2010 Fiction All Stars

Fiction (all genres) titles which received three or more starred reviews from major review sources.

• Sunset Park
  Author: Auster, Paul
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780805092868 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist LJ
  Luminous, passionate, expansive, and an emotional tour de force, Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.
  Updated 9.28.10
• The Infinities
  Author: Banville, John
  $ 25.95 ISBN: 9780307272799 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist LJ
  In his first novel since the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, John Banville gives readers a dazzling new work that chronicles both a human family and a rather unholy gathering of immortals.
  Updated 1.28.10
• Secrets of Eden
  Author: Bohjalian, Chris
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780307394972 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist LJ
  From the New York Times-bestselling author of Midwives and The Double Bind comes a novel of shattered family ties, intimate secrets, and the nature of sacrifice. Few writers can manipulate a plot with Bohjalian's grace and power.--New York Times Book Review.
  Updated 1.28.10
• Nowhere to Run: Joe Pickett
  Author: Box, C.J.
  $ 25.95 ISBN: 9780399156458 Date: 2010
  Booklist LJ PW Kirkus
  The Edgar Award-winning author of the bestselling Joe Pickett series really knows how to create a complex situation, add suspense, and then twist the tale with surprises that make for an intense and satisfying read (The Denver Post).
  Updated 2.28.10
• Parrot and Olivier in America
  Author: Carey, Peter
  $ 26.95 ISBN: 9780307592620 Date: 2010
  Booklist PW LJ
  From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early-19th-century America.
  Suggested Reading:Historical Fiction
  Updated 3.19.10
• 61 Hours
  Author: Child, Lee
  $ 27 ISBN: 9780385340588 Date: 2010
  Booklist LJ Kirkus
  New York Times-bestselling author Lee Child's latest thriller is a ticking time bomb of suspense that builds electric tension on every page. A bus accident lands Jack Reacher in a small South Dakota town, where a single witness is the only hope police have.
  Updated 4.7.10
  
• The Poacher's Son
  Author: Doiron, Paul
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780312558468 Date: 2010
  LJ Kirkus PW Booklist
  Set in the wilds of Maine, this explosive tale tells of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive--his own father.
  Suggested Reading:Debuts
  Updated 2.23.10
  
• Room
  Author: Donoghue, Emma
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780316098335 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus LJ
  Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
  Updated 8.9.10
• A Visit from the Goon Squad
  Author: Egan, Jennifer
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780307592835 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  From one of today's boldest writers comes a sly, surprising, and exhilarating novel about time, survival, and the electrifying sparks ignited at the seams of our lives by colliding destinies.
  Updated 4.14.10
• The Unnamed
  Author: Ferris, Joshua
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780316034012 Date: 2010
  Booklist PW Kirkus
  This dazzling novel tells the story of marriage, family, and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. It is the heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away.
  Updated 11.25.09
• The Blindness of the Heart
  Author: Franck, Julia
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780802119674 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  Winner of the German Book Prize, The Blindness of the Heart is a dark marvel of a novel by one of Europe's freshest young voices--a family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family.
  Updated 9.28.10
• Freedom
  Author: Franzen, Jonathan
  $ 28 ISBN: 9780374158460 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist LJ
  From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections comes a darkly comedic novel about family. Franzen's intensely realized characters struggle to learn how to live in an ever-confusing world--one with the temptations and burdens of liberty, the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.
  Updated 8.9.10
• Faithful Place
  Author: French, Tana
  $ 25.95 ISBN: 9780670021871 Date: 2010
  Booklist LJ PW
  Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was 19, growing up poor in Dublin's inner city, and he and Rosie Daly were all ready to run away to London together. But on the night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie vanished. Twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank is going home whether he likes it or not.
  Updated 6.10.10
• Widower's Tale
  Author: Glass, Julia
  $ 26.95 ISBN: 9780307377920 Date: 2010
  Booklist PW Kirkus
  In a quirky farmhouse outside Boston, 70-year-old Percy Darling enjoys a vigorous but mostly solitary life until, in a complex scheme to help his oldest daughter through a crisis, he allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn. The abrupt transformation of Percy's rural refuge into a lively, youthful community compels him to reexamine the choices he's made.
  Updated 9.3.10
• The Cookbook Collector
  Author: Goodman, Allegra
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780385340854 Date: 2010
  LJ PW Kirkus Booklist
  Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare-book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment. Bi-coastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, this work is about getting and spending, and about the substitutions one must make.
  Updated 7.12.10
• The Crossing Places: Ruth Galloway
  Author: Griffiths, Elly
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780547229898 Date: 2010
  LJ Kirkus Booklist
  When she's not on the job, quirky archaeologist Ruth Galloway lives in obscurity. But when a child's bones are found on a desolate beach nearby, Galloway is called into action. This is the beginning of a captivating new crime series featuring an irresistible heroine.
  Suggested Reading:Debuts
  Updated 11.20.09
  
