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HARDCOVER FICTION
     
Summer is the time for many of us to catch up on our fiction reading, and there is so much excellent new fiction that we included the hardcovers on our list, though we recognize that many prefer paperback. For those who are not traveling or those traveling by car, you may want to select a couple of these.

The young Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri mines family life in her gorgeous second book of stories, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH (Knopf, $25). What Lahiri’s characters go through is specific to the experience of Bengalis finding their bearings in the United States, yet the stories remind us of all that we have in common, whatever our backgrounds. The cultural confusion between parents and children is one more overlay in the emotional confusion within families. Carla Cohen

Hans van den Broek is left alone in post-9/11 New York after his wife Rachel decamps to London with their small son. Hans, in his loss and passivity, becomes involved with a group of cricket players, all from former colonies. The leitmotif in Joseph O’Neill’s  NETHERLAND (Pantheon, $23.95) is displacement (hence the title), echoed both by Hans, originally from the Netherlands, and his friend, a larger-than-life Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans personifies a man without strong beliefs or affections (except for his son) although he might like to have both. What makes this spare book so notable is the absence of self-pity or self-justification. The sadness is palpable but understated. Carla Cohen

In PEOPLE OF THE BOOK (Viking, $25.95), Geraldine Brooks imagines the story of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, the pride of the National Museum of Bosnia, from its inception in 15th- century Spain, through its journey after the Jews were expelled and traveled east. Although she knows the moving story of what happened during World War II, Brooks lets her protagonist, a book restorer, track down the details from physical clues left in the book. Carla Cohen

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY (Dial, $22), by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is a charming homage to the power of literature, in which an author named Juliet Ashton receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, who found her name in a used book of Charles Lamb’s essays. The heroic story of Guernsey, an island off the east coast of England that was occupied by the Nazis during WWII, is told through Juliet’s letters to friends and from friends to Juliet. The book club the people of Guernsey formed, for entertainment, yes, but also as a cover, gives the name to this novel. Carla Cohen Available in July.

George Eliot lived with George Lewes for twenty years; the two never married, and after Lewes died, Eliot married Johnny Cross, a much younger man, who was bent on rescuing her. They honeymooned in Venice. A hundred years later, in Deborah Weisgall’s THE WORLD BEFORE HER (Houghton Mifflin, $25), Malcolm takes his bride Caroline Spingold, a sculptor, to Venice. Both men want to possess their women, and to act on their behalf. The two women are in no way related except through their own need for self- expression and agency. Weisgall, in her first novel, does a graceful job of presenting each woman in her time. Carla Cohen

EXILES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23) is an historic novel based on the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ron Hansen’s beautiful book weaves Hopkins’s life with one of his major poems, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hopkins had a brilliant and original mind and he was out of step with the demands for strict obedience in the Jesuit order he belonged to. For a period he gave up poetry, but the wreck, with five nuns aboard who perished in the cold and storm, loosened something in him. Hansen imagines the life of each of the nuns and what drew her to the Franciscan order. This novel pays homage to the creative spirit that disturbs ordinary men, including ordinary priests. Carla Cohen

THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE (Ecco, $25.95) is partially a love story between young Edgar and the dogs his family raises, and partially an adventure story as he struggles to tell the truth without speaking a word. This well-paced epic rollicks across the Northern Wisconsin countryside. Replete with stunning visual details and intriguing characters, David Wroblewski tells a nuanced, dense story with lyrical ease. As the central mystery unfolds, you'll find yourself staying up much too late in order not to leave Edgar’s side. People may argue over who loves the story more, but everyone will agree it may be one of the finest debut novels ever. Conor Moran

