CVCO - Overbooked: All Stars 2002

Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Starred Reviews

All Stars 2002

March 12, 2008

Fiction and Mystery titles which received three or more starred reviews from major review sources.

The Book of Illusions
Author: Auster, Paul
Publisher: Holt $ 25 ISBN: 0805054081
Booklist Kirkus Library Journal PW
In this rich and emotionally charged work, a man's obsession with a silent film star sends him on a journey into a shadowy world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love.
Updated 8.27.02
Servants of the Map: Stories
Author: Barrett, Andrea
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393043487
Kirkus Library Journal PW
Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.
Century's Son
Author: Boswell, Robert
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375412379
Kirkus PW Booklist
From one of America's most skilled, subtle, and critically acclaimed writers--a novel about an eccentric midwestern family, and the history of love and tragedy that holds it together and tears it apart.
The Emperor of Ocean Park
Author: Carter, Stephen L.
Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375413634
Kirkus Booklist PW
The Emperor of Ocean Park is as brilliant in its suspense as in its acute social observation. Set in the privileged world of New York-Washington-Martha's Vineyard upper-crust African-American society and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school, it tells the story of a complex family with a single seductive and dangerous link to the shadowlands of crime.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars | Legal Stars | Debuts
Stories of Your Life and Others
Author: Chiang, Ted
Publisher: Forge $ 24.95 ISBN: 076530418x
Kirkus PW Booklist
Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon" ,won the Nebula Award for 1990. Now, collected for the first time, are all seven of this extraordinary writer's extraordinary stories--plus a new story written especially for this volume.
Without Fail
Author: Child, Lee
Publisher: Putnam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399148612
Kirkus PW LJ Booklist
Assassins have the new vice president in their sights, until Jack Reacher picks up their trail. For only Reacher has the head and the heart to corner his prey and bring them to justice--without fail.
Caramelo
Author: Cisneros, Sandra
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0679435549
Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
An extraordinary new novel from the author of The House on Mango Street is a multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family whose myriad voices create a dazzling weave of passion, poignancy, and the stuff of life.
Updated 12.05.02
City of Bones
Author: Connelly, Michael
Publisher: Little Brown $ 25.95 ISBN: 0316154059
PW Booklist LJ
The bones of a 12-year-old boy are found scattered in a remote canyon in the Hollywood Hills. For Harry Bosch, the City of Angels becomes the City of Bones. The case awakens police and political machinations, delves into a family's dark history, and opens-up Bosch's own childhood memories.
Crimson Petal and White
Author: Faber, Michael
Publisher: Harcourt $ 26 ISBN: 015100692x
Kirkus Booklist LJ PW
Richly textured, this novel is set in 1870s London. Nineteen-year-old prostitute Sugar yearns for escape from a terrifying brothel. Her ascent through Victorian society offers an intimacy with host of unforgettable characters as Sugar tries to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.
Updated 9.23.02
Standing in the Rainbow
Author: Flagg, Fannie
Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0679426159
Kirkus Booklist PW
Fannie's back in town--at her funniest, most touching, rooted, and surprising best. She has also brought along several characters from her earlier bestseller, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, plus some new folks to make readers smile, laugh, and cry.
Updated 7.22.02
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Author: Flanagan, Richard
Publisher: Grove $ 27.50 ISBN: 0802117112
Kirkus Library Journal PW Booklist
The latest novel from internationally renowned author Flanagan. A rich tragicomic saga of art, fish, and the founding of new worlds.
Everthing Is Illuminated
Author: Foer, Jonathan Safran
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 24 ISBN: 0618173870
Kirkus Library Journal PW Booklist
A writer journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Passionate and marked by an indelible humanity, Everything Is Illuminated mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching for people and places that no longer exist.
A Multitude of Sins
Author: Ford, Richard
Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375412123
PW Booklist Library Journal
With this masterful new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author evokes with unflinching candor our failures to achieve what we consider to be most important: to be faithful, patient, honest, passionate, and loving toward those we care for.
Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies
Author: Hemon, Aleksander
Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385499248
Kirkus Booklist PW
The author of the celebrated debut, The Question of Bruno, returns with the engrossing and hilarious mind-and language-bending adventures of his endearing hero, Jozef Pronek.
