Adult Services

New Books of September

07 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment

by rlpl4adult in New Books Tags: books, fiction, historical fiction, Holocaust, list, mystery, new, stillborn, WJMC

Come find out what’s new this month!

Good Graces
By Lesley Kagen
Sequel to Whistlin’ in the Dark
Eleven-year-old Sally, still traumatized by the sudden death of her father and her own narrow escape from a murderer and molester, no longer has confidence in her own judgment, but when she suspects her sister Troo of being involved in a series of crimes in their Milwaukee neighborhood, she knows she must somehow find a way to honor the deathbed promise she made to her dad to keep Troo safe.

The Art of Fielding
By Chad Harbach
At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay roommate and teammate, Mike Schwartz, and Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths.

The Grief of Others
By Leah Hager Cohen
The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Yet in the aftermath of the baby’s death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

There But for The
By Ali Smith
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles’s story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another? 

The Emperor of Lies
By Steve Sem-Sandberg
A fictionalized account of the second-largest Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in the Polish city of Lodz in 1940, chronicling the daily life of its inhabitants under the authoritarian rule of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the ambitious sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman who sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex. Sem-Sandberg risks courting controversy by revisiting this complicity with evil, as he does by allowing the possibility that Rumkowski may have honestly believed that he was saving his fellow Jews by his acts–a possibility that historians have lately been wrestling with.