The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce: Sam and his friends are like any gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom. Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon: In 1964, 12-year-old Cory Mackenson lives with his parents in Zephyr, Alabama. It is a sleepy, comfortable town. Cory is helping with his father’s milk route one morning when a car plunges into the lake before their eyes. His father dives in after the car and finds a dead man handcuffed to the steering wheel. Their world no longer seems so innocent: a vicious killer hides among apparently friendly neighbors. Other, equally unsettling transmogrifications occur: a friend’s father becomes a shambling bully under the influence of moonshine, decent men metamorphose into Klan bigots, “responsible” adults flee when faced with danger for the first time. With the aid of unexpected allies, Cory faces hair-raising dangers as he seeks to find the secret of the dead man in the lake.

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman: The year is 1878. Paris is the centre of the art world, and in the heart of its thriving, vibrant community live two sisters, Mary and Lydia Cassatt. One is at the peak of her career, as the other one reaches her moment of greatest frailty. Lydia Cassatt is dying of Bright’s disease. Conscious of her approaching death, she contemplates the narrowing of her world with courage, openness and dignity. But for Mary, an independent, ambitious painter, life is unimaginable without her beloved sister. Torn apart by the idea of losing Lydia, Mary embarks on a series of five paintings. And as the emotional tension between the sisters rises, they become unable to avoid inevitable questions about love and passion, about live and death…Lyrical and tender, “Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper” is a profoundly moving, unsentimental and hugely life-affirming story of the immortality, which both love and art can bestow.

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman: Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks’ duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.

Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem: Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems-there’s a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.

Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he’s falling a little in love with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor’s Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of a bar called the Fickle Muse.

Mixing elements of sci-fi, noir, and mystery, this clever first novel from the author of Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, funny, and satiric look at all that the future may hold.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Feed by Mira Grant
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb

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Kraken by China Mieville: In a London filled with magic and sorcery, a rare squid specimen disappears – it’s an embryonic god with huge potential, don’t you know – so beware the sect of squid worshipers or the Londonmancers who can see the future in the city’s entrails.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine: In Schine’s latest endeavor, Jane Austen’s beloved classic Sense and Sensibility undergoes a modern day makeover. Wealthy businessman Joseph Weissmann decides to divorce his sweet wife Betty (a.k.a. Mrs. Dashwood), citing irreconcilable differences (i.e., a younger woman enters the picture). He is 78, she is 75, and their marriage has lasted almost 50 years. Betty suffers further insult when she is turned out of their elegant upper West Side home and forced to relocate to a small cottage in Westport. Along with her daughters, the sensible Annie and the high-strung Miranda, Betty must learn to forge new relationships and adjust to a world of vastly reduced circumstances.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow: In the 1980s, 11-year-old Rachel Morse is sent to live with her paternal grandmother in Portland. Raised mostly overseas by her Danish mother and African American father, she is the only survivor from a mysterious tragedy that resulted in the death of her mother and younger siblings. Rachel doesn’t quite fit into her grandmother’s predominantly black neighborhood: her light brown skin, striking blue eyes, and bookish ways instantly brand her an outsider. As she learns to adjust to her new surroundings and navigate the perils of adolescence, she must also come to terms with her family’s sad, complex history.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman: In these engaging and quirky essays, Batuman chronicles her academic misadventures in the field of Russian literature. A conference on Isaac Babel that she helps organize at Stanford University goes hilariously awry in “Babel in California.” In “Who Killed Tolstoy?” she concocts a theory that Tolstoy was murdered in order to secure the grant funds necessary to attend a conference at his estate. She explores Dostoevsky’s enigmatic masterpiece in the title essay. Using Russian novelists and their works as a springboard in her quest for meaning, Batuman observes: “Tatyana and Onegin, Anna and Vronsky, Ivan and Vera: at every step, the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love [appear] bound up with Russian.”

And a couple more:

~ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
~ The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

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The Art Student’s War by Brad Leithauser: It’s 1943 in Detroit, and World War II is firmly under way. The thriving city is busy turning out an astonishing number of guns, tankers, and airplanes in support of the war effort. Bianca “Bea” Paradiso, an 18-year-old art student, does her part by volunteering to sketch wounded soldiers at a local hospital. As Bea struggles with her attraction to one of the injured men, she must also confront a once-stable home life that threatens to implode. In The Art Student’s War, Leithauser explores World War II’s effect on one family and portrays a uniquely American city during its glory days.

