, playful, and filled with insights into the human condition. The genre shifts might surprise fans of her mainstream hit, but within these pages they'll find familiar dramas and crises that entertain, illuminate, and question the reality that surrounds us. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

The tedious sequel to The Scoop sends Charleston, S.C., grande dame Toots Loudenberry to L.A. to help her daughter, Abby, who is running a struggling tabloid. Toots brings along her best friends—Ida, Sophie, and Mavis—and though the ladies envision some wild times, what they find instead is a haunted Malibu beach house, possible career ruin for Abby, and a dodgy doctor boyfriend for Ida. While there is plenty going on, none of the shenanigans forms what could be called a plot, and too many of the developments are unbelievably outlandish. Meanwhile, none of the characters is especially menaced by her alleged problems, which is almost fine, because Michaels doesn't follow through on the lightweight villainy. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Winner of this year's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Grover's stories work back in time to retrace the rupturing experience of Western schooling on the Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota during the early 20th century. In the title story, narrator Artense's beloved Aunt Shirley is dying of lung cancer as she recounts "the breaking of a culture through the education of its young." In addition to the history, Artense, the oldest child and the first high school graduate, is given Shirley's cherished dancing boots. The intergenerational key is grandma Maggie, who, in "Maggie and Louis," is educated at a mission school and meets her future husband while working as a teacher's assistant at the forbidding Harrod boarding school, which Indian children, taken from their reservations, are forced to attend. Later, in "Three Seasons," Maggie, now a worn-out mother and wife, leaves her drunken and abusive husband and takes her children to live with her alcoholic sister. Even in escape, Maggie has a harsh road ahead, and it's her generous spirit that permeates the stories of the later generations and lends this collection a bright and determined vitality. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

In Kawakami's first novel to be translated into English, a woman fades in and out of the present as she visits the beach town of Manazuru, in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. Kei's husband disappeared when their daughter, Momo, was three. Momo is now 12 and lives with Kei and Kei's mother in Tokyo. Moments shared among the women are pleasant but awkward, due to three generations of unspoken resentment. Some jarring transitions aside, Kawakami's handling of temporal space feels authentic: as Kei kisses her lover in one time and place, the wetness leaves her lips in another; she sits alone on a bench in Tokyo. The real and the fantastical meld as Kei narrowly avoids disaster (she escapes the typhoon that destroys the restaurant where she was dining). Her memories are startlingly vivid, yet their veracity remains uncertain; are the visions she has of her husband with another woman real or imagined? Kawakami has a remarkable ability to obscure reality, fantasy, and memory, making the desire for love feel hauntingly real. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

The bond between teacher and student occupies the center of Canadian Lyon's debut novel covering the three years during which Aristotle tutored the young Alexander the Great, before Alexander's accession to the throne of Macedonia. The philosopher narrates, recounting his arrival in the court of Philip of Macedon, Aristotle's upbringing, and his bond with the ruling family. The teenaged Alexander is headstrong and arrogant, but also insecure and vulnerable. "Every student is both a challenge and a laurel leaf," Aristotle says in an early, disputatious meeting. "I haven't seen anything in you that tells me you're extraordinary in any way." Alexander matures as he absorbs Aristotle's core principles. "You must look for the mean between extremes, the point of balance," Aristotle advises the future military genius. Lyon depicts Aristotle's desire to instill a sense of virtue in his royal pupil in clear, often earthy language, and brings 4th-century Greece to startling life. Lyon richly imagines Aristotle's stint as Macedon's royal academician, who gave Alexander the intellectual tools to not only rule but to civilize. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

A lively, heartfelt novel by Washburn, a professor of Indian studies at the University of Arizona, pursues a near-supernatural encounter between a rare white turkey and a Lakota medicine woman and her granddaughter. Hazel Latour and 12-year-old Stella live on a small farm, on a reservation run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Their daily lives are disrupted when, one Easter Sunday, a glorious white turkey makes her home in their chicken coop. Stella sees this as a good omen, believing the turkey to be holy, but Hazel insists it's just a dumb bird and is unafraid of arousing the ire of the head of the tribal leasing office, George Wanbli, a medicine man who she sees as a rival. Clients flock to Hazel, the bird bringing prosperity, but word gets out about the turkey, provoking Wanbli's jealousy. He attempts to crucify the bird and slaughter her chicks, but they miraculously return to life. Washburn doesn't belabor the Christian metaphor, instead alternating between the points of view of Stella and Hazel to weave a charming, plainspoken tale of two people who have only each other until a bird gives them the courage to battle the forces of corruption and evil. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

