Barbara's Byline

Our top twelve hardcover FICTION and NON-FICTION bestsellers are always 20% off for P&P members. This week, to help your holiday shopping, we are printing our complete bestseller lists along with our booksellers' recommendations from our catalogue. Click here to read our 2009 Holiday Newsletter and more about all of our favorite books which we are discounting 20% until the end of the month!

FICTION BESTSELLERS

WOLF HALL By Hilary Mantel
The latest Booker Prize-winner opens in 1527, as Henry VIII is trying to get rid of his wife of sixteen years, Katherine. He is interested in Anne Boleyn, a well-connected young woman at court who has kept him interested by refusing to consummate their relationship until they are married.  Thomas Cromwell is the King’s man to move things along. Cromwell’s eye is on the main chance. “You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.” Although society no longer burns people at the stake or beheads them, jockeying for political position and religious hysteria endure. The book’s appeal is not only in its oft-told story, but Mantel’s particular telling of the story. Humor and horror are close together—that is a characteristic of Mantel’s writing and what gives her narrative so much power. - Mark LaFramboise

THE LACUNA By Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna is an engrossing historical fiction, told as the journals of Harrison Shepherd, a fictional author who reflects on the crowds, caprices, and injustices of 20th-century North America. This is the first novel in nine years by Barbara Kingsolver, and it boasts her courageous—but always literary—concern for injustice and cultural difference. Born into a confused heritage—his father absent, his mother Mexican—Harrison’s experience encapsulates that of both countries: through his eyes we witness the Bonus Army riots, the murals of Diego Rivera, Trotsky’s assassination, World War II metal drives, and the McCarthy trials. Lively renderings of Frida Kahlo, Trotsky, and even Richard Nixon combine with documentary support from Times articles (authentic and fabricated) and a heartbreaking concern for the fate of truth in the infancy of the media age to create the rare sort of novel that is both totally absorbing in its fiction and yet profoundly engages the reader with the world of fact beyond its pages. -  Lila Stiff

TOO MUCH HAPPINESS: Stories By Alice Munro

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE By Orhan Pamuk
Kemal is a rising young businessman about to become engaged to the ideal woman, when he falls in love with 18-year-old Fusun, a boutique clerk. As this new relationship bursts over him, Kemal is so impassioned that he doesn’t see why he can’t have a wife and a lover. Both women dump him, but he remains obsessed with Fusun, eventually tracking her down and courting her for eight years, even though she’s married by then. Kemal, though self-absorbed, is so earnest and inventive in his plans and theories that he’s an unexpectedly engaging protagonist. And the inward focus of his emotional story is balanced by his habit of collecting objects for his museum. Started as part of his obsession, this collection of figurines, candles, glasses—anything related to Fusun—expands to document a wide range of Turkish life from the mid-1970s on. In fact Pamuk, the Nobel laureate, has been working for the last decade to establish such a museum as a tribute to his own enduring beloved, Istanbul. - Barbara Meade

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK By A.S. Byatt
This big, bold, and ambitious novel tells the story of a group of artists—playwrights, potters, puppeteers, and writers—in the last years of the 19th century and leading up to the onset of the First World War. At the center is Olive Wellwood, a writer of fairy stories, her large family, and a close-knit group of Fabians (a progressive British political movement that laid the foundation of today’s Labour Party) and their children. The two families share parties, vacations, artistic workshops, and trips abroad, oblivious of the dark political clouds that will so dramatically change everything. This is a rich historical novel of ideas and aesthetics, showcasing a fascinating and too-little-explored period.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS By Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore taps into 21st-century unease through her young protagonist, Tassie Keljin. Tassie grew up in a hick town in the Middle West and reflects on the world she moves into at the prestigious state university. In order to make ends meet, she applies for a position in child care and finds one with Sarah Brink, a woman who owns a French restaurant in town. She accompanies the woman when she adopts a biracial two-year-old and becomes a nanny for the child. All of this provides opportunities for Tassie to reflect on food culture, residual racism, urban/rural discontinuities. Furthermore, Tassie’s brother enlists in the Army because his grades aren’t good enough to get him into college. Moore tackles the gut issues of our times: war/peace, race, and class. She does so in her distinctive voice, joking and punning so that we are laughing and nodding at the same time.