• The Good Son
  Author: Gruber, Michael
  $ 26 ISBN: 9780805091281 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  New York Times-bestselling author Gruber delivers a taut, multilayered, riveting novel of suspense focused on peace activists who are being held hostage in Pakistan.
  Updated 3.18.10
  
• Snakewoman of Little Egypt
  Author: Hellenga, Robert
  $ 25 ISBN: 9781608192625 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist LJ
  From the author of The Sixteen Pleasures comes a winning new novel packed with wit, substance, and emotional depth that takes readers into the world of snakehandling.
  Updated 9.3.10
• Hypothermia
  Author: Indridason, Arnaldur
  $24.99 ISBN: 9780312569914 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist LJ
  One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage. Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur embarks on an unofficial investigation to find out why the woman's life ended in such an abrupt and tragic manner. At the same time, he is haunted by the unresolved cases of two young people who went missing 30 years before.
  Updated 8.9.10
• World and Town
  Author: Jen, Gish
  $ 26.95 ISBN: 9780307272195 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius and daughter of an American missionary, starts over in a small New England town, where she is soon joined by a Cambodian-American family and an ex-lover, all of them looking for their own new lives.
  Updated 9.28.10
• The Surrendered
  Author: Lee, Chang-Rae
  $ 26.95 ISBN: 9781594489761 Date: 2010
  PW LJ Kirkus Booklist
  Combining the complex themes of identity in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling of Aloft, Lee has delivered his most ambitious work yet. It is a mesmerizing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.
  Updated 1.23.10
• The Ask
  Author: Lipsyte, Sam
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780374298913 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, university fundraiser Milo Burke is offered one last chance by his former employer: but he must reel in a potential donor--a major ask--who turns out to be Milo's sinister college classmate. And the give won't come cheap.
  Updated 1.28.10
• The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
  Author: Mosley, Walter
  $ 26 ISBN: 9781594487729 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  In a masterful, moving novel about age, memory, and family, Mosley captures the compromised state of his protagonist's mind with profound sensitivity and insight, and creates an unforgettable pair of characters at the center of a novel that is sure to become a true contemporary classic.
  Updated 9.27.10
• Skippy Dies
  Author: Murray, Paul
  $ 28 ISBN: 9780865479432 Date: 2010
  Kirkus PW Booklist LJ
  Why does Skippy, a 14-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop? Why Skippy dies and what happens next unravels a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined.
  Updated 8.9.10
• Bound
  Author: Nelson, Antonya
  $ 25 ISBN: 9781596915756 Date: 2010
  LJ Kirkus Booklist
  The critically acclaimed author of Nothing Right delivers her much-anticipated first novel in a decade--a story of tangled lives, set in a Wichita riveted by the reemergence of the infamous serial killer known as BTK.
  
• Collusion: Jack Lennon
  Author: Neville, Stuart
  $ 25 ISBN: 9781569478554 Date: 2010
  LJ PW Booklist
  The line between friend and foe disappears as Detective Jack Lennon stalks a killer haunting the streets of Belfast.
  Updated 9.3.10
What Is Left the Daughter
Author: Norman, Howard
$ 25 ISBN: 9780618735433 Date: 2010
PW Kirkus Booklist
Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books--The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L--in this erotically charged and morally complex story.
Updated 6.15.10
• Changeling
  Author: Oe, Kenzaburo
  $ 24 ISBN: 9780802119360 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe takes readers from the forests of southern Japan to the washed-out streets of Berlin as he investigates the impact real and imagined pasts have on present lives.
  Updated 4.14.10
• Occupied City
  Author: Peace, David
  $ 25.95 ISBN:9780307263759 Date: 2010
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  From the author of Tokyo Year Zero comes a fierce, exquisitely dark novel that returns readers to post-World War II occupied Japan: a Rashomon-like retelling of a murder (based on an actual event), its aftermath, and the hidden wartime atrocities that led to the crime.
  Suggested Reading:Historical Crime Fiction Stars
  Updated 2.28.10
  