True Confections by Katharine Weber: In the 1970s, WASPy teenager Alice Tatnall accidentally sets fire to a friend’s house and is branded “Arson Girl.” The label causes her to be rejected, first by her humiliated parents and then by a college admissions department. Alice finds solace and surprising enjoyment working in a New Haven, Connecticut candy factory called Zip’s. Founded in 1924 by the Jewish Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky, Zip’s is famous for it’s “Dat’s Tasty!” company slogan and its assortment of chocolate-covered (and racially suspect) Little Sammies. When Alice marries the Zip’s candy heir, she finds herself immersed in a whole new, and not so sweet, way of life.

Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom: In these twelve stories, divided into two sets of four linked stories and four standalone stories, families, friends, and unlikely lovers discover the many ways that love can upend our lives. The first series of stories charts the relationship of William and Clare, two longtime, middle-aged friends who suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves passionately attracted to one another despite being married to other people. The second series follows Juli and her stepson Lionel, who, after the death of Lionel’s jazz musician father, express their mutual grief in a way that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives. Each story is a small tribute to human nature at its best and worst.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James: We “turn for relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge to these unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world,” P.D. James writes of the importance of the detective novel. The author’s overview on the genre was written at the request of Oxford’s Bodleian Library as a primer for interested readers. James was happy to oblige, drawing on an insider’s perspective to offer her thoughts on the writers and the social contexts that spawned – and perpetuated – the (primarily British) detective novel. James pays homage to such stalwarts as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie, as well as some writers new to the scene who will surely push detective fiction across cultural and geographical boundaries to even greater heights.

The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee: In Lee’s fourth novel, an 11-year-old refugee during the Korean War is separated from her siblings and brought to an orphanage by an American soldier. She slowly recovers with the help of a minister’s wife, who is herself suffering from having witnessed her parents’ murder at the hands of Japanese soldiers in 1934.

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Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich: Irene America keeps two diaries – one she knows her husband is secretly reading, and one that contains the truth about their unraveling marriage and life with three children.

The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: Impoverished Nick and Suzy are fond of each other but determined to find rich spouses. They marry anyway so that they can live off the wedding presents and honeymoon villas offered by their wealthy friends – but with the understanding that either can leave the other if a better offer appears. As they negotiate society with a satiricial eye, they find that things aren’t quite that simple.

Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda: It tells the story of Camille, a literally starving artist; Philobert, a socially awkward history buff; Franck, a foul-mouthed chef; and Franck’s grandmother, Paulette, who is desperate to avoid ending life in a nursing home. Each has a past of rejection to overcome in order to form a new and unconventional family.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford: Michael Crawford, who grew up in a commune in California, has always led something of a dual life. One part of him is in love with motorcycle engines and the type of people who repair them, while the other part is committed to the pursuit of knowledge. But according to the argument of Shop Class as Soulcraft, those two parts of the human experience ought not to be in conflict: physical work has a highly intellectual component requiring real knowledge and practice. Crawford first reports (and laments) how we’ve arrived at such a conflict in American life. He then draws alternately on his philosophical background and the daily experience of motorcycle work to argue for a new dedication to working with one’s hands.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon: Michael Chabon is a father of four, and despite his success as an author, he is still willing to define a father as “a man who fails every day.” This essay collection might be called an effort to come to peace with his definition, but the effort sounds far too serious for a book that also includes an invective against Captain Underpants and a praise song for Planet of the Apes (the TV show, mind you), as well as reflections on Judaism and the value of Chabon’s MFA program. Somewhere between the two extremes, the explorations and epiphanies of earnest father and geeky kid, Chabon finds his voice – and it turns out to be the same one readers already love.

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Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach: Steinbach always prided herself on being an independent woman. But independence does not always go hand in hand with knowing oneself. This was the dilemma Steinbach faced as she traveled through Europe without hesitation. The characters she encounters, the places she stays, and the person she becomes make for the adventure of a lifetime.

Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay: Jeanette Hochmann of Miami is a 42-year-old single parent writing a book about Clara Wieck Schumann, the wife of 19th-century composer Robert Schumann and a gifted pianist in her own right. What fascinates Jeanette, and has stumped historians for years, is Clara’s inexplicable attachment to her husband’s handsome young protege, Johannes Brahms. Were the pair simply friends, as they claimed? Or was the Schumanns’ marriage devastated by a secret love affair? And is it ever truly possible for a man and a woman to maintain a meaningful, but platonic, relationship? With the help of a charismatic doctor, Jeanette delves further into Clara’s past and discovers unsettling parallels to her own troubled life.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker: Paul Chowder, a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck poet, is struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology. While he has long since given up writing in rhyme, he prefers writers who do – in fact, the collection giving him so much trouble is called Only Rhyme. As in most Baker novels, small actions and thoughts dominate. Although he can’t quite seem to finish the introduction, Chowder is happy to opine about various poets (rhyming and not – from Tennyson and Longfellow to Merwin and Bishop), the vicissitudes of his love life, and various other minutiae from his particular, frustrated poetic point of view.

Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan: Arriving in Ann Arbor, Michigan, mysterious stranger David Loogan soon begins working for Gray Streets, a literary crime fiction magazine. He soon agrees to help the magazine’s owner, Tom Kristoll, bury the body of a man Kristoll claims he killed in self-defense – partly out of guilt over the affair Loogan is carrying on with Kristoll’s beautiful wife. After Kristoll plummets to his own death from his office window and the body they’d buried together is discovered, Loogan becomes Detective Elizabeth Waishkey’s main suspect. But the writers and editors of Gray Streets keep turning up dead – and Loogan finds himself on the run, searching for answers of his own.

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The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt: In Byatt’s latest, she looks at the lives of the Wellwood family from the Victorian era through World War I. Olive Wellwood is a famous children’s book author who also writes private books for each of her seven children. Family secrets are plentiful and the Great War looms.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: When a natural disaster destroys most of human life, only two women survive. Can they remain in hiding? Are their families and lovers alive? What about the men from nearby Painball prison? As gene-spliced animals roam the land, it is indeed a strange new world.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby: Duncan is obsessed with the singer Tucker Crowe. When Duncan breaks up with Annie, she begins an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, who is on the verge of releasing his first album in ten years.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd: Here Ackroyd posits a world where Mary Shelley, author of the Frankenstein story, knows Victor and his Creature personally.

Angel Time: Songs of the Seraphim by Anne Rice: Rice offers a metaphysical thriller about angels and assassins in her 29th book. In the present day, a soulless man – a contract killer – meets someone who offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. He is carried back in time to the 13th century on a quest for salvation.

Other books that caught my eye:

The Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger
The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Last Child by John Hart
The City and the City by China Mieville

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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.

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The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters is a ghost story in which a doctor is summoned to a grand house in rural Warwickshire and confronts old family secrets.

This month, Bookmarks had a big spread on the works of Shakespeare, and literary works surrounding the world of Shakespeare and his plays. There were a lot of great titles suggested.

The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd takes place in the 19th century, before the real-life Mary Lamb murdered her mother and a decade before her brother, English essayist Charles Lamb, published Tales from Shakespeare. Charles, a young writer, and Mary, constrained by domesticity, escape their lives by reading the Bard. Then a young bookseller seduces the siblings with a “lost” Shakespearean play. But is it authentic – or a fantastic hoax?

The Quality of Mercy by Faye Kellerman. This novel historicizes the young actor-playwright William Shakespeare’s life. In Elizabethan England, Rebecca Lopez and her converso family (Spanish Jews posing as Anglicans and practicing their faith in secret) smuggle Jews out of Spain. At the same time, the young Will seeks revenge for the death of his mentor. Soon, Will and Rebecca meet in an unlikely place – and their lives change forever.

The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosembaum. Drawing on voluminous research and inside information on many key Shakespeare critics, scholars, and stage directors, Rosenbaum offers a treatise on Shakespeare’s body of work and its handling four centuries after the Bard’s death. He includes tales of messy and unsavory academic feuds over the sources of his plays – and yes, even his punctuation and spelling – as well as discussions on King Lear’s final words, the origins of Shakespeare’s characters, and the relative merits of film versus stage productions.

The magazine also had a profile on Jodi Picoult, and asked her for some book recommendations, one of which was The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block. Picoult said, “It’s a terrific first novel about a boy whose mother has early onset Alzheimer’s and an old man who can’t forget the things he wishes he could. I loved the way the two story lines meshed.”

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