Cynthia Ozick is a meticulous writer, and her latest fiction is the bounty of a long life of careful reading, deep thought, natural wit, and a relish of all things human, from foibles to manners to graver questions of history, religion, and language. All this—and more—figures in DICTATION: A Quartet (Houghton Mifflin, $24) of novellas, each as rich and satisfying as a novel many times longer. Different from one another in tone and subject, these stories range from a tour de force of historic fiction, premised on a friendship between the assistants to Henry James and Joseph Conrad; to a New York theatre’s revival of a Yiddish play and an old man’s rage; to a marriage of mercy between a pregnant maid and a visiting journalist in Mussolini’s Italy; to a family mystery involving a universal language to rival Esperanto. Laurie Greer 

 

PAPERBACK FICTION

 

OUT STEALING HORSES (Picador, $14), by Per Petterson, is as understated and cool as the Norway countryside where it takes place. A man comes to live by himself in the woods, and reflects on his boyhood and the last summer that his father was part of the family. Peterson won all sorts of awards and the book was selected for nearly every 2007 Best of list. Carla Cohen

Michael Chabon’s YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION (Harper Perennial, $15.95) is a richly imagined tale combining Jewish shtick and hardboiled detectives in the unlikely setting of Alaska. Imagine, if you will, that the Promised Land had been carved out of Alaska instead of Palestine. Carla Cohen

Nancy Horan’s first novel LOVING FRANK (Ballantine, $14) manages to find a good balance among historical accuracy, psychological astuteness, and a fine story. In 1906 Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney left their spouses and children and went to Europe together. That was not done 100 years ago and they both paid a high price. Carla Cohen 

Min Jin Lee’s FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES (Grand Central Publishing, $13.99) is a hoot of a novel that involves a vast New York landscape of characters that brings to mind Bonfire of the Vanities 20 years later. Casey Han, a recent Princeton graduate, is trying to find her place between the expectations of her hardworking Korean American parents and the glamorous worlds of fashion and finance. There is fabulous energy in Casey’s search; she is at once exasperating and endearing. Carla Cohen

The scary  world of Iran in the time of the Ayatollahs is evoked in THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ (Harper Perennial, $13.95), a novel about a Jewish family, once prosperous and integrated into Iranian society, now facing charges of treason. Dalia Sofer shows herself to be an accomplished newcomer in literature. Carla Cohen

In a skillful weaving of multiple strands, Alaa Al-Aswany tells the story of modern Cairo through the residents of a single building, THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING (Harper Perennial, $13.95). On the roof are tiny rooms once used as storage areas, now occupied by poor people, among them the doorkeeper Shazli and his bright and ambitious son Taha, whose story is emblematic of Egypt today. All the pressures of modern Egypt are revealed in the deceptively simple prose. Aswany has a new book coming in the autumn called Chicago.  Carla Cohen

An unnamed American encounters a Pakistani man in a café in Lahore. Changez, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST (Harvest, $14) Pakistani, pours out his story; he had lived a successful American life, but he returned to Pakistan after becoming disillusioned with the West. Mohsin Hamid, who studied in the U.S. and lives in London, is well positioned to open this window on “Oriental” views of the U.S. This chilling book is reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger. Carla Cohen

A brilliant novel about literature and legends from the late Chilean Roberto Bolaño—a kind of legend himself—THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES (Picador, $15) strives to set the record straight about the charismatic leaders of Mexico City’s visceral realist poetry movement. Who were Ulisses Lima and Arturo Belano? Were they even poets, or just drug dealers? To get at the truth, the novel takes the form of testimonies recorded over a 20-year span from all over the world by people who knew, or thought they knew, Lima and Belano. As the many voices tell their diverse stories, Bolaño’s narrative becomes a virtuosic display of rants, laments, adventures, itineraries, and catalogs of books and writers. Laurie Greer

Rich with jokes, allusions, and well-barbed wit, JAMESTOWN (Harcourt, $14), Matthew Sharpe’s fourth work of fiction, conflates America’s colonial past with a possibly apocalyptic future. As before, Pocahontas, Powhatan, and other Native Americans in Virginia are the targets of exploitation, but this time the invaders come by armored bus, represent the oligarchic—and desperate—Manhattan Corporation, and want food and oil, not the polluted, ruined land.  Laurie Greer