Updated 9.7.02
A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good
Author: Hijuelos, Oscar
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060175699
Kirkus LJ Booklist PW
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love returns to the world of music with this gorgeously written novel about one man's passion for his art, his family, and his country.
Suggested Reading: Music & Fiction
The Wailing Wind
Author: Hillerman, Tony
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060194448
Kirkus Booklist PW
Bestselling author Hillerman brings back Chee and Leaphorn in a twisting tale of murder, past and present. Legends of the Navajo Reservation's lost gold mines are an important part of the plot, but the tale also turns on obsessive love and memories of a missing woman's voice wailing in the darkness.
Enemy Women
Author: Jiles, Paulette
Publisher: Morrow $ 24.95 ISBN: 0066214440
Kirkus PW LJ
The Colley family are modest farmers in the Missouri Ozarks. The Colleys try to remain neutral, a fact ignored by the Union militia who confiscate their livestock, burn their farm, and arrest their daughter on charges of "enemy collaboration." Yet as this innocent young woman soon discovers, fate can have a double edge. In unsentimental yet elegant prose, Jiles reveals the universal horrors of war and its irreparable damage, and introduces a wonderful new character in a memorable story.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Civil War Stars
Roscoe
Author: Kennedy, William
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670030295
Booklist Library Journal PW
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed. Roscoe, the seventh novel in the Albany cycle, illuminates the high and low of Albany life between the world wars. It is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly comic masterpiece from one of America's most important novelists.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Mr. Potter
Author: Kincaid, Jamaica
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $18 ISBN: 0374214948
PW Booklist Library Journal
Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur. In her most ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging out of an unexamined life.
The Impressionist
Author: Kunzru, Hari
Publisher: Dutton $ 24.95 ISBN: 052594642x
PW Booklist Library Journal Kirkus
Sweeping from India to England to France and Africa and played out on a teeming world canvas, The Impressionist is the unforgettable riches-to-rags story of a boy who is born a lie and must adapt--or perish.
Suggested Reading: First Fiction
Fragrant Harbor
Author: Lanchester, John
Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 0399148663
PW Kirkus LJ
Fragrant Harbor takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong. The result is a novel that proves Lanchester is a versatile and talented contemporary novelist.
Tishomingo Blues
Author: Leonard, Elmore
Publisher: Morrow $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060008725
Booklist PW LJ
Girls love Dennis Lenahan, he's cool and he's a daredevil. Dennis is performing in a Tunica, Mississippi casino, when he witnesses a murder and the local Dixie Mafia warns him, "You talk, you're dead." Along comes Robert Taylor, a black gangsta from Detroit. Robert has his own agenda for taking on the Cornbread Cosa Nostra and wants Dennis to come in with him. Readers will wonder: is Dennis hooked up with the bad guys or the really bad guys?
The Sweetest Dream
Author: Lessing, Doris
Publisher: HarperCollins $26.95 ISBN: 0066213347
Kirkus Booklist PW
Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table--her sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and fresh-off-the-street friends. Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look from one of the greatest writers of our time at a group of people who dared to dream--and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward.
Company: A Novel of the CIA 1951-1991
Author: Littell, Robert
Publisher: Overlook $ 27.95 ISBN: 1585671975
Library Journal Kirkus Booklist
The magnum opus of acclaimed espionage novelist Littell is a mesmerizing, dazzlingly plotted epic that tells the life and death struggle of two generations of CIA operatives during a long Cold War.
Shackling Water
Author: Mansbach, Adam
Publisher: Doubleday $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385502052
LJ Booklist Kirkus
In the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Adam Mansbach captures the rhythms of jazz in a remarkable debut novel about a young man looking for his muse in Harlem.
Suggested Reading: Debuts and Music & Fiction
Atonement
Author: McEwan, Ian
Publisher: Doubleday $ 26 ISBN: 0385503954
PW Booklist Kirkus
In this rich novel by the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Amsterdam, a young girl unwittingly tells a tale that turns her family upside down. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, Atonement is at its center a profound--and profoundly moving--exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and the difficulty of absolution.
In Revere, in Those Days
Author: Merullo, Roland
Publisher: Crown $ 22 ISBN: 0609610325
Kirkus Booklist Library Journal
From acclaimed novelist Merullo comes a poignant and compelling coming-of-age story set in a large Italian-American family in the working-class community of Revere, Massachusetts.
