Found in the pages of Bookmarks Magazine, July/August issue

Once again, my issue of Bookmarks Magazine has me adding titles to my to-read/wish list. These are the titles that caught my eye from the latest issue:

In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisa-Beth Hyde: When a mismatched tour group – a 27-year-old guy on the prowl, a Harvard professor, a 70-year-old couple, and an overweight teen, among others – embarks on a 13-day rafting journey down the Colorado River, their lives change forever.

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley: This novel tells the story of a doomed settlement of Europeans in Greenland, offering a fascinating look at how people can refuse to adapt to their environment.

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville: In the summer of 1997, Marissa Bishop, eight months pregnant with their first child, asks her husband to hunt down the antique cradle her mother took when she abandoned Marissa and her father ten years earlier. Devoted to his wife, Matt sets out across the Midwest with a single clue from his father-in-law. A decade later in Chicago, famous children’s author Renee Owen copes with memories of her first love, a soldier who died in Vietnam. There is also a secret she has kept from her husband of 20 years as their son leaves for a tour of duty in Iraq. Both Matt and Renee find they must confront the past to address its lingering hold on the present.

All Other Nights by Dara Horn: Fleeing an arranged marriage during the Civil War, 19-year-old Jacob Rappaport, son of a wealthy Jewish New York merchant, joins the Union army and is quickly enlisted as a spy. His assignment: to poison his uncle, a fanatic New Orleans Jew accused of plotting President Lincoln’s assassination. Jacob’s follow-up mission is no easier. Ordered by his superiors to infiltrate a Virginia spy ring by marrying its beautiful leader, Jacob finds himself falling in love with the very woman he must betray.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry: In a city where it never stops raining, the various crimes that plague the citizenry are directed to a single, massive detective agency. Charles Urwin was a mere clerk there, until his boss, master detective Travis Sivart, went missing. Now Urwin, reluctantly, and perhaps mistakenly, promoted to detective, must investigate Sivart’s whereabouts with only the help of a narcoleptic assistant and the Manual of the title. But the situation grows more complicated when Urwin discovers that Sivart’s brilliant casework was not all it was cracked up to be. To make matters worse, a mysterious criminal taunts the city’s denizens in their dreams.