A new chief constable, James Blake, arrives at Bradfield CID in McDermid's excellent sixth Tony Hill novel (after Beneath the Bleeding). Since Blake takes a skeptical view of both Tony's contributions as a medical consultant and the team's commitment to cold cases, Det. Chief Insp. Carol Jordan has to tread carefully. Soon deemed too expensive by Blake, Tony turns to nearby Worcester for work, where a grisly case involves the brutal murder and sexual mutilation of teenagers lured to their deaths by a killer who befriends them on a social networking Web site. Connections soon arise between Tony's case and Carol's new murder inquiry in Bradfield, which McDermid develops with her usual systematic ease until all the pieces of the disturbing puzzle fall into place. The increasingly complex and indefinable relationship between Tony and Carol provides a strong emotional undercurrent. McDermid demonstrates once again that she's as adept with matters of the heart as she is with murder. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Fifty brief, knotty thrusts at life's conundrums make up this hip collection. Themes of failure—particularly in love—dominate, as in the compendium of excuses the narrator of "And Since I Couldn't Sleep" makes the morning after she's left the apartment of a man she's finally slept with. In "An Almost Perfect Evening," the buttoned-down narrator wishes his equally well-brought-up date would reveal a drastic fault. A humorous mixup occurs in "Words Matter," when a lonely man in a hotel room calls the number on a card offered by the desk clerk, though he has misunderstood the card's purpose ("So, you're not..." "No, I'm not"). And what to make of a world in which a person can go to bed a bank mogul and wake up a rickshaw driver? Each of these short bursts (most are barely a page long) bubbles with a droll, dry humor handily captured by Soban's dead-on, deadpan translation. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

In this original and evocative novel, Erpenbeck (The Book of Words) charts the history of a property in the Brandenburg hills through snippets—temporarily opened windows offering brief, tantalizing glimpses before slamming shut. There is a Jewish girl murdered during the Holocaust; a disillusioned Communist activist who leaves Nazi Germany and returns after WWII; an architect who collaborated with Albert Speers on the Germania Project; two hard-partying structural engineering students who try to escape to the West, and so on. Amid all these protagonists, there is the recurring figure of "The Gardener," who goes about the bucolic business of maintaining the property with unwavering application. Erpenbeck's elliptical style, rife with naturalistic descriptions of landscape and geology, is better at describing the physical world than the emotional life of her characters, but in so doing, she hammers home her basic point—that people are part of the same continuum as the trees and glaciers that come and go over eons, and that "eternal life already exists during a human lifetime." (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

A second collection of powerful stories by Papernick (The Ascent of Eli Israel) pursues the conflicted inner turmoil of Jews caught in a modern maelstrom. The chilling title story, set during Purim in a New York City Jewish school, pits a well-meaning, beleaguered young teacher against one of his disaffected charges, the angry half-Haitian Junius Barker, who comes to class dressed as a suicide-bombing prophet Mohammed and challenges the teacher to explain why the Jews are the chosen people. In "A Kiss for Mrs. Fisch," a 40-year-old businessman on his first trip to Israel and his first time away from his mother, decides to get a wife, but finds himself swimming uncomfortably between American materialism and ritualistic Judaism. In "The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim," a shell-shocked Iraqi war victim offered work at a Boston-area synagogue believes he sees the imprint of the Madonna in a pulpit, setting off a firestorm between Christian pilgrims and bewildered Jews. And in "The Last Five-Year Plan," the millionaire developer protagonist hits on a brilliant idea to establish accord between Israelis and Palestinians: he'll introduce them to baseball. Papernick's new collection is tight and fearless. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 07/01/2010 | Details & Permalink