The story of one night’s events in the seven hours between midnight and dawn in Tokyo, AFTER DARK (Vintage, $13.95) is Haruki Murakami’s latest beautiful and beguiling novel. Evoking the quintessential urban conditions of simultaneity and the unpredictable intersection of different lives, the narrative follows a series of characters—strangers to one another when the book begins—as they move around the city, looking variously for peace, for escape, or for answers of some sort. Murakami’s nocturnal Tokyo is both prosaic and dreamlike, alienating and familiar. It’s large enough to lose someone in forever, yet contained enough to offer unexpected reunions. Laurie Greer

Michael Ondaatje, who won the Booker Prize for The English Patient, remains one of our most lyrical contemporary writers. In DIVISADERO (Vintage, $13.95), a sensuous, panoramic story beginning on a northern California farm during the ‘70s, and ending in south central France in the present, Ondaatje weaves a hypnotic tale from a premise, as described by the narrator, Anna, that, “we live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories…” Barbara Meade

 

 

PAPERBACK MYSTERY

 

With a young girl lying murdered in the forest outside her back door, Detective Robert Ryan is called upon to investigate.  The public cry for justice is overwhelming, due in no small part to the lingering memory of three kidnapped local children, two of whom were never found.  As Detective Ryan tracks the killer, he hides the fact that he is the third child from the earlier kidnapping.  As the case cools and the victim’s family withdraws behind a veil of secrets, Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, go to any length to discover what happened IN THE WOODS (Penguin, $14), by Tana French. Conor Moran

For those who are tired of trying to read what they should, only to bog down in the middle of some long tome, THE ROUGH GUIDE TO CLASSIC NOVELS (Rough Guide, $12.99), edited by Simon Mason, presents a list of novels chosen precisely for being “first and foremost, great pleasure-givers.”  The Rough Guide takes a refreshingly broad view of the term “classic”; while it recommends great authors from 36 countries, 5 centuries, and countless genres, its user friendly format categorizes the fiction by theme as opposed to era or region.  Thinking about family?  Try Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  Looking for a laugh?  Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm fits that bill.  Whether it’s incredible worlds, love letters, or a good old American hero you’re looking for this summer, this Rough Guide has the book for you. Conor Moran 

 

AIRPLANE READING

We used to have a section in the store called Airplane Reading, but it somehow disappeared. Airplane reading means a book that you get so engrossed in, you don’t want the plane to land. Airplane reading is when you leave your family at the beach and go back to your room to finish a book. Airplane reading is when the book seems to read itself more than you read it.

It’s better to read Vikram Chandra’s doorstopper of a novel, SACRED GAMES (Harper Perrenail, $16.95), when you have time to read great swaths at one sitting. In this marvelous evocation of modern India, Policeman Sartaj Singh is pitted against the Godfather of Mumbai, Ganesh Gaitonde. Chapters alternate between Gaitonde’s efforts to consolidate his hold on the underworld and Singh’s investigations. There’s plenty about contemporary India that the reader learns along the way: the continuing suffering resulting from partition, the religious fanaticism, the corruption. Chandra tells a compulsively readable story about a country that contains everything in huge abundance: the modern and the ancient, honesty and evil, sacred and profane, democracy and caste.

 

A MUCH MARRIED MAN (Griffin, $14.95) is a frothy story for anglophiles. Anthony Antscomb is the scion of Antscomb Bank. His parents own a complete town in the Cotswolds. As a result of his Candide-like naiveté and good humor (and wealth), he finds himself in a number of unhappy relationships with women.  Nicholas Coleridge’s book charts thirty-five years of changes in British life from the rigid, class-dominated years after WWII, through the Thatcher era and the rise of the new economy. In the hands of most American writers, we would have mere soap opera; here, Coleridge offers a fast-moving narrative full of gentle irony.
                                                                                     Section by Carla Cohen