Updated 9.7.02
Family Matters
Author: Mistry, Rohinton
Publisher: Knopf $ 26 ISBN: 0375403736
Kirkus Booklist PW
At once sweeping and intimate, comic and tragic, Family Matters--by the author of A Fine Balance --is the story of a 1990s Bombay family dealing with their elderly patriarch, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease.
After the Quake
Author: Murakami, Haruki
Publisher: Knopf $ 21 ISBN: 0375413901
Kirkus Booklist PW
In 1995, the physical and social landscape of Japan was transformed by the Kobe earthquake and the poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subways. By a world-class writer, this is a short but powerful book whose importance is emphasized by its hideous timeliness, and whose great gift is both comfort and understanding.
Updated 7.30.02
Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age
Author: Oe, Kenzaburo
Publisher: Grove $ 24 ISBN:0802117104
PW Kirkus Booklist
A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between a famous writer and his cipher of a son, this magnificent novel of startling candor is from a Nobel Prize-winning Japanese master. As the man struggles to understand his family, he must evaluate himself as he deals with parenting a disabled child.
When the Emperor was Divine
Author: Otsuka, Julie
Publisher: Knopf $ 18 ISBN: 0375414290
PW Library Journal Booklist
Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.
Updated 9.7.02
The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Author: Packer, Ann
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375412824
Kirkus PW Booklist
A suspenseful, richly layered first novel that asks: How much do people owe the people they love? The Dive from Clausen's Pier will speak to all those who have ever thought about leaving when they knew they should stay or felt trapped, not only by circumstance, but by the strength of their own love.
Suggested Reading: First Fiction
Violence, Nudity, Adult Content
Author: Passaro, Vince
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 068485726x
Kirkus Library Journal Booklist
With Violence, Nudity, Adult Content, the noted essayist and short story writer Vince Passaro offers a revelatory first novel of crime, sexual damage, and personal redemption--in a story that combines the grit of a Scott Turow courtroom thriller with an astute vision of a crumbling marriage, worthy of Russell Banks or Lorrie Moore. With present-day New York City teeming darkly as a backdrop to the relentless action, this thriller fires on all cylinders as a compelling literary page-turner.
Suggested Reading: First Fiction
The Dream of Scipio
Author: Pears, Iain
Publisher: Riverhead $ 27.95 ISBN: 157322202x
Booklist PW Kirkus
From the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost comes this anticipated novel that is constructed around Provence in three different centuries, and each has at its heart a love story. Expertly imagined and perfectly realized, The Dream of Scipio is a feat of storytelling.
The Whore's Child: And Other Stories
Author: Russo, Richard
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375411682
Kirkus PW LJ
In his first collection, a master storyteller focuses on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, Russo captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.
Lovely Bones
Author: Sebold, Alice
Publisher: Little Brown $ 21.95 ISBN: 031666343
Booklist Library Journal PW
In the hands of a brilliant new novelist, and through the eyes of her winning new heroine, this tale of family, memory, love, and living is told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief the most hopeful and joyful of stories.
Suggested Reading: First Fiction
The Last Girls
Author: Smith, Lee
Publisher: Algonquin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1565123638
Booklist Kirkus PW
Revered for her powerful female characters, Smith tells a brilliant story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as "women."
Updated 7.31.02
December 6
Author: Smith, Martin Cruz
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26 ISBN: 0684872536
Kirkus Booklist PW
As seen through the eyes of an American con man living in Tokyo days before the Japanese attack, December 6 is Smith at the top of his game. The #1 bestselling author of Gorky Park, Red Square, Havana Bay and Rose returns with his most audaciously original and brilliant novel yet.
Updated 8.13.02
The Little Friend
Author: Tartt, Donna
Publisher: Knopf $ 26 ISBN: 0679439382
Kirkus Booklist PW LJ
The hugely anticipated new novel by the author of The Secret History--"an elegant, edifying work of art" (Entertainment Weekly). Even more transfixingly suspenseful than its predecessor, this is a dark novel of lost childhood, rich in moral paradox, as a 12-year-old Mississippi girl sets out to find her brother's murderer.
Updated 10.16.02
The Story of Lucy Gault
Author: Trevor, William
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670031542
Kirkus PW Booklist Library Journal
The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of arson leads nine-year-old Lucy's parents to leave Ireland for England. On the day before they are to leave, Lucy runs away. In this profound and moving story of love, guilt and forgiveness, Trevor has written a novel that stands alongside the best literature in the English language.
Updated 9.7.02

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