• Bury Your Dead: Inspector Gamache
  Author: Penny, Louise
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780312377045 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  Chief Inspector Gamache receives a letter from the village of Three Pines, where beloved Bistro owner Olivier was recently convicted of murder. The letter proclaims Olivier's innocence, so Gamache must relive the terrible events that killed one of his men before he can bury the dead.
  Updated 8.6.10
• Fever Dream
  Author: Preston, Douglas J.
  $ 27 ISBN: 9780446554961 Date: 2010
  LJ Booklist PW
  Special Agent Pendergast embarks on a quest to uncover the mystery of his wife's murder. But as Pendergast probes the circumstances of her death, he is faced with an even greater question: Who was the woman he married?
  Updated 4.5.10
  
• Model Home
  Author: Puchner, Eric
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780743270489 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  The debut of an award-winning writer, Model Home is a bitterly funny, deeply moving novel about a family reckoning with failure, guilt, and love.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 1.28.10
• The Rhetoric of Death
  Author: Rock, Judith
  $ 15 ISBN: 9780425236642 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist Kirkus
  "An amazing debut historical novel "(Ariana Franklin, national betselling author of Grave Goods)Paris, 1686: When The Bishop of Marseilles discovers that his young cousin Charles du Luc, former soldier and half-fledged Jesuit, has been helping heretics escape the king's dragoons, the bishop sends him far away-to Paris, where Charles is assigned to assist in teaching rhetoric and directing dance at the prestigious college of Louis le Grand. Charles quickly embraces his new life and responsibilities. But on his first day, the school's star dancer disappears from rehearsal, and the next day another student is run down in the street. When the dancer's body is found under the worst possible circumstances, Charles is determined to find the killer in spite of being ordered to leave the investigation. - Publisher Marketing
  Suggested Reading:Debuts
  Updated 9.28.10
• Man in the Woods
  Author: Spencer, Scott
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780061466557 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  The author of Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper delivers a gripping and provocative psychological thriller of morality and manhood, choice and fate.
  Updated 8.9.10
• City of Dragons: A San Francisco Mystery
  Author: Stanley, Kelli
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780312603601 Date: 2010
  BooklistPW LJ
  In San Francisco's Chinatown, private investigator Miranda Corbie stumbles upon the fatally shot body of Eddie Takahashi. The Chamber of Commerce wants it covered up, and the cops acquiesce. All Miranda wants is justice--whatever it costs.
  Updated 1.28.10
• Still Missing
  Author: Stevens, Chevy
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780312595678 Date: 2010
  Booklist Kirkus, LJ
  Interwoven with the story of the year Annie spent as the captive of psychopath in a remote mountain cabin, which unfolds through sessions with her psychiatrist, is a second narrative recounting events following her escape--her struggle to piece her shattered life back together and the ongoing police investigation into the identity of her captor.
  Updated 6.10.10
• Ilustrado
  Author: Syjuco, Miguel
  $ 26 ISBN: 9780374174781 Date: 2010
  LJ PW Kirkus
  Garnering international prizes and acclaim, Ilustrado has been called brilliantly conceived and stylishly executed (2008 Man Asian Literary Prize judges). Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving, this debut explores the hidden truths that haunt every family.
  Updated 3.18.10
• The Marriage Artist
  Author: Winer, Andrew
  $ 26 ISBN: 9780805091786 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  In pre-World War II Vienna, a child artist prodigy creates beautiful ketubot--traditional Jewish marriage contracts. As he navigates between the survival of his body and of his soul, his choices will shape not only his life, but the lives of those born many miles--and many years--away.
  Updated 9.28.10