Tag: Novel

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Godless: A Novel

The nightmares have returned. Something, or someone, wants to drag Julia Davidson back into a dreadful conflict she assumed a distant memory. Was this, like before, the echo of someone else’s dream? Is she responsible to rescue faces she doesn’t recognize but can’t forget? Do the murky images suggest she has a part to play in whatever ominous events lie ahead?

Things are finally looking up for Matthew Adams. As the top earner at MedCom Associates he has started to crawl out of the financial hole created during his “dark days.” And now, out of the blue, a mysterious woman invites him to join a confidential research initiative. She says it will ease the mounting economic crisis. But at what cost to Matthew’s fragile sanity, and his tortured soul?

Pastor Alex Ware faces a serious problem. The honeymoon period at Christ Community Church has ended. The finance committee says they can’t afford another year of dwindling income and dismal growth. The board wants action, now! Aging parishioners would gladly allocate a portion of their estate to help. But only if Alex stops condemning the transition industry and starts affirming what the Youth Initiative calls “our heroic volunteers.”
In Fatherless and Childless, Dr. James Dobson and Kurt Bruner depicted a time in which present-day trends come to sinister fruition. This eagerly awaited conclusion vividly imagines what happens when God’s image on earth is exchanged for the horrors of a GODLESS world.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Love on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

Law Beaumont and Kristen Hemmings have watched each other from a distance for years. But Law, a bartender with a bad-boy past, and Kristen, an assistant principal devoted to helping her community, couldn’t seem more different. When they unite to mentor a young foster child and to help Law’s troubled daughter through the aftermath of her parents’ ugly divorce, their attraction deepens. They face the undeniable connection between them, and a whirlwind of challenges they can only conquer together. A stirring love story and a candid look at the complexities of divorce, substance abuse, and our country’s foster care system, Love on Mimosa Lane is a love song to an entire community, and a novel about the power of family — the family you’ve been given, the one you’ve chosen, and the one that can lift you up, even when the world is tearing you down.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Doctor Sleep: A Novel

Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted fans of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2013: What ever happened to Danny Torrance? For the 36 years since The Shining was first published, the answer has been left to our imaginations. Finally we catch up with Dan as his creator envisions him: a flawed middle-aged man with a tragic past — his special gift, “shining,” dulled with age and alcohol. He’s “Doctor Sleep” now, a hospice worker who eases the end of patients’ lives. He also happens to be the only one who can help a little girl with her own special gift. This is not simply The Shining II. Not only does this story stand on its own, it manages to magnify the supernatural quality that first drew us to young Danny, expanding its mystery and its intensity in a way that might even reach beyond this book into the rest of the King-iverse… and beyond. (Easter egg alert: look for the nod to King’s son Joe Hill’s recent book N0S4A2.) –Robin A. Rothman

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Dust (A Scarpetta Novel)

The new Kay Scarpetta novel from the world’s #1 bestselling crime writer. 

After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exhausted and ill, she’s recovering at home when she receives an unsettling call. 

The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s rugby field. The victim, a graduate student named Gail Shipman, is oddly draped in ivory linen and posed in a way that is too deliberate to be the killer’s first strike. A preliminary examination in the sea of red mud where the body has been left also reveals a bizarre residue that fluoresces blood red, emerald green and sapphire blue.

Physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta’s FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital Murderer.

The cases all connect and yet seem to conflict. Gail Shipman was murdered for financial gain—or was she? It will require the usual ensemble of characters to find out the truth, including Scarpetta’s sidekick Pete Marino, who has undergone a drastic change in his life that places him center stage in a Cambridge investigation that puts everyone at risk. 

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Orphan Train: A Novel

Orphan Train is a gripping story of friendship and second chances from Christina Baker Kline, author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be.

Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to “aging out” out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse…

As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.

Molly discovers that she has the power to help Vivian find answers to mysteries that have haunted her for her entire life – answers that will ultimately free them both.