THE HELP By Kathryn Stockett
Kathryn Stockett brings the early civil rights era to life through the perspectives of four women - two black and two white, who all are attempting to maintain the course of their lives within strict societal limiting factors - Jim Crow segregation, family and peer expectations, Southern courtesy, and the Junior League. Shifting the narrative voice among the women, The Help reveals their various personal desires, motivations, and struggles, which result in deep changes in their small town in Mississippi. A gripping and insightful representation of this painful time in our country's history. - Andrew Getman

BROOKLYN By Colm Toibin
Elis is an Irish girl pushed by her more energetic sister to immigrate to Brooklyn, where the prospects for work and romance seem more promising.  Elis herself is doubtful about leaving her beloved mother and small town, in spite of the constricted life there. The Brooklyn she finds in the early 1950s, the rooming house and her job in the small department store, are part of a world that I remember well, with the hominess and the conservatism of those years. In time Elis finds love and a second family with Tony, an Italian-American. When she is called back to Enniscorthy after a sudden death in the family, she finds herself a different person than the one she was. Colm Tóibín‘s considerable talent and finesse are well displayed in this charming story. - Carla Cohen

LA'S ORCHESTRA SAVES THE WORLD  By Alexander McCall Smith

BRIGHT WINGS: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds By Billy Collins, David Allen Sibley
This year David Sibley has also ventured into literary anthologies. His sparkling, full-color paintings of birds, with informative captions, accompany the more than 100 selections in Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds. Gathered by the former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, this collection includes Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper,” Robert Penn Warren’s “Evening Hawk,” poems by no fewer than seven different poets on owls, and many more, by writers from Chaucer to Whitman to Mary Oliver. - Barbara Meade

HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel By Jeannette Walls
As she did in her memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls spins family dysfunction into a riveting, triumphant tale. Walls writes Half Broke Horses, a “true-life novel,” in the voice of her spirited, defiant grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Lily grew up in the Depression’s grueling rural poverty, moving from a Texas dugout to a failing New Mexico ranch. She was forced to leave school when her father spent her tuition money on a pack of great Danes, but she still became a teacher, a rancher, and a pilot. Think Little House on the Prairie, with a bit more grit and a lot more sass. - Elizabeth Sher

NEW YORK: The Novel By Edward Rutherfurd

NON-FICTION BESTSELLERS

STONES INTO SCHOOLS By Greg Mortenson
Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders. He shares his vision to promote peace through education and literacy.

WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED By Gail Collins

READ MY PINS: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box By Madeleine Albright

HALF THE SKY  By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn

THE HAWK AND THE DOVE By Nicholas Thompson
It was George Kennan who promulgated the containment policy. In his famous long telegram from Moscow, he guessed at Soviet intentions and urged that the U.S. had to contain the USSR. In his perceptive and intriguing book, the very young Nicholas Thompson offers a joint biography of Kennan and Paul Nitze, who opposed Kennan’s position of waiting patiently until the USSR imploded. He advocated a strong military buildup, although, in truth, he was very cautious about deploying the weapons. Both men came from the same upper class background and Ivy League schools. Both served in important civilian positions during World War II and both believed deeply in public service. Kennan had served in the Embassy in the Soviet Union and was able to hold opposing views about our one-time ally. Nitze seemed to see the situation as either/or – either the Soviets were our friends or they were our enemies. Thompson does an admirable job of crafting a vast trove of material into a readable history. It is still not clear whether the military build-up prolonged the Cold War with a paranoid foe or contributed to its fall.

OPEN: An Autobiography By Andre Agassi

THE PLEASURES OF COOKING FOR ONE By Judith Jones
The great Knopf editor who played an instrumental role in bringing Julia Child’s recipes to American cooks, follows her memoir, The Tenth Muse, with a useful cookbook about taking care of and nurturing yourself. After her husband died, Jones taught herself how to cook and savor a good meal for one.  “This book is for those of you who want to roll up your sleeves and enjoy, from day to day, one of the great satisfactions of life.”  

WHAT THE DOG SAW: And Other Adventures By Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, the master of the quirky mashup and incomparable author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, serves up a feast of his favorite New Yorker pieces in What The Dog Saw. The eponymous essay is a profile of the charismatic dog trainer, Cesar Millan; in his signature counterintuitive approach, Gladwell is less interested in Millan than he is in what’s going on inside Millan’s dog’s head, and by the end of the piece, even cat people will be eager to know. Gladwell’s insatiable curiosity about other people’s motivations and desires leads to such diverse ruminations as who’s most likely to be hired, who’s most likely to make a killing in investments, and why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one ketchup. - Barbara Meade

SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT By Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford began to question his satisfaction as a “knowledge worker,” and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. Shop Class as Soulcraft is an absorbing personal labor-history-cum-memoir, a philosophical treatise on the essence of work, and an analysis of America’s economic and vocational future, reminiscent of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Following Crawford through the mental and mechanical process of a manual trade will order, link, and electrify many of the vague discontents and notions you might have about the nature and quality of work and a good life in our times. This is an especially thought-provoking choice for college students or recent graduates.

INSIDE OF A DOG: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know By Alexandra Horowitz

THE LEXICOGRAPHER'S DILEMMA By Jack W. Lynch