Rich in detail and epic in scope, Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline is a powerful novel of upheaval and resilience, of unexpected friendship, and of the secrets we carry that keep us from finding out who we are.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Flight Behavior: A Novel

“Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.”
—Time

The extraordinary New York Times bestselling author of The Lacuna (winner of the Orange Prize), The Poisonwood Bible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver returns with a truly stunning and unforgettable work. Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver’s riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior is arguably Kingsolver’s must thrilling and accessible novel to date, and like so many other of her acclaimed works, represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012: In what may be the first novel to realistically imagine the near-term impact of “global weirding,” Barbara Kingsolver sets her latest story in rural Appalachia . In fictional Feathertown, Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow–on the run from her stifling life–charges up the mountain above her husband’s family farm and stumbles onto a “valley of fire” filled with millions of monarch butterflies. This vision is deemed miraculous by the town’s parishioners, then the international media. But when Ovid, a scientist who studies monarch behavior, sets up a lab on the Turnbow farm, he learns that the butterflies’ presence signals systemic disorder–and Dellarobia’s in-laws’ logging plans won’t help. Readers who bristle at politics made personal may be turned off by the strength of Kingsolver’s convictions, but she never reduces her characters to mouthpieces, giving equal weight to climate science and human need, to forces both biological and biblical. Her concept of family encompasses all living beings, however ephemeral, and Flight Behavior gracefully, urgently contributes to the dialogue of survival on this swiftly tilting planet. –Mari Malcolm

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Wanted Man: A Jack Reacher Novel

Reacher is back! A Wanted Man is a new masterpiece of suspense—from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child.
 
Four people in a car, hoping to make Chicago by morning. One man driving, eyes on the road. Another man next to him, telling stories that don’t add up. A woman in the back, silent and worried. And next to her, a huge man with a broken nose, hitching a ride east to Virginia.
 
An hour behind them, a man lies stabbed to death in an old pumping station. He was seen going in with two others, but he never came out. He has been executed, the knife work professional, the killers vanished. Within minutes, the police are notified. Within hours, the FBI descends, laying claim to the victim without ever saying who he was or why he was there.
 
All Reacher wanted was a ride to Virginia. All he did was stick out his thumb. But he soon discovers he has hitched more than a ride. He has tied himself to a massive conspiracy that makes him a threat—to both sides at once.
 
In Lee Child’s white-hot thriller, nothing is what it seems, and nobody is telling the truth. As the tension rises, the twists come fast and furious, keeping readers guessing and gasping until the explosive finale.
 
Praise for #1 bestselling author Lee Child and his Reacher series
 
“Child is a superb craftsman of suspense.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“The truth about Reacher gets better and better.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“Implausible, irresistible Reacher remains just about the best butt-kicker in thriller-lit.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Like his hero Jack Reacher, Lee Child seems to make no wrong steps.”—Associated Press
 
“Lee Child [is] the current poster-boy of American crime fiction.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“Indisputably the best escape artist in this escapist genre.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
 
“Jack Reacher is much more like the heir to the Op and Marlowe than Spenser ever was.”—Esquire

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel

From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty, and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the twentieth century

Through his books and his radio essays for NPR’s This American Life, David Rakoff has built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time. Written with humor, sympathy, and tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master of an altogether different art form.

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. 

The characters’ lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box—an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.

Rakoff’s insistence on beauty and the necessity of kindness in a selfish world raises the novel far above mere satire.  A critic once called Rakoff “magnificent,” a word that perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

From the Hardcover edition.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

And the Mountains Echoed: a novel by the bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

On May 21, 2013, the new novel from Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013: Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed begins simply enough, with a father recounting a folktale to his two young children. The tale is about a young boy who is taken by a div (a sort of ogre), and how that fate might not be as terrible as it first seems—a brilliant device that firmly sets the tone for the rest of this sweeping, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting novel. A day after he tells the tale of the div, the father gives away his own daughter to a wealthy man in Kabul. What follows is a series of stories within the story, told through multiple viewpoints, spanning more than half a century, and shifting across continents. The novel moves through war, separation, birth, death, deceit, and love, illustrating again and again how people’s actions, even the seemingly selfless ones, are shrouded in ambiguity. This is a masterwork by a master storyteller. —Chris Schluep